Talk:Kay Walsh

Cause of death

According to Brian MacFarlane's article on Walsh, which appeared in 2009 in the Oxford DNB: Lives of the Week, she died from unnatural causes. Something that never came out in any of the other obits. I can't find out any more about this online. Well, here's the article (note: her date of birth is different here):

Update; She remained active in films until her retirement in 1981, after the film Night Crossing. Walsh later lived in retirement in London. She died at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital from multiple burns, following an accident in her apartment, aged 93. Source; http://gratuitfilm.destinee-paris.net/actor/kay-walsh-67615.html. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shipscrew (talk • contribs) 03:32, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

Kathleen [Kay] Walsh (1911-2005), actress, was born at 2 Granville House, Tetcott Road, Chelsea, London, on 15 November 1911, the daughter of James Walsh, taxi driver and later mechanical engineer, and his wife, Elizabeth, nee Murphy, both of Irish descent. Kay, as she was known (or sometimes Katy to friends and colleagues), and her sister Peggy were raised in a small Pimlico flat by their grandmother, who had moved from Ireland. Her early years were spent in poverty and instilled in her both a determination to shake off such indigence and a lifelong sympathy for left-wing views. She had little formal education, but was highly intelligent, read widely, and became a sharply articulate woman-a classic auto-didact.

Walsh's initial ambition was to be a dancer. She said in 1991: 'I can't remember a time when I didn't dance. The first memory of a public performance was darting into Church Street, Chelsea, and dancing to a barrel organ, aged three' (McFarlane, Autobiography, 594). She danced in Andre Charlot's revues and scored some success as a solo dancer in New York in the early 1930s, as well as in straight plays. In one of these, in 1934, she was spotted by a film talent scout and the rest of her career was spent in film, with just a few television appearances. She was fair-haired, pretty, and purveyed what one writer called 'the common touch' (Quinlan, 482), which would stand her in good stead for the next several decades of notable screen work. Though she never really became a fully fledged star, she was always incisive and convincing, with a demotic appeal uncommon among English film actresses of the time.

Walsh's first film role was an uncredited part in the long-forgotten musical comedy How's Chances? (1934), but, after being noticed on stage by the director Basil Dean, joint managing director of Ealing Studios, she appeared in sixteen further films during the decade. Many of these starred such scarcely remembered popular comics of the day as Sandy Powell and Ernie Lotinga, but also and most famously George Formby, with whom she co-starred twice (in Keep Fit, 1937, and I See Ice, 1938), under the watchful eye of Mrs Formby. Many actresses who cut their teeth on these unsophisticated entertainments went on to more demanding fare and Walsh was no exception. Perhaps her most significant film of the 1930s was Secret of Stamboul (1936), for, while making it, she met David Lean (1908-1991), then a film editor, fell in love with him, lived with him for four years, and became his second wife on 23 November 1940. In 1937 he edited the sea-going romance The Last Adventurers, in which she had a starring role.

Marriage to Lean was a mixed blessing: on the one hand Walsh did some of her finest screen work in films he directed; on the other, his serial womanizing (he married six times and conducted numerous affairs) and perhaps his sense of intellectual inferiority, compared with the clever, perceptive Walsh, made him a difficult partner. 'Being in love with David was a killer, and how I survived I don't know', she said later (The Times, 28 April 2005). He gained considerably from his association with her. When he was editing Gabriel Pascal's film version of Pygmalion (1938) she provided some 'filler' dialogue which even Shaw did not recognize as other than his own. She had dragged Lean to see a Steiner Hall production of Great Expectations before the war and assisted on the screenplay when he so memorably filmed it in 1946; and the powerful, mutely gothic opening of his Oliver Twist (1948) was her idea. Not himself a reader, Lean was influenced by her taste. Further, when she was starring with Peter Ustinov in the mildly amusing 'Victorian' comedy Vice-Versa (1947), she noted the talented young Anthony Newley and recommended him to Lean to play the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist.

While claiming to be interested only in 'working, just working' (McFarlane, Autobiography, 595), Walsh reached a new stature with her 1940s films, especially in the three directed by Lean. She brought a brisk humanity to Freda, who marries the sailor played by John Mills in In Which We Serve (1942, co-directed by Noel Coward); was very believable as the rebellious lower-middle-class daughter in This Happy Breed (1944), enacting a moving scene of reconciliation with Celia Johnson near the film's end; and, though she felt the character had been softened, she was extremely poignant as life-battered Nancy in Oliver Twist (1948). By this time her marriage to Lean had fallen apart and they divorced in 1949. Walsh's second marriage, on 14 March 1953, to the Canadian psychologist Elliott Jaques (1917-2003), with whom she adopted a daughter, Gemma, in 1956, was also dissolved, though she retained his name in several official functions for the rest of her life.

From 1950 Walsh settled rather early into character parts, but there was a string of memorable and substantial roles throughout the decade. She was wonderfully sly and insinuating as the housekeeper in Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950); a warmly sympathetic hotel manager in Last Holiday (1950), the second of five films with her friend Alec Guinness; touchingly fallible as the vicar's wife in Lease of Life (1954); and worldly and forthright as the woman who unmasks the murderer Dirk Bogarde in Cast a Dark Shadow (1955). Best of all, though, were perhaps the 'winter cruise' segment of the Somerset Maugham compendium Encore (1951), in which she played an unstoppably loquacious traveller, and her role as the barmaid Coker, her own favourite, with Guinness in The Horse's Mouth (1958). She went on acting until 1981, and there were cherishable moments such as her mean-spirited Aunt Cissie in The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970), based on the novel by D. H. Lawrence. She enjoyed working with Bette Davis in a bad film, Connecting Rooms (1970), less so with Joan Fontaine in a better one, The Witches (1966). Her television work was comparatively negligible, but everything she did was worth watching. A consummate actress, a woman of rare wit and character, and a spirited hostess, Walsh was working on her memoirs in her last years. She died at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London, on 16 April 2005, of multiple burns, following an accident.

Brian McFarlane

Sources D. Quinlan, The illustrated directory of film stars (1981) + A. Silver and J. Ursini, David Lean and his films (1974); pbk edn (1992) + K. Brownlow, David Lean (1996) + B. McFarlane, An autobiography of British cinema (1997) + B. McFarlane, ed., The encyclopedia of British film, 2nd edn (2005) + G. Phillips, Beyond the epic: the life and films of David Lean (2006) + The Times (28 April 2005) + Daily Telegraph (28 April 2005) + The Guardian (29 April 2005) + BFI film and TV database, BFI | Home, accessed on 21 Sept 2007 + The Internet Movie Database (IMDb), accessed on 21 Sept 2007 + personal knowledge (2009) + private information (2009) + b. cert. + m. certs. + d. cert.

Archives FILM BFINFTVA, performance footage SOUND BFI NFTVA, interview with B. McFarlane

Crisso (talk) 17:16, 20 May 2010 (UTC)