Kay Francis

Background

She was born Katherine Edwina Gibbs in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the daughter of Joseph Sprague Gibbs, a businessman, and Katherine Clinton Franks, an actress.

Education

Upon completion of a private-school and convent education, she worked for brief periods as a stenographer and as a real-estate agent.

Career

In 1927 Francis started her acting career on Broadway in Crime, followed by Venus. The next year she appeared in Elmer the Great opposite Walter Huston, who arranged her 1929 movie debut in Paramount's Gentlemen of the Press.

In 1931, at the urging of talent scout Myron Selznick, she transferred to the Warner Brothers studio, where, although often on loan to other studios, she remained for most of her acting career.

She appeared in a total of sixty-eight films, sometimes making as many as seven a year. In her first movies Francis frequently was teamed with William Powell. Two of their best films were Jewel Robbery (1932) and One-Way Passage, which won the Academy Award for the best story of 1932-1933.

Then, on loan to other studios, she starred in two more successful pictures, Trouble in Paradise and Cynara, both released in 1932. After these movies Francis' career flourished; throughout the 1930's she was one of Hollywood's most popular and highest-paid actresses, a star in the grand tradition.

The press, to whom she was not always polite, zealously reported all of her activities. Her name frequently appeared in "ten best" compilations, including the list of best-dressed women and, along with Katharine Hepburn and Helen Hayes, a list of the brainiest women in motion pictures.

Ignoring her ability as a comedienne, revealed in the early scenes of Living on Velvet (1935), Warner Brothers generally cast Francis with George Brent, Powell's successor as her leading man, in movies that emphasized her ultrasophistication and her flair for modeling chic styles.

In several of these films Francis, immaculately groomed and self-assured, portrayed successful professional women: a famous fashion designer in Street of Women (1932); an obstetrician in Mary Stevens, M. D. (1933); and a physician in Dr. Monica (1934). In others, like The Keyhole (1934), which carried the provocative advertisement, "Don't come if you're afraid to see what's on the other side of the keyhole, " and The Goose and the Gander (1935), Francis and the equally urbane Brent became involved in intricate romantic tangles that somehow managed to unravel, with the heroine remaining composed and elegant.

In two of her most popular films, The House on 56th Street (1933) and Give Me Your Heart (1936), billed as "the picture every woman [would] want some man to see, " Francis portrayed sensitive women who endured the agonies of lost romance and frustrated mother love. Although repetitious and sentimental, her films nonetheless won unfailing audience approval.

The Francis movies, which accorded with the motion-picture magnates' goal of conveying positive themes and images, provided a welcome escape from the oppressive atmosphere of the Great Depression. Indeed, audiences and critics alike rejected her 1936 venture into realistic drama in The White Angel, a somber biography of Florence Nightingale. Francis presumably did not object to being stereotyped.

However, she did object when in 1937 Warner Brothers gave the lead in Tovarich, a role she had expected, to Claudette Colbert, and also gave several other choice roles to Bette Davis, the studio's newest star.

When Francis threatened to leave at the expiration of her contract, under the terms of which she earned $227, 000 a year, Warner Brothers officials retaliated by casting her in six mediocre films. During the next few years, Francis enjoyed a few more successes.

Her friend Carole Lombard secured her a role in the RKO production In Name Only (1939). She was featured in Charley's Aunt (1941), with Jack Benny, for Twentieth Century-Fox, and she played opposite her longtime friend Walter Huston in Always in My Heart (1942), for Warner Brothers. She also costarred again with George Brent in a Lux Radio Theatre production of "The Lady Is Willing. " The severing of her association with Warner Brothers, however, began the decline of her career. Until her death she expressed bitterness over the action of the studio officials.

From 1944 to 1946, in an effort to revive her career, Francis coproduced and starred in three movies at Monogram. These melodramas, Divorce (1945), Allotment Wives (1945), and Wife Wanted (1946), provided an ironic conclusion to her once-sparkling career.

In 1946 she returned to Broadway as a replacement for Ruth Hussey in State of the Union, the Howard Lindsay-Russel Crouse Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Then, after recovering from an overdose of sleeping pills taken while on tour in Ohio, she made a few more public appearances on television and in summer stock productions, including The Last of Mrs. Cheney in 1948 and, in 1952, the final one, Theatre.

For the remainder of her life Francis lived in semiseclusion in a New York City apartment. The bulk of her estate of more than $1 million went to the training of guide dogs for the blind.

Achievements

• Two of their best films were Jewel Robbery (1932) and One-Way Passage, which won the Academy Award for the best story of 1932-1933. After a brief period on Broadway in the late 1920s, she moved to film and achieved her greatest success between 1930 and 1936, when she was the number one female star at the Warner Brothers studio and the highest-paid American film actress. Some of her film-related material and personal papers are available to scholars and researchers in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Complete Kay Francis Career Record: All Film, Stage, Radio and Television Appearances

    (This book is the definitive guide to the film, stage, rad...)

  • Another Dawn (1937)
  • Play Girl (1941)
  • Jewel Robbery (1932)

Religion

Francis' movies were mostly society dramas of the soap-opera variety, often designated "women's movies, " with shallow plots and contrived happy endings.

Views

Her image was flawed only by a lisp that caused her r's to sound like w's, a problem that apparently did not detract from her appeal. Francis' movies were mostly society dramas of the soap-opera variety, often designated "women's movies, " with shallow plots and contrived happy endings.

Membership

She was courted by a former Harvard athlete and member of the Boston Bar Association.

Personality

The press, to whom she was not always polite, zealously reported all of her activities.

A tall, slender woman with lustrous dark hair, expressive brown eyes, and stately carriage, she epitomized tasteful elegance.

Connections

Her first marriage, in 1922, to Dwight Francis, a member of a prominent Massachusetts family, soon ended in divorce, but she continued to use Francis' name throughout her career.

Subsequent marriages to William Gaston, a lawyer, in 1926, and to Kenneth MacKenna, a Broadway actor, in 1931, also ended in divorce. Court records mention another husband, John Meehan, but his name appears in no other records. She had no children.

Father:

Joseph Sprague Gibbs

mother Katherine Clinton Franks

1st husband:

Dwight Francis

2nd husband William Gaston 3rd husband Kenneth MacKenna 4th husband John Meehan

:

friend

Carole Lombard

References

• JAYNE MANSFIELD, VERY SEXY, 8 X 10 AUTOGRAPH ON GLOSSY PHOTO PAPER
• Kay Francis: I Can't Wait to be Forgotten: Her Life on Film and Stage
• Murder at the Belmar : A Kay Francis mystery (Kay Francis mysteries Book 1)
• Kay Francis: A Passionate Life and Career
• Playbill State of the Union 1947 Ralph Bellamy Kay Francis Hudson Theatre