Kay Francis

Kay Francis, born Katharine Edwina Gibbs on January 13, 1905, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Territory, was an American stage and film actress whose Broadway career spanned 1925 to 1945. She adopted Francis, her mother's maiden name, as her professional surname. Her mother, Katharine Clinton Francis, was herself an actress and singer who performed under the stage name Katherine Clinton on a regional theatrical circuit, and Francis frequently traveled with her during childhood.

Francis attended Catholic schools when finances permitted, beginning at the Institute of the Holy Angels at age five. She later studied at Miss Fuller's School for Young Ladies in Ossining, New York in 1919, the Cathedral School in 1920, and subsequently enrolled at the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School in New York City. At seventeen, she became engaged to James Dwight Francis of Pittsfield, Massachusetts; the two married at Saint Thomas Church in New York, though the marriage ended in divorce three years later. In the spring of 1925, she traveled to Paris to finalize that divorce, where she met Bill Gaston, a former Harvard athlete and member of the Boston Bar Association. The two married secretly in October 1925, though the union was short-lived.

Francis made her Broadway debut in November 1925, playing the Player Queen in a modern-dress production of Shakespeare's Hamlet. She later joined producer Stuart Walker's Portmanteau Theatre Company, performing in Dayton, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis in a range of roles including secretaries, walk-ons, and supporting parts. By February 1927, she had returned to New York and secured a role in the Broadway play Crime, in which a teenage Sylvia Sidney held the lead. Following her divorce from Gaston in September 1927, Francis briefly stepped away from the stage before returning to appear in the Rachel Crothers play Venus. In 1928, she appeared in Elmer the Great, written by Ring Lardner, produced by George M. Cohan, and starring Walter Huston. The production was unsuccessful commercially, though Huston was sufficiently impressed by Francis's work to encourage her to pursue a screen test at Paramount Pictures.

That screen test led to a starting contract of $300 per week for five weeks at Paramount. Francis filmed Gentlemen of the Press and the Marx Brothers production The Cocoanuts, both shot at Paramount's Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, before relocating to Hollywood. At Paramount she developed a frequent on-screen partnership with William Powell, appearing alongside him in as many as six to eight films per year and accumulating a total of twenty-one films together between 1930 and 1932. Her career at the studio continued despite a mild rhotacism — she pronounced the letter "r" as "w" — which earned her the nickname "Wavishing Kay Fwancis." She appeared in George Cukor's Girls About Town in 1931 and in 24 Hours that same year. On December 16, 1931, Francis and her co-stars participated in the gala opening of the newly constructed Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, with a preview screening of The False Madonna.

In 1932, Warner Bros. offered Francis star status at a salary of $4,000 per week, prompting Paramount to file suit over her departure. At Warner Bros., Francis rose to become the studio's top female star, and by 1935 she was earning an annual salary of $115,000. Between 1930 and 1937, she appeared on the covers of thirty-eight film magazines, a figure second only to Shirley Temple's 138. Warner Bros. loaned her back to Paramount for Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise in 1932. Her films at Warners frequently showcased elaborate wardrobes and lavish production design, a strategy aimed at Depression-era female audiences. She played long-suffering heroines in pictures including I Found Stella Parish, Secrets of an Actress, and Comet Over Broadway. As Belinda in Give Me Your Heart in 1936, opposite George Brent and Roland Young, her performance drew favorable notice from The New York Times for its reticence and pathos.

Francis eventually grew dissatisfied with the quality of scripts she was receiving at Warner Bros. and openly feuded with the studio, at one point threatening legal action over inferior material and treatment. The conflict resulted in her being assigned to lower-budget productions. She married actor and producer Kenneth MacKenna in January 1931; the couple separated amicably in 1933 and divorced in 1934. In October 1937, Francis met aviation businessman Raven Freiherr von Barnekow at a Beverly Hills party; a reported engagement and planned retirement from films did not materialize, and by December 1938 Barnekow had returned to Germany.

Francis died on August 26, 1968. Her Broadway credits, spanning two decades, included Hamlet, Crime, Venus, Elmer the Great, and State of the Union.