Oh Dear! Now It's Kay Walsh R.i.p.

[plasticjock]

From The Independent ~
27 April 2005

Kathleen Walsh (Kay Walsh), actress: born London 27 August
1911; married 1940 David Lean (marriage dissolved 1949),
second Dr Elliott Jaques (died 2003; one adopted daughter;
marriage dissolved); died London 16 April 2005.

A former chorus girl who became a popular screen player in
the Thirties, Kay Walsh was leading lady to George Formby in
two of the singer/comedian's hit films. She found most
recognition, though, when she had roles in two of the
biggest successes of the Forties, In Which We Serve and This
Happy Breed.

The second of David Lean's six wives, she encouraged him to
become a director, and played Nancy in his version of Oliver
Twist. Also a skilled writer, she is credited with devising
two of the best-remembered scenes in Lean's work - the
climax of Great Expectations (often cited as better than
that conceived by Dickens) and the wordless opening sequence
of Oliver Twist. Later she became one of Britain's finest
character actresses, giving outstanding performances in such
films as Last Holiday, Encore and Cast a Dark Shadow.

Of Irish stock, she was born in London in 1911 and raised in
Pimlico by her grandmother. Although her family was not
theatrical, she told the historian Brian McFarlane,

I can't remember a time when I didn't dance. My first memory
of a public performance was darting into Church Street,
Chelsea, and dancing to a barrel organ, aged three.

She was a chorus dancer in revue before making her screen
début with a small part in the musical How's Chances?
(1934), then played a leading role in the minor comedy Get
Your Man (1934), the first of several "B" movies that
displayed her fresh blonde beauty and spirited playing. She
remembered these early films with mixed emotions -

Affection because of such warm-hearted old pros as Sandy
Powell, Will Fyffe and Ernie Lotinga. Fear, because of
having broken out of the chorus at a time of appalling
unemployment and presenting myself as an actress. I had had
no training and dreaded being rumbled.

In 1936, while filming The Secret of Stamboul, she met Lean,
then a fledgling editor who was cutting the Elisabeth
Bergner vehicle Dreaming Lips (1937). The pair were soon in
love, and Walsh broke off her engagement to Pownell Pellew,
later ninth Viscount Exmouth, and began living with Lean. In
December 1936, she was appearing in the play The Melody That
Got Lost at the Embassy Theatre when she was seen by the
Ealing producer Basil Dean, whose wife Victoria Hopper was
in the show.

Dean gave her a year's contract and cast her in her two
movies with Formby, Keep Fit (1937) and I See Ice (1938).
Walsh described the films as "high-flying compared to the
'fit-up' quickies I had been doing", but she was unhappy at
Ealing. She told Lean's biographer Kevin Brownlow,

I never suffered so much in my life as I did at that studio.
They were absolute monsters, and everyone assumed I was
Basil Dean's girlfriend. They were all freemasons and they
would never give David a job because he had the wrong
handshake.

Although her relationship with Lean, whom she married in
1940, was constantly subject to his infidelities, Walsh
recalled their early days fondly:

We worked all day and danced all night and slept through the
weekend, waking late on Sunday to make love, to read the
Sunday papers and to breakfast on eggs and bacon. And, of
course, we went out to a film. We were asked everywhere - we
were an attractive couple, we enjoyed life enormously.

When Lean edited Anthony Asquith's screen version of
Pygmalion (1939), Walsh wrote additional dialogue for the
film with such skill that, allegedly, Shaw himself never
noticed.

Her film roles continued to be in lesser "quota quickies"
until she was cast in Noël Coward's In Which We Serve
(1942). She had tested, unsuccessfully, for a role in Leslie
Howard's The First of the Few, but Coward saw the test and
thought she had "a nice, mousy quality" perfect for the role
of the wife of an Able Seaman (John Mills). Particularly
moving was the scene in which she receives a telegram
informing her that her husband is one of the survivors of a
sunken destroyer. After joyfully shouting the news to her
mother, she dissolves into tears. "Kay's great strength is
her reality," Mills said. "You can hardly believe she is
acting; when the camera turned over she just did it." It was
Walsh who persuaded Lean, who was editing the film, to ask
for co-director credit with Coward, who eventually agreed.
Walsh and Coward got along well, though privately he derided
her strong left-wing views, calling her "Red Emma".

Walsh had an even better role in Lean's first film as solo
director, This Happy Breed (1944), based on Coward's play.
She played Queenie, the erring daughter dissatisfied with
working-class life, who leaves home during the night to be
with a married man. The scene in which, years later, she
returns home, was exquisitely underplayed by Walsh and Celia
Johnson, as her mother. "The only difference between Queenie
and me was that I would never have given in, never have gone
back home."

She was given a writing credit on Lean's Great Expectations
(1946), her major contribution being the dénouement,
completely different from that of Dickens. Estella's
transformation into a second Miss Havisham, and Pip's
throwing open the doors and curtains to let in the light, is
generally considered superior to the original ending.

Walsh's next film as an actress was the comedy-fantasy Vice
Versa (1947), Anthony Newley's first feature film:

I went to the first day rushes, then telephoned David at
Pinewood, where he was doing dreadful things in the make-up
room to Alfie Bass's face (to test him for the Artful
Dodger). I said, "I've got your Dodger."

Walsh played Nancy in Lean's Oliver Twist (1948), a
performance she herself disliked - she wanted to look
dirtier and "more damaged" than Lean would allow her.

She was much prouder of having conceived the film's haunting
opening sequence. Dickens's novel starts with a
matter-of-fact statement of Oliver's birth, and the
film-makers were so desperate to find an effective way of
beginning the film that there had even been a competition
held at Pinewood:

Finally, I said to David, "Look, I've got a couple of pages
here I've written in an exercise book. Have a look at it."

She had scribbled a detailed description of a storm, a girl
in labour painfully climbing a hill to reach a source of
light, and pulling on a bell as she sinks down and the
camera goes up to a sign saying, "Workhouse". A baby's cry
is heard and Oliver Twist is born. Although the film
initially received mixed reviews, all agreed that the
opening sequence, filmed as Walsh had described, was
masterly.

Lean and Walsh were divorced in 1949, Walsh citing his
adultery with the actress Ann Todd, who became Lean's next
muse. Later Walsh married Dr Elliott Jaques, a leading
psychologist who coined the phrase "mid-life crisis", and in
1956 they adopted a baby daughter, Gemma.

Walsh spent the next decades as a respected character
actress, creating a gallery of memorable portraits. She had
a good role in Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950), which
she remembered primarily for "watching Marlene Dietrich tuck
into a steak-and-kidney pudding in the canteen". She was a
sympathetic housekeeper in Last Holiday (1950) with Alec
Guinness, and in another Coward adaptation, Meet Me Tonight
(1951), portrayed part of a music-hall act in the "Red
Peppers" sequence. Her partner was Ted Ray, "the most
lovable actor I ever worked with".

She was the frustrated wife of a vicar in Lease of Life
(1954), and in The Horse's Mouth (1956), again with Alec
Guinness, she had her favourite role, as the barmaid. She
enjoyed cooking for Guinness, his family, and other friends,
and she was also an enthusiastic gardener and renovator of
old properties.

Her last film was Night Crossing (1992), based on the true
story of a family who escaped from East to West Berlin by
hot-air balloon.

[DB7]

Sad news, has any other media outlet picked up the story?

[Rob Compton]

I'm very sad to hear this. As the obit shows, she was a very talented lady indeed. I always enjoyed her performances, and her ability to be either feisty or "mousey" as the situation demanded. One of my favourite roles was as George Formby's girlfriend in "Keep Fit" (a thoroughly enjoyable film, with very catchy songs, by the way).

I wasn't aware of her writing ability before.

rgds
Rob

[The_Late_Peter_Cook]

Blimey!

A great, if under-rated performer. Perfect as Nancy in OLIVER TWIST, great as the murder victim in THE OCTOBER MAN and a good match for Alec Guinness in THE HORSE'S MOUTH.

Another sad loss

[smudge]

Like the obit said, a marvellous piece of playing in THIS HAPPY BREED - also involving John Mills, of course.

Sad news. [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/no.gif[/img]

I believe she was working on her autobiography of late. It would be a nice tribute if it were still put into print.

SMUDGE

FROM THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Kay Walsh
(Filed: 28/04/2005)

Kay Walsh, who died on April 16 aged 93, was the second of six wives of David Lean and starred in some of his best-known films, including In Which We Serve (1942), This Happy Breed (1944) and Oliver Twist (1948), in which she took the role of Nancy.



She met Lean, then an aspiring film editor, in 1936 while she was working on the set of Secret of Stamboul (1936) and he on Dreaming Lips (1937). After their marriage in 1940, Kay Walsh not only acted in her husband's films, but helped him on matters of production and casting. It was her idea to cast Anthony Newley as the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist, and she conceived the film's dramatic and wordless opening sequence in which Oliver's mother staggers over the rain-swept moors to give birth on the steps of the workhouse.

When Lean edited Anthony Asquith's version of Pygmalion (1939), Kay Walsh wrote additional dialogue for the film so seamlessly that it was said that Bernard Shaw never noticed. She was also given a writer's credit on Great Expectations (1946), and was largely responsible for the closing sequence, in which Estella is rescued by Pip from the shuttered house where she is becoming a second Miss Havisham, and they run out into the sunshine to start a new life together.

But Lean was a serial womaniser, and constantly unfaithful throughout their marriage. On honeymoon in Gibraltar, he bought sets of silk pyjamas which Kay Walsh obligingly wore through Customs, but never in bed: they were gifts for his lady friends. He was, she recalled, "a disturbed, split man", and she alluded to darkly self-destructive forces that lay smouldering beneath the elegant surface.

Part of the problem may have been Lean's jealousy of her talent; he never felt comfortable in the company of people whom he feared might be cleverer than himself. "Wives who are quicker-witted and more intelligent and are leaders of their families do not show their husbands to advantage," he once observed.

Yet Kay Walsh remained one of his greatest supporters. She recalled that when Lean was too shy to demand a co-credit with Noel Coward on In Which We Serve (she played the wife of John Mills's chirpy young sailor), it was she who took up the cudgels with Coward on his behalf: "I pushed and pushed and eventually we won. I only ever had his best interests at heart."

When they divorced in 1949 on the ground of his adultery with the actress Ann Todd, she was careful to keep things amicable, and marked the occasion with "a very nice dinner at Scott's in Mayfair". Lean's sixth wife, Sandra, confessed her "huge admiration" for Kay Walsh: "She stood by him through thick and thin and I thought she was a really good woman. Truthfully, I think he should have stayed with her."

Of Irish parentage, Kathleen Walsh was born on August 27 1911. Her grandmother, who had moved from Ireland, raised both Kay and her sister Peggy in a small Pimlico flat, though her idea of grandparental responsibility consisted largely of dumping the children in the local picture house while she toured neighbouring hostelries, her favourite being The Six Bells on the King's Road.

With virtually no formal education, Kay began to earn her living as a dancer in the back row of a chorus in André Charlot revues, before taking solo assignments in New York and Berlin. She made her screen debut in the tepid Dorothy Boyd vehicle Get Your Man (1934), followed by The Luck of the Irish (1936), directed by Donovan Pedelty.

In 1936 Kay Walsh became engaged to Pownell Pellew, later the 9th Viscount Exmouth, but broke off the engagement after becoming involved with David Lean, then newly divorced from his first wife, Isobel. After appearing in Secret of Stamboul (1936), with Valerie Hobson and James Mason, she worked with Lean on The Last Adventure (1937) with Linden Travers. At this stage Kay Walsh was the more famous of the two, enjoying fourth billing, whilst Lean was listed as one of the film's editors. "David was a little jealous of me, I think," she recalled. "Linden told him not to be as she could tell I was crazy about him."

In 1936 she had appeared as a dancer in the West End production of The Melody That Got Lost and was spotted by the producer Basil Dean, who signed her to a contract at Ealing Film Studios. She starred opposite George Formby in the hit comedies Keep Fit (1937) and I See Ice (1938), on which Lean accompanied her on set. But she hated the studios, recalling that the staff there were "absolute monsters and everyone assumed I was Basil Dean's girlfriend".

Her career blossomed during her time with Lean, perhaps most notably in her performance as Queenie, Celia Johnson's errant daughter in Noel Coward's This Happy Breed (1944).

As well as In Which we Serve and Oliver Twist, she appeared with Anthony Newley in the comedy Vice Versa (1948), directed by Peter Ustinov, and played alongside Marlene Dietrich and Jane Wyman in the Hitchcock thriller Stage Fright (1950). Kay Walsh continued her acting career into the 1980s, giving outstanding performances in The Magnet (1950) Last Holiday (1950) and Encore (1952), a Harold French comedy in which she played a demanding spinster, and travelled to Hollywood for Young Bess (1953).

She was praised for her performance as Robert Donat's frustrated wife in Lease of Life (1954), and won a Bafta nomination and National Board of Review award for Best Actress for her powerful portrayal of the barmaid Daphne Coker in The Horse's Mouth (1958), in which she played opposite Alec Guinness, of whom she became a great friend. After playing the part of Jane Alexander's mother in Night Crossing (1981), she decided to retire.

Following her divorce from David Lean, Kay Walsh married Elliott Jaques, the psychologist who coined the term "mid-life crisis", and in 1956 they adopted a daughter. That marriage too was later dissolved.

[JamesM]

A sad week for Ronald Neame, who worked with Kay Walsh (10 films) and John Mills (5 films) on many occassions, in the week of his 94th birthday (April 23rd).

[coolieman]

I remember Kay from the early George Formby films....surfing the net i found she had passed away, bad news but she had a good innings as we Brits say!!. She was one of the pioneers of British cinema....a true heroine who will be greatly missed. Rest in peace Kay, i for one will not forget you.