Jessie Matthews

[Jen]

Hello All,



Our recently updated website on this delightfully talented star is at Jessie Matthews for anyone interested. It may become interactive, time permitting. We collect photos of her too. (hint, hint). Cheers! Jen

[Jen]

Hi again,



Forgot to mention that some browsers may have difficulty reading the above site, so try fwd/bwd or refresh. Jen

[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.

[DB7]

Jessie Matthews



Britain's first international film star: But Jessie Matthews was better known for a string of affairs



The names on the door of the courtroom - Monro, E.E. versus Monro, J.R.H., Lytton J.M. intervening - gave no clue to the fame of the three protagonists, or to the sensational nature of the cause cÈlËbre about to unfold.



For Elsie Evelyn Monro was better known as Evelyn 'Boo' Laye, the reigning blonde beauty of the London and Broadway stage. Her husband, John Robert Hale Monro, was the popular actor and comedian, Sonnie Hale. And Jessie Margaret Lytton, the other woman, was the West End's saucer-eyed, long-legged, highkicking musical comedy sex symbol, Jessie Matthews.



'Boo' Laye was not in court. She was in Hollywood, making a film called One Heavenly Night. In her absence, the court was told about the heavenly nights enjoyed by her husband and his devastatingly attractive mistress, and listening to the sexually explicit love letters which Jessie Matthews had written to her married lover, which his wife had discovered.



'My Darling,' she wrote in one that was read aloud, 'I want you and need you badly, all of you, and for a very long time. I am lying here, waiting for you to possess me. The dear little boobs, which you love so much, are waiting for you also.'



Representing Matthews in court was the most celebrated advocate of his day, Norman Birkett, who was soon afterwards to appear for Wallis Simpson in the divorce case that precipitated the Abdication Crisis. Birkett had already acted for Matthews in her own divorce.



Presiding over the court on this afternoon in July 1930, was the most censorious and inflexible divorce judge of his generation, Sir Maurice Hill, a 68-year-old widower, three months away from retirement, with a deeply ingrained distaste for divorce proceedings, which he once described as like having 'one foot on sea and one in a sewer'.



Matthews' presence in court, young, beautiful, a self- confessed 'fallen woman', visibly angered Hill. She sensed his hostility to her and became increasingly tense.



Halfway through the evidence, she slumped forward, falling in a dead faint on the floor beneath the seat in front. Very tenderly, Hale lifted her up and some women helped to carry her outside, where she was given a glass of water.



This painful incident did nothing to lessen the stinging severity of Sir Maurice Hill's final comments. 'It is quite clear,' he said, 'that the husband admits himself to be a cad, and nobody will quarrel with that, and the woman Matthews writes letters which show her to be a person of an odious mind.'



Those words, emblazoned in giant headlines across the front pages of newspapers all over the world, scarred Matthews for life. 'That day in court marked me,' she admitted later.



Not even the massive fame she was to achieve as Britain's first and greatest international movie star would erase the memory of it.



And ironically, when, at the age of 56, she emerged from more than a decade in the showbusiness wilderness to seize the headlines again, it was in the role of radio's Mrs Dale, the paragon of middle-class respectability.



This month, the centenary of Matthews's birth has been celebrated by the National Film Theatre with a season of ten of her films and four of her television performances. A new double CD, also released in tribute to her, contains love songs such as May I Have The Next Romance With You?, One More Kiss and Head Over Heels In Love.



Yet at the beginning, Jessie Margaret Matthews, born on March 11, 1907 in a cramped Soho flat above a butcher's shop, sixth of the 11 children of a Berwick Street Market costermonger, was a figure of total innocence.



In 1923, when she made her first visit to New York as a 16-year-old chorus girl, she had never had sex with anyone, and was completely ignorant of the facts of life.



But with her huge and brilliant eyes, gamine looks, and unconscious, nymph-like sexuality, she acted as an overpowering magnet to men.



The first was a fellow passenger on the Aquitania, taking her to New York, a devastatingly handsome young Argentine, Jorge Ferrara, with whose rich family the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, had stayed with during visits to Argentina.



The Cockney innocence of Matthews, acted as a challenge to the louche and sophisticated 28-year-old. He set out to take her virginity. He continued his siege for months after their arrival in New York, and when the star of her show, Gertrude Lawrence, fell ill, and Matthews stepped into the lead, he finally lost patience and raped her.



She became pregnant as a result, and after her return to London, was forced to undergo a secret abortion. Both the rape and the abortion triggered a recurring psychiatric illness that was to plague Matthews's career for years. She always believed the abortion had damaged her chances of childbearing. She suffered a series of miscarriages and her only child lived for just an hour. Later, she adopted a daughter.



However, after her spell in New York, and despite Ferrara's attack, at just 19 she became a West End star, acclaimed by the critics.



The leading man in her first major hit was Henry Lytton Jr., the spoiled and pampered son of Sir Henry Lytton, the legendary idol of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas at the Savoy.



The couple married in 1926, a partnership which seemed to offer Matthews all the social advantages her own upbringing had lacked, but which proved to be a short-lived disaster. Lytton was an indolent womaniser who bedded chorus girls behind her back, then charged bottles of perfume for them to her account.



Nevertheless, at the age of 20, Matthews took London by storm, starring in Charles B. Cochran's lavish revue, One Dam Thing After Another.



The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, attended the opening night, and was so captivated by her that he leapt to his feet in the stage box, shouting 'Bravo! Bravo!'



He reported her 'devastating' physical attractions to his brother, Prince George, later the Duke of Kent. George went to see for himself and agreed.



The princes ordered the 12th Earl of Airlie, father of the late Sir Angus Ogilvy, and his brother, the Hon. Bruce Ogilvy, to invite Matthews and another member of the cast, Sheilah Graham - later F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'beloved infidel' and a formidable Hollywood gossip columnist known to some stars as 'Miss Poison Pen' - to supper at the Berkeley.



The object was to inquire discreetly if Matthews was willing to dine a deux first with the Prince of Wales, and then with his brother.



'Jessie,' Miss Graham told me years later, 'coming from a Cockney family in Soho, was under the impression that a royal command could not be refused. So she said "yes", without having any idea what she was agreeing to.'



The first dinner, alone with the Prince of Wales, took place at York House, St James's Palace, with the servants banished and HRH serving the star himself. She was surprised by this, then astonished to find herself shortly afterwards in bed with the heir to the throne, an episode that was over almost before it began, as the Prince, in his pre-Wallis Simpson days, was a disastrously incompetent lover.



With extreme apprehension, Matthews returned to York House for dinner with Prince George, who ate nothing, appeared to be very much the worse for drink and possibly drugs, showed a bizarre fascination with the texture of her evening dress, and finally slumped unconscious over the coffee and liqueurs.



Ringing the bell, she informed the footman: 'His Royal Highness appears to be unwell. Would you bring my wrap and arrange for a car to take me home?'



Matthews was so ashamed of these episodes that her strait-laced Cockney family was kept in ignorance of them, and in 1974, when I wrote my biography of her, to coincide with her own ghostwritten memoirs, leading lawyer Lord Goodman, on her behalf, forbade any reference to these royal interludes.



Royal admirers aside, Matthews's leading man in the Cochran revue was Sonnie Hale, who had been married for just over a year to the London theatre's greatest beauty, Evelyn 'Boo' Laye, whom he was later to describe as 'sexually frigid'.



Matthews's hit song in the show was Rodgers's and Hart's My Heart Stood Still. The song went: 'I took one look at you, that's all I meant to do, but then my heart stood still.' The two stars, both unhappily married, took more than one look.



The following year, in NoÎl Coward's This Year Of Grace, Matthews and Hale starred together again, sitting at a lighted window, holding hands, to sing Coward's tender love duet, A Room With A View.



Evelyn Laye, visiting her husband during rehearsals, found him holding Matthews's hand off-stage as well. She searched their flat and found the bundle of explicit love letters, written by Matthews, that were to feature so sensationally in the divorce case.



Moving out of the marital home, Laye, 'shaken with hatred for Jessie', stalked the streets outside her husband's flat and saw



On the first night of her greatest hit, Ever Green, she forgot to put on the leotard she was supposed to wear under a pair of chiffon pyjamas. The lights cut straight through the chiffon, revealing her pubic hair to the shocked audience.



And even after her marriage to Hale, the scandals did not cease. In their next show, Hold My Hand, Matthews's love interest was played by a tall, dark-haired and extremely handsome 31-year-old actor, Harry Milton, who had been married for only 18 months to the film actress, Chili Bouchier.



In the show, Milton had to fall in love with Matthews, kiss her passionately, and then marry her.



'One night,' Bouchier was later to allege, 'Jessie opened her mouth to Harry during a stage kiss and that was it. He was lost.' Milton pursued Matthews relentlessly, imbibing huge quantities of brandy, and destroying his marriage. But Matthews was a major box-office draw and could not afford another scandal with a married man. Milton was bought off by her studio.



In desperation, he hired a Gypsy Moth and flew it low over The Old House, the Hale mansion at Hampton, dropping a cluster of matchboxes on the lawn, each containing a single raspberry. Later, divorced by Bouchier and unable to get work, he was reduced to working as a porter in a block of flats. He never got over his obsession with Matthews and finally gassed himself.



But little affected Matthews. In 1933 she became an international star in the role of Susie Dean, the diamond-bright concert party trouper in the film of J.B. Priestley's novel, The Good Companions.



Her co-star, John Gielgud, was homosexual, but Matthews still pursued him. 'She was an enchanting creature,' he recalled years later, 'but no man was safe in her presence.'



When the film was released, King George V and Queen Mary attended the premiere, but Matthews, as the central figure in a scandalous divorce, was not allowed to shake hands with them.



In 1934 she had a son by Hale - although many believed the child to be Milton's - but the baby lived for only one hour. It was then that Matthews succumbed to one of her many major breakdowns. Showbiz cynics dubbed her 'Jess the Mess'.



Her private life was equally complicated, her affair with Milton being far from her last.



On a visit to CadaquÈs in Spain, Matthews made love to the surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, in front of a canvas depicting an extremely large cow reclining on top of a grand piano, while Hale went fishing.



In the 1937 film, Head Over Heels, the first in which her husband directed her, Matthews's leading man, Robert Flemyng, the 6ft 1in, 24-year-old ex-Haileybury public schoolboy, was alarmed to find himself pursued by her to his dressing room 'in a distinctly predatory manner. Then Sonnie, obviously aware of what was going on, breezed into the room as if nothing had happened'.



During the making of Climbing High in 1938, in which Matthews costarred with Michael Redgrave, she had a passionate affair with the film's director, Carol Reed, the uncle of Oliver Reed. In Hollywood in 1941, where she appeared in Forever And A Day, her lovers included the bisexual Tyrone Power.



In New York, where she was signed to star in a Broadway musical, she bedded another bisexual, Danny Kaye. However, the musical was a disaster, and Matthews suffered the worst of her breakdowns.



She was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where she was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia. The hospital reported to Hale that she was 'on the edge of madness'.



When she returned to Britain six months later, she found that Hale, in her absence, had fallen in love with Mary Kelsey, the Norland nanny employed to look after their adopted daughter.



Matthews went back to the stage, but six months later Hale left her for Kelsey, and the couple were divorced. A third marriage, to an Army officer, Brian Lewis, 13 years her junior, resulted in another miscarriage and another divorce.



Her popularity was dwindling and she was in the spotlight less and less until, in 1963, she won the role of Mrs Dale in the BBC's hugely popular radio show, The Dales. By 1970, after the award of the OBE, Matthews was plump and matronly. Her great rival in love, Evelyn Laye, glimpsing her at an all-star gala, observed acidly: 'Oh look, the dear little boobs have become apple dumplings.'



But Matthews retained her allure for men. In 1973, when she was 66, a neighbour in the village of Verwood in Dorset, a 60-year-old widower, Edward Armsdon, was said to be 'completely captivated' by her.



And in 1980, when I saw her last, she was heavily involved, at the age of 73, in a physical relationship with Roy Wilson, a man some 20 years her junior. She even divorced her third husband, Brian Lewis, for the second time - their 1958 divorce was not recognised in Britain - in order to be free to marry Wilson.



Her friends suspected he was gay and on the make, but she blithely ignored this. However, when Matthews was hospitalised with cancer, he was barred from her bedside, and marched into the office of a Fleet Street gossip columnist to spill the beans.



'R. is a rat', she wrote to me bitterly, in a hand I scarcely recognised. By that time, cancer was spreading throughout her body and she died in 1981.



In 1995, 14 years after her death, a plaque was erected to her in Berwick Street, Soho, where she was born. The market stallholders, of whom her father had been one, suspended their customary cries as Andrew Lloyd Webber unveiled the plaque, the street falling silent for the first time in its history.



It was a uniquely touching tribute to a woman who, both on stage and screen and off, had dedicated her life to the pursuit of love.

[Brief Encounter]

What a fascinating life Jessie had. I'm a recent convert to her charms. Any other fans?

[torinfan]

What a fascinating life Jessie had. I'm a recent convert to her charms. Any other fans?

I first heard of her when I bought a copy of "Whatever Became Of...?" Vol. 2 by Richard Lamparski and an entry on her was included. The only film I've seen of hers is "Climbing High." She certainly had an interesting life. Have any bios been written on her?

[TimR]

I saw her in a musical called Evergreen. There is a song called "Dancing on the Celing", which she performed. The film itself was just fair but she was exceptional.



She was extraordinarily talented as a dancer. I think she and Fred Astaire would have made an impressive team.

[Joenoir]

The Jessie Mattews Home Page

[Brief Encounter]

There have been several - the most well known is that by Michael Thornton. Jessie wrote her own autobiog too.



I agree with Tim - Evergreen was ok, but Jessie was something else.

[orpheum]

I was fortunate enough to be at the NFT on a number of occasions when Jessie was there to talk about her career or introduce a screening of her films.On one great day back in 1964 she was present with Sir Michael Balcon at a lecture they both gave at the NFT.

[Edward G]

DB7,

Many thanks for this vibrant story.

Worth it for the wonderful quote (below) alone!

I'd heard of Jessie Matthews as an actress but didn't know the full picture.

Will definitely seek out her movies after this.

Edward G.

Jessie Matthews



'My Darling,' she wrote in one that was read aloud, 'I want you and need you badly, all of you, and for a very long time. I am lying here, waiting for you to possess me. The dear little boobs, which you love so much, are waiting for you also.'

[Brief Encounter]

Fortunate indeed orpheum.



The '40 Minutes' docu on JM is well worth watching if you can get a copy.

[Brief Encounter]

Edward, that is indeed a 'unique' quote LOL!



Hope more of Jessie's films make it to DVD soon... boxset, please.

[orpheum]

It would be great to have an updated frank and open book on Jessies life particularly since "Two Dinners" Goodman is no longer with us.

[CaptainWaggett]

The ODNB on Jessie

Matthews, Jessie Margaret (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 début in the chorus of André 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 Noël 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.

Sources The Times (21 Aug 1981) · J. Matthews and M. Burgess, Over my shoulder (1974) · M. Thornton, Jessie Matthews (1974) · D. Shipman, The great movie stars: the golden years, rev. edn (1979) · J. Richards, The age of the dream palace: cinema and society in Britain, 1930–1939 (1984) · C. B. Cochran, I had almost forgotten (1932) · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1981)



Archives

FILM BFI NFTVA, current affairs footage · BFI NFTVA, performance footage

SOUND BL NSA, oral history interview · BL NSA, performance recordings





Likenesses D. Wilding, bromide print, c.1928, NPG [see illus.] · photographs, Hult. Arch.



Wealth at death £56,503: probate, 26 Oct 1981, CGPLA Eng. & Wales







--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© Oxford University Press 2004–9 All rights reserved



H. F. Oxbury, ‘Matthews, Jessie Margaret (1907–1981)’, rev., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31425, accessed 7 Oct 2009]



Jessie Margaret Matthews (1907–1981): doi:10.1093/refdnb/31425

[Brief Encounter]

It would be great to have an updated frank and open book on Jessies life particularly since "Two Dinners" Goodman is no longer with us.

Who?



I think I'm going to try to seek out Michael Thornton's book on Jessie...

[orpheum]

That was PEs nickname for the blessed Arnold.As Michael Thorntons book was published during her lifetime it is not likely to be very frank.

[CaptainWaggett]

Those seeking scurrilous information on Jessie might enjoy this site