julian_craster

From the DMB ...

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit Oxford DNB: Lives of the week

Jessie Margaret Matthews (1907-1981), actress, was born in Soho, London,
on 11 March 1907, the seventh of eleven surviving children of George Ernest
Matthews, owner of a greengrocery stall in Berwick Street market, and his
wife, Jane, daughter of Charles Henry Townshend, a timber porter. She went
to Pulteney Street School for Girls, Soho, and showed such promise as a
dancer that her oldest sister, Rosie, arranged for her to be trained in
classical ballet by Mme Elise Clerc. When Mme Clerc died suddenly, Rosie
determinedly arranged for Jessie to train as a chorus girl with Miss Terry
Freedman of Terry's Juveniles.


Jessie Matthews made her first London appearance in 1919 in Bluebell in
Fairyland, produced by E. Seymour G. Hicks. Four years later she played in
Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue, presented by Charles Cochran. In his book I
had Almost Forgotten (1932) Cochran described her as 'an interesting looking
child with big eyes, a funny little nose, clothes which seemed a bit too
large for her, and a huge umbrella' (Cochran, 163).


At sixteen Jessie Matthews made her New York debut in the chorus of Andre
Charlot's Revue of 1924. Gertrude Lawrence was the leading lady in that
show, and when she fell seriously ill with pneumonia in Toronto, Jessie
Matthews took over her part. She reached full star status in The Charlot
Show of 1926 when she danced in ballet numbers with Anton Dolin and in
musical comedy items with Henry Lytton junior (Lord Alva Lytton; d. 1965),
son of Henry Alfred Lytton, actor. She married Henry Lytton in 1926 but
from the outset the marriage was a failure, and in 1929 it was dissolved. At
this time she also obtained a £25,000 contract from Cochran, and in 1927 she
starred in One Dam Thing After Another by Ronald Jeans, with music by Lorenz
Hart and Richard Rodgers. A co-star was John Robert Hale Monro (Sonnie
Hale), and she found in him the perfect dancing partner. The next year they
appeared together in This Year of Grace by Noel Coward, in which they sang
Coward's romantic duet, 'A Room with a View'. The critics acclaimed her
performance, which was followed by similar triumphs in Cole Porter's Wake up
and Dream (1929) and Ever Green (1930). She had now reached the peak of her
theatrical career.


Sonnie Hale (d. 1959), son of the actor Robert Hale, was married to Evelyn
Laye, another highly successful actress. In 1930 they divorced and Jessie
Matthews received much unwelcome publicity as the woman responsible for the
break-up of the marriage. Her own divorce had been finalized and in 1931 she
and Hale married. In that year she made her first sound film, Out of the
Blue, which was a failure, but her second, There Goes the Bride (1933), was
a triumph, and led to her becoming Britain's first international film star.
During the 1930s she starred in fourteen films, including The Good
Companions (1933) opposite John Gielgud, Friday the Thirteenth (1933)
opposite Ralph Richardson, and Evergreen (1934), all directed by Victor
Saville.


During the filming of Evergreen Jessie Matthews had her first nervous
breakdown; many, more serious, were to follow. In 1934 her first baby, a
son, lived only four hours; the doctors advised the desolate mother to adopt
a child, and early in 1935 she and her husband adopted a baby girl,
Catherine. In 1936 there was another serious nervous breakdown. In spite of
Jessie Matthews's spectacular successes she was always beset by feelings of
insecurity; at the beginning of her autobiography, Over my Shoulder (1974),
she wrote: 'All my life I had been frightened' (Matthews and Burgess, 1).
She was now directed by her husband in Head over Heels (1937) and feared it
would be a failure; but it made money. Gangway (1937) and Sailing Along
(1938), however, were disappointments, and relations with Sonnie Hale were
becoming more and more strained. Her only Hollywood film was Forever and a
Day (1943).


The Hales returned to the stage in 1939 in their own musical production I
Can Take It. Its provincial tour was a great success and it was due to open
at the London Coliseum on 12 September 1939; war broke out on 3 September,
and cancellation of the show meant financial disaster. In 1941 Jessie
Matthews had an offer to appear on Broadway in The Lady Comes Across, and
her husband urged her to accept. She reluctantly left him and Catherine, and
set off alone for New York but before the show could open she was ill again
and the play flopped. At the age of thirty-four her doctors predicted that
her theatrical career was over. During her absence in America her husband
was having an affair with Catherine's nurse, Mary Kelsey, and in 1942 he and
his wife parted company; two years later they divorced.


Jessie Matthews resumed her stage career in the West End in Jerome Kern's
Wild Rose (1942). While appearing in concerts with the Entertainments
National Service Association she met Lieutenant (Richard) Brian Lewis, of
the Queen's Royal regiment, who was twelve years her junior; in 1945 they
married. Lewis was the son of Norman Percy Lewis, a schoolmaster, from West
Hartlepool. Four months later Jessie Matthews had a stillborn son and her
doctors warned her that another pregnancy would threaten her life. In 1948,
after six years' absence, she reappeared on the London stage in Maid to
Measure, followed in 1949 by the revue Sauce Tartare. She also appeared in
Pygmalion (1950) and Private Lives (1954). She and Brian Lewis divorced in
1958.


Jessie Matthews returned to films in Tom Thumb (1958), and demonstrated that
she could still command an audience when she sang one of her well-known
songs, 'Dancing on the Ceiling', in the 1960 Night of One Hundred Stars. By
this time she had lost her sylphlike figure but not her charm. In 1963 the
BBC invited her to take over the matronly role of Mrs Mary Dale in the radio
serial The Dales; she played this part for the next six years. She also
appeared frequently in television drama and returned to the stage in such
plays as The Killing of Sister George (1971) and Lady Windermere's Fan
(1978). In 1979 her one-woman show Miss Jessie Matthews in Concert, produced
in Los Angeles, won the US Drama Critics award. She was appointed OBE in
1970. Jessie Matthews's last appearance was at the National Theatre, London,
in Night of One Hundred Stars on 14 December 1980. She died at Eastcote,
London, on 19 August 1981.


H. F. Oxbury, rev.

CaptainWaggett

It's always been one of the great mysteries of British cinema that Sonnie Hale persuaded so many beautiful women to sleep with him, not all of whom could have been using the casting couch. Though Jessie wasn't exactly backward in this field

orpheum

He must have had either a great chat up line or have been great at the art of seduction as he is the most unprepossessing character on film.Notice that he never so far as i can recall played the romantic lead.

Welcome To Highbury The Home Of Football