Kay Walsh

Kay Walsh – Actress (F)
Born 27 August 1911, London, UK • Died 16 April 2005

Biography / Gallery

Kay Walsh was born in London of Irish parentage. There seems to be some confusion on her actual birth year. Some put it as 1914, but the mostly accepted year is 1911. She and her sister Peggy were raised in Pimlico by their grandmother.

She initially gained experience as a dancer in revue in London's West End, Berlin and New York. She made her film debut in 1934 in Get Your Man, which she followed with appearances in How's Chances?, The Luck of the Irish and The Secret of Stamboul. These films have long since faded into obscurity, but Walsh would go on to become one of Britain's most-liked female leads – she also became the second wife of the great film director David Lean.

They met in 1936, and for a while before they were married, Lean moved into the lodgings at which Walsh was living (quite radical as cohabiting was taboo at the time). They married in 1940.

After her appearance in the play The Melody That Got Lost, she earned a contract with Ealing Studios, where her first film was the George Formby vehicle Keep Fit. Produced by Basil Dean and directed by Anthony Kimmins, it was an immediate hit and did much to establish Walsh with audiences.

Lean edited The Last Adventurers in 1937, a film in which Walsh had a supporting role. Their fees came in handy as a long bout of unemployment followed for both. Hers was broken with another George Formby film, I See Ice.

The 1940s were her golden years on screen. Standout roles included In Which We Serve (Lean/Noel Coward, 1942) and Oliver Twist (Lean, 1948). But for many, her greatest role came when she played Queenie Watts in This Happy Breed (Lean, 1944). Lean used a superb slice of wartime propaganda to tell the story of a London family – the Gibbonses – from 1919–1939. Based on Coward's 1943 West End hit, the film marked Lean's debut as a solo director.

It is a great ensemble piece, but Walsh held her own. Her Queenie Gibbons, Frank and Ethel’s eldest daughter, is the lynchpin of the story, and Walsh captures the trauma and torment of someone who feels the restraints of suburbia. She wants desperately to rise above her surroundings, yet part of her loves the decency around her. This tension makes her performance perhaps the most important of the entire film.

This Happy Breed went on to become the biggest British money-maker of its year (although it did not get released in America until 1947).

By the time she worked on Oliver Twist (she gave warmth and depth to the character of Nancy), her marriage to Lean was nearly over. Lean was involved with actress Ann Todd and, needing to pursue this relationship, suggested a divorce. Walsh, recognising the inevitable, agreed.

Aside from appearing on screen in Lean’s films, she collaborated by writing additional dialogue and advising on production and casting. She often said she would rather have been a writer than an actress.

As Lean and Todd married in 1949, Walsh threw herself into work. She appeared in three films released in 1950: The Last Holiday, Stage Fright (directed by Alfred Hitchcock), and The Magnet, a minor Ealing comedy.

She married Canadian psychologist Elliott Jacques in 1949, though the marriage lasted only seven years. Her screen career never again hit the heights of the 1940s. She was almost unrecognisable as Mrs Brown in the 1961 film Greyfriars Bobby. A steady but modest stream of roles followed, some on television, until she retired after Night Crossing in 1981.

In her later years she lived in a nursing home and died in London on 16 April 2005. Strangely – or perhaps fittingly – she died just seven days before John Mills, who had acted so memorably with her in In Which We Serve and This Happy Breed.

With their deaths, an umbilical cord to the golden age of British cinema was severed. That era now lives on only in history.

Selected Filmography

• Great Expectations (1946)
• Oliver Twist (1948)
• In Which We Serve (1942)
• The Horse's Mouth (1958)
• No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948)

Trivia

Kay Walsh was married to British director David Lean, and contributed to several screenplays, including Great Expectations and Take My Life.