Jessie Matthews
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Jessie Matthews, OBE (March 11, 1907 - August 19, 1981) was a popular English actress, dancer, and singer of the 1930s, whose career continued into the post-war period.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
Matthews was born March 11, 1907 in Soho London[1], in relative poverty, one of sixteen children of a fruit and vegetable seller. Matthews first appeared on the stage in 1912; she made her film debut in 1923 in the silent film The Beloved Vagabond.
[edit] Career
Matthews was acclaimed in the UK as a dancer and as the first performer of numerous popular songs of the 1920s and 1930s, including "A Room with a View" by Noël Coward and "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love" by Cole Porter. After a string of hit stage musicals and films in the mid-1930s, Matthews developed a following in the USA, where she was dubbed "The Dancing Divinity". Her British studio was reluctant to let go of its biggest name, which resulted in offers for her to work in Hollywood being repeatedly, and on her part reluctantly, rejected.
Matthews' fame reached its initial height with her lead role the 1932 stage production of Ever Green, a musical by Rodgers and Hart, at its time the most expensive musical ever mounted on a London stage. The 1934 cinematic version (Evergreen) featured the newly composed song Over My Shoulder which was to go on to become Matthews' personal theme song, later giving its title to her autobiography and to a 21st century musical stage show of her life.
Her distinctive warbling voice and round cheeks made her a familiar and much-loved personality to British theatre and film audiences at the beginning of World War II, but her popularity waned in the 1940s after a string of only moderately successful films (then being directed by soon to be ex-husband Sonnie Hale). As fashions changed her carefully-cultivated accent was often parodied for being affectedly posh.
After a few false starts as a straight actress she played Tom Thumb's mother in the 1958 children's film, and during the 1960s found new fame when she took over the leading role of Mary Dale in the BBC's long-running radio serial, 'The Dales', formerly 'Mrs Dale's Diary'. (She later took the lead role in the play The Killing of Sister George - filmed starring Beryl Reid - which has connections with the radio character she had played until the serial was axed.)
Live theatre and variety shows remained the mainstay of Matthews' work through the 1950s and 1960s, with successful tours of Australia and South Africa interspersed with periods of less glamorous but welcome work in British provincial theatre and pantomimes. She became a stalwart nostalgia feature of TV variety shows such as The Night Of A Thousand Stars and The Good Old Days.
Matthews was awarded a well-deserved OBE in 1970 and continued to make cabaret and occasional film and television appearances through the decade including one-off guest roles in the popular BBC series Angels and an episode [2] of the ITV mystery anthology Tales of the Unexpected [3].
She had suffered from periods of ill-health throughout her life and eventually died of cancer at the age of 74 in Britain, but not before, in the final year of her life, staging an acclaimed series of cabaret shows in New York which won her a coveted New York Theatre Critics award.
Matthews was the focus of a British episode of This Is Your Life in the 1960s, and a posthumous biography from the BBC's Timewatch series in the mid 1980s entitled Catch A Fallen Star.
[edit] Personal life
In 1925 she married the first of her three husbands, actor Henry Lytton, Jr., the son of singer and actress Louie Henri and Sir Henry Lytton the doyen of the Savoy Theatre. They divorced in 1930. The second and longest marriage was to actor-director Sonnie Hale; the third to military officer, Lt. Brian Lewis). All of her marriages ended in divorce and were marred by affairs and a series of unsuccessful pregnancies. With Hale she had one adopted daughter, Catherine Hale, who married to become the Countess Grixoni.
Matthews had several romantic relationships conducted in the public eye, often courting controversy in the newspapers. A high court judge denounced her as an "odious"[1] individual when her love letters to Hale were used as evidence in the case of his divorce from his previous wife, the popular 1920s singer Evelyn Laye. It took some time for Matthews' popularity to recover from this scandal.
Her personal life also included a romance with Prince George, Duke of Kent, and some of her much publicized temperamental behavior and emotional tempestuousness can be traced to the secret but lifelong psychological trauma that resulted from becoming pregnant after a sexual assault at the age of 16 by an Argentinian, Jorge Ferrara, whose family were friends of the then Prince of Wales. [2]
[edit] Filmography
- The Beloved Vagabond (1923)
- Straws in the Wind (1924)
- Out of the Blue (1931)
- The Midshipmaid (1932)
- There Goes the Bride (1932)
- Friday the 13th (1933)
- The Good Companions (1933)
- The Man from Toronto (1933)
- Strauss's Great Waltz (aka Waltzes from Vienna) (1933)
- Friday the 13th (1934)
- Evergreen (1934)
- First a Girl (1935)
- It's Love Again (1936)
- Gangway (1937)
- Head Over Heels in Love/Head Over Heels (1937)
- Climbing High (1938)
- Sailing Along' (1938)
- Forever and a Day (1943)
- Candles At Nine (1944)
- Tom Thumb (1958)
- The Hound of the Baskervilles (1977)
[edit] Bibliography & Sources
Over My Shoulder, by Jessie Matthews and Muriel Burgess Publisher: WH Allen (16 Sep 1974) ISBN 0-491-01572-0 Jessie Matthews - A Biography, by Micheal Thornton Publisher: Hart-Davis (7 Oct 1974) ISBN 0-246-10801-0
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ "BBC Radio 2 documentary".
- ^ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=445576&in_page_id=1879
