Kay Francis (born Katharine Edwina Gibbs; Jan 13, 1905 – Aug 26, 1968) was an American stage and film actress.
In a career spanning 17 years, Francis made over 50 features.
Francis achieved her greatest success between 1930 and 1936, when she was the top female star and highest-paid actress at Warner.
She adopted her mother’s maiden name (Francis) as her professional surname.
Katharine Edwina Gibbs was born in Oklahoma City (present-day Oklahoma), in 1905, the only child of Joseph Sprague Gibbs and Katharine Clinton (née Francis), an actress. Wed in 1903, her parents divorced in 1909 when Kay’s mother left her alcoholic father and took Kay with her.
Her mother had been born in Nova Scotia, Canada, and was successful actress and singer on a hardscrabble theatrical circuit under the stage name Katherine Clinton. Kay often traveled with her mother. Kay attended Catholic schools when it was affordable, becoming a student at the Institute of the Holy Angels at age five.
After also attending Miss Fuller’s School for Young Ladies in Ossining, New York (1919) and the Cathedral School (1920), she enrolled at the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School in NYC. While there she benefited from the fame of her mother, Katharine Gibbs, the pioneering American businesswoman who had established the Gibbs chain of vocational schools.
In 1922, Kay, 17, was engaged to James Dwight Francis, a well-to-do man from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Their marriage, at New York’s Saint Thomas Church, ended in divorce three years later.[5]
In the spring of 1925, Francis went to Paris to get a divorce. While there, she was courted by Bill Gaston, a former athlete at Harvard and member of the Boston Bar Association. Secretly married in October 1925, their marriage was short-lived, with only occasional visits between Bill in Boston and Kay in New York City following her mother’s footsteps onto the stage.
She made her Broadway debut as the Player Queen in a modern-dress version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in November 1925. She often “borrowed” wardrobe for fashionable nights out in New York that were covered by the press. Francis claimed she got the part by “lying a lot, to the right people.” One of them was producer Stuart Walker, who hired her to join his Portmanteau Theatre Company. She soon found herself commuting between Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio, and Indianapolis, Indiana. She played wisecracking secretaries, saucy French floozies, walk-ons, bit parts, and heavies.
By February 1927, Francis returned to New York and got a part in the Broadway play Crime. A teenage Sylvia Sidney had played lead, but later said that Francis stole the show.
After Francis’s divorce from Gaston in September 1927, she became engaged to society playboy Alan Ryan Jr. She promised his family that she would not return to the stage – a vow that lasted only a few months before she was playing an aviator in a Rachel Crothers play, “Venus.”
Francis appeared in only one other Broadway production, “Elmer the Great” in 1928. Written by Ring Lardner, produced by George M. Cohan, and starring Walter Huston, the play nonetheless flopped. Though broke at the time, Francis was unwilling to ask friends for help and determined to “crawl out of this mess herself.”
Huston was impressed by Francis’s performance and encouraged her to take a screen test for his new studio, Paramount, and the film Gentlemen of the Press (1929). Paramount offered her a starting contract of $300 per week for five weeks. Francis made Press and the Marx Brothers film The Cocoanuts (1929) at Paramount’s Studios in Astoria, New York before moving to Hollywood.
Major film studios, which had formerly been based in New York, had relocated to California.
With the coming of sound pictures, even more Broadway actors were enticed to Hollywood, including Ann Harding, Aline MacMahon, Helen Twelvetrees, Spencer Tracy, Paul Muni, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Joan Blondell and Leslie Howard.
Screen Team: Kay Francis and William Powell
Signed to a featured players contract with Paramount, Francis also made the move and created an immediate impression. She frequently co-starred with William Powell, first teaming in Street of Chance (1930) when David Selznick fought for the pairing after seeing Francis in Behind the Make-up (1930). It worked, and they appeared in as many as six to eight movies together per year, making a total of 21 films between 1930 and 1932.
Francis’s career flourished at Paramount in spite of slight, but distinctive rhotacism (she pronounced the letter “r” as “w”) that gave rise to the nickname “Wavishing Kay Fwancis”. She appeared in George Cukor’s “thrillingly amoral comedy” Girls About Town (1931) and 24 Hours (1931).
On December 16, 1931, Francis and her co-stars opened the newly constructed art deco Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, with gala preview screening of The False Madonna.
In 1932, Francis’s career at Paramount changed gears when Warner promised her star status at a better salary of $4,000 a week. Paramount sued Warner over the loss.[18] Warner Bros. persuaded both Francis and Powell to join the ranks of their stars, along with Ruth Chatterton. After her first three featured roles had been as a villainess, Francis was given roles with a more sympathetic screen persona, such as in The False Madonna, as a jaded society woman who learns the importance of hearth and home when nursing a terminally ill child.
After Francis’s career skyrocketed at Warner, she was loaned back to Paramount for Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932).
From 1932 through 1936, Francis was the queen of the Warner lot, and, increasingly, her films were developed as star vehicles.
By 1935, Francis was one of the highest-paid actors, earning a yearly salary of $115,000, dwarfing the $18,000 Bette Davis – who would occupy Francis’s dressing room.
From 1930 to 1937, Francis appeared on the covers of 38 film magazines, second only to child sensation Shirley Temple’s 138.
Soon after her arrival in Hollywood, she began an affair with actor and producer Kenneth MacKenna, whom she married in January 1931. MacKenna’s Hollywood career foundered, having spent more time in New York. In 1933, the couple separated amicably, and divorced in 1934.
Francis frequently played long-suffering heroines, in I Found Stella Parish, Secrets of an Actress, and Comet Over Broadway, displaying lavish wardrobes that, in some cases, were as memorable as the characters she played.
As Belinda in Give Me Your Heart (1936) with co-stars George Brent and Roland Young, her performance had “reticence and pathos” and garnered reviews.
In October 1937, Francis met aviation businessman Raven Freiherr von Barnekow at a party of Countess Dorothy Dentice di Frasso’s in Beverly Hills. In March 1938, Louella Parsons reported on their intended marriage and that Francis would retire from films, but by October the two were traveling separately and Francis was still acting; by December, Barnekow returned to Germany.
Francis’ statuesque frame often led Warners’ producers to concentrate on lavish sets and costumes rather than the storylines, a move designed to appeal to Depression-era female audiences and capitalize on her reputation as the epitome of chic.
Francis herself became dissatisfied with these vehicles and began openly to feud with Warner, threatening lawsuit against them for inferior scripts and treatment. This led to her demotion to programmers, such as Women in the Wind (1939), and to the termination of her contract.
The Independent Theatre Owners Association paid for an advertisement in The Hollywood Reporter in May 1938 that included Francis, along with Garbo, Joan Crawford, Fred Astaire, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn and others, on a list of stars dubbed “box office poison.”
After her release from Warner, she was unable to secure another studio contract. Carole Lombard, who had been a supporting player in Francis’s 1931 Ladies’ Man, insisted that Francis be cast in her film In Name Only (1939). Francis had a supporting role to Lombard and Cary Grant, offering her opportunity to engage in some serious acting.
After this, she moved to supporting parts in other films, playing fast-talking, professional women – holding her own against Rosalind Russell in The Feminine Touch – and mothers opposite rising young stars such as Deanna Durbin.
Francis had one lead role at the end of the decade opposite Bogart in the gangster film King of the Underworld, in 1939. The movie was a remake of Paul Muni’s Dr. Socrates (1935), with Francis in the role of a doctor forced to treat Bogart’s injured gangster character, whjo then gets caught up with the law.
Originally titled Lady Doctor, the film was shelved, then retitled Unlawful for reshoots to beef up Bogart’s role. By the film’s release, Warner had again changed titles to King of the Underworld while demoting Francis to second billing.
With the start of World War II, Francis joined the War effort, doing volunteer work with the Naval Aid Auxiliary, where she was named head of the NAA’s Hospital Unit.
She also performed extensive war-zone touring, chronicled in the book “Four Jills in a Jeep,” written by fellow volunteer Carole Landis. It became a popular 1944 film, Four Jills in a Jeep, with Martha Raye and Mitzi Mayfair joining Landis and Francis in the cast.
At end of the war, Four Jills was given a four-star production by Fox, but still needed distribution through Monogram, and the decade found Francis unemployable in Hollywood.
She signed a three-film contract with Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures, which gave her production credit and star billing. The resulting films: Divorce, Wife Wanted, and Allotment Wives had limited releases in 1945 and 1946.
Francis spent the remainder of the 1940s on stage, appearing in “State of the Union” and touring in various productions of plays, including “Windy Hill,” backed by former Warner colleague Ruth Chatterton.
Declining health, aggravated by an accident in Columbus, Ohio during tour of State of the Union in 1948, when she was badly burned by radiator after passing out from accidental overdose from pills, hastened her retirement from show business. This incident was first reported as a fainting spell caused by the pills, with a complication of respiratory infection.
Her manager and traveling companion had arrived at Francis’s hotel room and, in an attempt to revive the unconscious actress with fresh air, burned her legs on the radiator near the window. She recovered in oxygen tent at the local hospital. Soon, she retired from acting and then public life.
“My life? Well, I get up at a quarter to six in the morning if I’m going to wear an evening dress on camera. That sentence sounds a little ga-ga, doesn’t it? But never mind, that’s my life … As long as they pay me my salary, they can give me a broom and I’ll sweep the stage. I don’t give a damn. I want the money … When I die, I want to be cremated so that no sign of my existence is left on this earth. I can’t wait to be forgotten.”—Kay Francis’s private diaries, c. 1938.
Francis married three times, to James Dwight Francis (1922–1925); William Gaston (1925–1927); and Kenneth MacKenna (1931–1934).
She had affairs with Maurice Chevalier and Raven Freiherr von Barnekow.
Her diaries, preserved along with her film-related material at Wesleyan University that are open to scholars and researchers, paint a picture of a woman whose personal life was often in disarray.
In the Company of Gay Men
She regularly socialized with gay men, one of whom, Anderson Lawler, was paid $10,000 by Warner to accompany her to Europe in 1934.
In 1966, Francis was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent mastectomy, but the cancer had already spread.
She died in 1968, aged 63.
Her body was cremated per her request and her ashes disposed of “how the undertaker sees fit.”
Having no family members, Francis left more than $1 million to “The Seeing Eye,” an organization in New Jersey, which trains guide dogs for the blind.
Filmography (1929-1946)
Features
1929
Gentlemen of the Press, Myra May
The Cocoanuts, Penelope
Dangerous Curves, Zara Flynn
Illusion, Zelda Paxton
The Marriage Playground, Lady Wrench
1930
Behind the Make-Up Kitty Parker
Street of Chance Alma Marsden
Paramount on Parade Carmen Episode: “The Toreador”
A Notorious Affair Countess Olga Balakireff
For the Defense Irene Manners
Raffles, Gwen
Let’s Go Native Constance Cook
The Virtuous Sin Marya Ivanova Sablin
Passion Flower Dulce Morado
1931
Scandal Sheet Edith Flint
Ladies’ Man Norma Page
The Vice Squad Alice Morrison
Transgression Elsie Maury
Guilty Hands Marjorie West
24 Hours Fanny Towner
Girls About Town Wanda Howard
The False Madonna Tina
1932
Strangers in Love Diana Merrow
Man Wanted Lois Ames
Street of Women Natalie ‘Nat’ Upton
Jewel Robbery Baroness Teri
One Way Passage Joan Ames
Trouble in Paradise Madame Mariette Colet
Cynara Clemency, Warlock
1933
The Keyhole Anne Vallee Brooks
Storm at Daybreak Irina Radovic
Mary Stevens, M.D. Mary Stevens
I Loved a Woman Laura McDonald
The House on 56th Street Peggy Martin
1934
Mandalay Tanya Borodoff / Spot White / Marjorie Lang
Wonder Bar, Liane
Dr. Monica Monica Braden
British Agent Elena Moura
1935
Living on Velvet Amy Prentiss
Stranded Lynn Palmer
The Goose and the Gander Georgiana
I Found Stella Parish Stella Parish
1936
The White Angel Florence ‘Flo’ Nightingale
Give Me Your Heart Belinda Warren
1937
Stolen Holiday Nicole Picot
Another Dawn Julia Ashton Wister
Confession Vera Kowalska
First Lady Lucy Chase Wayne
1938
Women Are Like That Claire Landin
My Bill Mary Colbrook
Secrets of an Actress Fay Carter
Comet Over Broadway Eve Appleton
1939
King of the Underworld Carol Nelson
Women in the Wind Janet Steele
In Name Only Maida Walker
1940
It’s a Date Georgia Drake
When the Daltons Rode Julie King
Little Men, Jo
1941
Play Girl, Grace Herbert
The Man Who Lost Himself, Adrienne Scott
Charley’s Aunt Donna Lucia d’Alvadorez
The Feminine Touch, Nellie Woods
1942
Always in My Heart, Marjorie Scott
Between Us Girls, Christine ‘Chris’ Bishop
1944
Four Jills in a Jeep, Herself
1945
Divorce, Dianne Carter
Allotment Wives, Sheila Seymour
1946
Wife Wanted, Carole Raymond (last film)
Short subjects
Screen Snapshots Series 16, No. 3 (1936) as Herself – Observer
Show Business at War (1943, Documentary) as Herself (uncredited)
Bibliography
Bubbeo, Daniel. The Women of Warner Brothers: The Lives and Careers of 15 Leading Ladies. Filmographies for Each. MacFarland & Co., 2001.
Callahan, Dan, “Kay Francis: Secrets of an Actress,” Bright Lights Film Journal, May 2006.
Nemeth, Michael. “Alluring Lady”, Classic Images. September 2022
Kear, Lynn; Rossman, John (2006). Kay Francis: A Passionate Life and Career. McFarland & Company.
Kear, Lynn; Rossman, John (2007). The Complete Kay Francis Career Record. McFarland.
O’Brien, Scott (2006). Kay Francis: I Can’t Wait to Be Forgotten. BearManor Media.
