Kay Francis was Hollywood glamour personified, playing strong, modern women while looking fabulous in the highest fashions of the day. Arriving in Hollywood in the late 1920s, just as talkies took over, Kay by all rights should never have been a star. She was beautiful, but sported a mild speech impediment during the years when studios worried over their stars' voices, and she lacked substantial experience -- she had lied her way on stage almost on whim, and had not formally trained as an actress.

Dozens of other actresses could out-maneuver her on screen, but they couldn't work harder than Kay. Though often decried by critics as merely a fashion plate, especially in her early days, Francis showed a dogged determination to improve at her craft, work her publicity and become a star. In less than two years, she did just that. She conquered Hollywood just as she had conquered stage and society before; Kay was a woman who had plenty of practice getting exactly what she wanted.

Katharine 'Kay' Gibbs was born on a Friday the 13th in the first month of 1905. Kay's mother raised her alone, earning her living as an actress, which lead to Kay's first stage appearance as a toddler in one of her mother's plays. In her late teens, Kay became a companion secretary to an event planner for high society. Soon she was partying with the rest of the Lost Generation in the mid-1920s, shocking society with her short cropped hair and devil-may-care attitude. She married into the last name Francis, but the marriage didn't last. None of her five marriages lasted; Kay was impetuous when it came to men, and each in a series of hasty marriages lead inevitably to divorce.

In the mid 1920s, Kay was enjoying the fabulous soirees and important social connections in New York City, as well as a sporadic modeling career and even a little work on Broadway, but when offered a contract by Paramount, she headed out to California with little hesitation. By then it was 1929, the beginning of the pre-Code era, and Kay's first film, the extremely pre-Code Marx Brothers flick The Cocoanuts, was a harbinger of things to come. In the film she's a baby vamp, a stunner with solid comedic timing, and though her acting still needed work, the camera loved her.

Paramount initially put Kay in supporting roles, primarily because the studio had trouble finding enough parts for their bigger stars, let alone their roster of contract players. Her third film, Dangerous Curves (1929), was one of those smaller parts. The Clara Bow vehicle may not have given Kay much opportunity to stretch, but Clara, though extremely supportive of Kay, was not given any support of her own from the studio. In true Hollywood fashion, Kay's conniving vamp essentially stole the show while Clara, the ostensible star, floundered.

While critics were quick to claim Kay appealed only to women interested in the latest fashions, it was clear she offered much more to early-30s moviegoers than haute couture. By 1930, she was starring in well-received hit films like Street of Chance and Raffles. Unfortunately, Paramount was giving her quite a few stinkers, too. Warner Bros. Studio was in need of popular performers and, when Paramount found themselves in financial trouble, Warners famously took the opportunity to 'raid' the cash-strapped studio. By 1932, Warners had poached three of the biggest Paramount stars: William Powell, Kay Francis and Ruth Chatterton.

The new studio gave Kay the star vehicles she had always wanted, larger roles with more time on screen -- and, finally, no more vamps. After a few moderate successes at Warners, primarily in Street of Women (1932), Kay hit her stride with a trifecta of phenomenal movies, all released in 1932: Jewel Robbery, One Way Passage and Trouble in Paradise.

Audiences already adored Kay, but by the time the calendar rolled over to 1933, they positively loved her. There was an easy sophistication about her, an impossible glamour tempered by a genuineness and approachability. She was as strong in real life as on the screen, and female moviegoers were mad about successful women. Kay's real-world personality meshed wonderfully with that climate, and she flourished in the days before the Production Code.


(Behind the Make-Up [1930] with William Powell)
Colleagues, however, often found Kay hard to get along with. Alternately generous and judgmental, Kay's emotions were difficult to navigate. She was complicated and occasionally insufferable. She could also be contradictory; though she reportedly loathed the Hollywood publicity machine, she jumped right into it with a passion that rivaled her torrid romances on screen. Not a single movie magazine was spared her quest to showcase her exquisite taste, all while she, without a hint of irony, would tout her own down-to-earth, everygirl nature.

These interviews were also her own personal platforms used to preach advice to readers, presumedly female, on how to succeed -- always by emulating Kay herself. She spoke regularly about how hard work and determination brought her success, though she would somehow always forget to mention that her social connections and great beauty opened doors for her that would remain closed to almost anyone else. Over time, a less than subtle hostility toward women emerged from Kay's interviews, everything from imploring women to stop being emotional to grousing that society 'begins to die' when women open their own car doors without the help of men. Once, she went so far as to claim that no woman had ever helped her, that she owed everything in her life to men.

Hostile as it is, it's probably the most honest thing Kay ever said in an interview, and indicates perhaps she did know that those rich friends, a few well-placed boyfriends and her looks were as much to credit for her success as her hard work was. Yet in one of Kay's essential contradictions, she could be quite feminist, and was very outspoken about the implementation of the Production Code in the summer of 1934 and its effect on women in cinema. She considered herself a working woman and hated that women with careers, after the Code, had to be portrayed as bad girls who could only redeem themselves by giving up their jobs.

It's no wonder that Kay was angered by the strict rules of the Code. Kay had become queen of the Warner lot by that magical year of 1932, the heyday of the pre-Code era. Her first truly great film was Jewel Robbery (1932), a delightful and zippy romance starring Kay as Baroness Teri von Horhenfels. We first see her happily frolicking in a tub overflowing with bubbles. She is a rich Viennese society wife with a politically savvy husband, multiple maids, a lavish estate, several boyfriends and a yen for a beautiful diamond ring that she desperately wants her husband to buy for her. Her entire life is devoted to a lazy hedonism; she revels in boredom, and when the jewelry shop holding her beloved diamond ring is robbed, she is at first irritated that her tranquility has been disturbed. Soon, she becomes enthralled by the cultured, sophisticated gentleman robbing the store, played with an almost unearthly suaveness by William Powell.

Powell and Francis had been a popular pair at Paramount and became even more beloved after they moved to Warner Bros., thanks entirely to the nearly unanimous positive reception to Jewel Robbery. An immediate followup was planned by the studio, the now-classic One Way Passage (1932). William and Kay play Dan and Joan, passengers on a trans-Pacific cruise who fall in love, neither knowing that they are both saddled with foreshortened futures: Dan is a convicted murderer sentenced to be executed, and Joan is terminally ill. One Way Passage is a guaranteed tear-jerker, beautiful and maudlin all at once, and a favorite of moviegoers for decades.


Kay next found herself teamed with Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins in the scandalous Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedy Trouble in Paradise (1932). Playing another rich woman -- Kay may have been saved from villainous vamp roles, but was merely typecast anew as a wealthy society dame -- she winds up the unknowing third wheel in a love triangle and victim of a long con by a pair of savvy (and exceptionally open-minded) swindlers.

Publicity played up the on-screen romantic rivalry between Kay and Miriam, though if any rivalry truly existed, it was less romantic than professional. Hopkins had worked with director Lubitsch before, though Trouble in Paradise was the film where he came into his trademark directorial 'touch.' He had a distinct knack for bringing out the best in his stars, and Francis, who had been in films only three years, more than held her own against stalwart professionals like Marshall and Edward Everett Horton.

Warner Bros. kept Kay working tirelessly for years. Soon trading in William Powell for another frequent screen partner, George Brent, Kay continued to make well-received films, though often regarded as less important by critics. Cast primarily in women's pictures, often known as 'weepies,' Kay may not have gotten the strictly A-list roles she enjoyed just a year earlier, but ironically was allowed to play stronger characters. These pre-Code weepies allowed women to suffer through all manner of tragedies, and Kay suffered wonderfully.

She was at her most beautiful and beleaguered in Mandalay (1934), a scandalous pre-Code affair that finds Kay left behind at a house of ill repute thanks to a boyfriend that turned out to be a crook and a cad. Dressed in impossible lamé gowns and distractingly tight white frocks, Kay is arguably her most glamorous as she works her way into enough money to sneak out of the country and head to Mandalay and the promise of a new life.

Her next film, Wonder Bar (1934), was even more saucy than Mandalay had been. An Al Jolson vehicle set in a Weimar-era cabaret, the production of the film was troubled. Kay had been promised a large role, but ended up with almost a bit part after Jolson expanded Dolores Del Rio's role at Kay's expense. Kay was unhappy about the smaller part, and soon became even more unhappy as the Production Code kicked in and her career took a downturn.

Cinema was rapidly changing, and though female stars may have been somewhat hindered by new Production Board demands, their performances were more forceful than Kay's had ever been. Sure, Kay could cry on demand and fast talk like the dickens, but you couldn't imagine her in grittier parts that went to Warners stars like Ida Lupino or Bette Davis. There were also limits to the roles Kay could get after years of contemporaneous reviews talking about nothing by Kay's clothing, to the exclusion of anything else. Many critics were actively hostile; as the columnist known as Fan-Fare once said, 'We've never thought Kay Francis was a good actress, and we've said so frequently.'

By 1938, Kay was tired of the lesser roles she was receiving, and bolstered by suits brought by other Warner Bros. stars like Bette Davis and James Cagney, she sued the studio when they gave a film promised to her to Claudette Colbert instead. Unfortunately, Jack Warner decided to make an example out of Kay. No one seems to know why, but when her suit went to court, she changed her mind and decided not to break her contract. Ed Sullivan speculated in a 1938 article that she must have been given the chance for better roles, but that quickly proved to be false. Kay was relegated to B-list programmers for the rest of her time at Warners, in roles that were often humiliating.

It was during this time she announced that she would retire from screen permanently, though once her Warner contract ended, she worked as a freelancer, giving solid performances in films such as Allotment Wives, In Name Only and Little Men. She then volunteered with the USO, ultimately finding herself overseas in dangerous situations for months at a time. The experience ended up as a semi-documentary film, Four Jills in a Jeep (1944), one of her final films.

By the mid 1940s, her Hollywood career was all but over. She had returned to stage, where she performed to good reviews until a bizarre accident left her legs terribly burned. After several surgeries and many months of recovery time, Kay briefly returned to the stage, but her injured legs and other health problems simply would not allow her to perform for long. She became somewhat of a recluse for the remainder of her life, and passed away of complications from cancer in 1968.

Kay famously said in 1938 that she could not wait to be forgotten, and she almost got her wish. Considered a lesser actress for decades, with her films difficult to find, only the most dedicated early Hollywood cinephile would have recognized her name until the mid 1990s and the arrival of the Turner Classic Movies cable channel. Kay's programmers and pre-Codes were shown regularly, and by the time she was made the TCM Star of the Month in the late 1990s, she had become a favorite of classic movie fans. The subject of two biographies, a second TCM Star of the Month stint and now with several of her films available on DVD, Kay Francis will never be forgotten again.

When not watching classic movies, Stacia Kissick Jones is writing about them, dreaming about them or complaining about them. Her ruminations are there for all to see at She Blogged by Night.