Kay Francis

Born Katharine Edwina Gibbs in Oklahoma City to a stage-actress mother, Kay Francis came up through the New York theater and glided into early sound films with a look tailor-made for the camera: tall, dark, sleek, draped in the most extravagant gowns the studios could produce. Audiences of the early 1930s, hungry for glamour amid the Depression, made her one of the most popular women in America, and by mid-decade she was the highest-paid star on the Warner Bros. lot.

She was, by common agreement, a limited technician with a distinctive quirk: she could not pronounce the letter R, so her lines were often written to avoid it, and she pronounced very as vewy. Yet she made the limitation into a kind of vulnerable music. Her specialty was the woman's picture of noble suffering, in which she loved, sacrificed, and wept beautifully in couture. She also proved she could play light and sly, most memorably as the jewel-thief target of Herbert Marshall in Ernst Lubitsch's exquisite Trouble in Paradise (1932), and she brought real feeling to the shipboard romance of One Way Passage.

Her fall was engineered. When her enormous salary became inconvenient, Warner Bros. deliberately shunted her into cheap, second-rate pictures to humiliate her into quitting. Francis, clear-eyed and unsentimental, refused to break her contract, reportedly saying she would keep cashing the checks whatever they gave her, and rode her decline all the way to the bank before drifting out of films in the 1940s.

She retired wealthy, private, and largely content to be left alone, dying of breast cancer in 1968. In a final gesture that revealed the shrewd, generous woman behind the glamour, she left the bulk of her considerable fortune to a charity training guide dogs for the blind. Once a bigger draw than Bette Davis on her own lot, she is today the classic example of a star whose enormous fame simply evaporated.