Jessie Matthews

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Jessie Margaret Matthews , OBE (born March 11, 1907 in London , † August 19, 1981 in Eastcote , Middlesex ) was a British actress . She began her career as a dancer in the London Music Halls . After a few musical successes , Jessie Matthews became one of the most popular British film stars in the 1930s , but was unable to build on her earlier successes during the Second World War . In the early 1960s Matthews made a comeback on the British radio soap opera The Dales .

biography

Stage career

Jessie Matthews grew up in poor circumstances in Soho , London, as the seventh of eleven children of a street vendor. She attended Pulteney Street School for Girls . Her older sister Rosie, herself an ambitious actress, recognized Jessie's talent as a dancer and singer early on and made it possible for her to take dance and speaking lessons. At the age of twelve, Jessie Matthews made her stage debut in a production of Seymor Hicks ' Christmas musical Bluebell in Fairyland (1919). Four years later, Matthews was a revue dancer in various London music halls and made his first film appearances in supporting roles. Theater director Charles Cochran mentioned Matthews in his book, I Had Almost Forgotten (1932), whom he remembered as "an interesting-looking kid with big eyes, a funny little nose" and too big clothes.

Jessie Matthews toured the United States with André Charlot ’s Revue of 1924 . Her big hour came when the star Gertrude Lawrence fell ill while on tour and Matthews stood in for her in Detroit . Matthews received positive reviews and recommended himself for bigger roles. She appeared as a solo dancer in Charlot's Revue of 1926 , and had her first leading role in the 1927 London production of Rodgers' and Hart's revue One Dam Thing After Another . At the same time she received a £ 25,000 contract from Charles Cochran. In 1928 Matthews sang A Room With a View in Noël Coward's revue This Year of Grace .

Matthews' stage partner in This Year of Grace was Sonnie Hale , with whom she began a love affair. Hale was married to actress Evelyn Laye at the beginning of the affair . When Laye finally found out about her husband's affair and filed for divorce, Matthews' love letters to Hale were presented as evidence. The divorce process became a widely noticed scandal in the summer of 1930. Jessie Matthews' reputation was henceforth ruined, but it did not damage her further career. In 1931, Hale and Matthews married; it was Jessie Matthews's second marriage after she was married to actor Henry Lytton, Jr. from 1926 to 1929.

The high point of Jessie Matthews' stage career was the musical Ever Green , written by Rodgers and Hart , which premiered on December 3, 1930 at London's Adelphi Theater . Matthews played alongside Sonnie Hale both mother and daughter in the musical inspired by the life of Edwardian Music Hall singer Marie Lloyd. The number Dancing on the Ceiling became one of Jessie Matthews' most famous songs.

Film career

In 1931 Jessie Matthews played her first leading role in a British film. The British International Pictures- produced musical Out of the Blue was unsuccessful, but it led to film producer Michael Balcon signing Matthews and systematically building her into a movie star. In 1933 she finally achieved her breakthrough with Victor Saville's musical comedy The Good Companions , which established Matthews' image as a glamorous star as well as Saville's reputation as one of the leading British film directors of the 1930s.

In 1934, Ever Green was filmed by Victor Saville for Gaumont-British under the title Evergreen . Matthews repeated their roles from the stage version, the song Over My Shoulder , written for the film version , became Matthews' signature tune. The New York premiere of Evergreen made Jessie Matthews famous overnight in the United States. She was nicknamed The Dancing Divinity there and was regarded as the ideal partner for the American musical star Fred Astaire . In fact, Balcon had tried to get Astaire for Evergreen , but he was already under contract with RKO Pictures . In the following years, possible joint film projects by Matthews and Astaire failed, also because Gaumont-British did not want to release its biggest star to Hollywood .

Evergreen was the first of six films with Jessie Matthews, with which Gaumont-British managed to catch up with the American film musicals in terms of effort and staging. The commitment of American talent also contributed to this. Lesser Samuels and Dwight Taylor wrote the scripts, Robert Bradley was hired to choreograph and Glen MacWilliams was the cameraman . The German art director Alfred Junge was responsible for the lavish furnishings . After Evergreen , Victor Saville made First a Girl in 1935 , an extremely successful remake of the German comedy film Viktor and Viktoria , and in 1936 the musical comedy It's Love Again .

In the mid-1930s, Jessie Matthews was finally considered one of the most internationally known British film stars. The British film magazine Picturegoer named her in January 1937 the only English film actress who was a celebrity in the United States without appearing in Hollywood productions. In their homeland, however, Matthews was overshadowed by George Formby and Gracie Fields . While Fields addressed ordinary people with her optimism in times of crisis, Jessie Matthews' films escaped reality with their Art Deco style , which was more popular with the middle class .

When Saville left Gaumont-British in 1936, Matthews' husband, Sonnie Hale, stood in for the next three films. But his directorial work could not keep up with Saville's elegance. Rising production costs and dissatisfaction with Hale's direction meant that after the 1938 film Sailing Along, the next Gaumont-British film musical was canceled and the contract with Hale was not extended. Jessie Matthews' next film, Climbing High , was directed by Carol Reed and rewritten as a no-vocal comedy. It proved to be a flop, whereupon Gaumont-British also released Matthews from their contract.

comeback

After the sudden end of her film career, Jessie Matthews tried a comeback on the London theater stages together with Sonnie Hale, but the outbreak of the Second World War stopped the planned project. On the advice of her husband, Jessie Matthews went to New York, where she was to appear in the Broadway production The Lady Comes Across . Even before the premiere, Matthews suffered a nervous breakdown that seemed to end her career for good. She had had serious health problems, panic attacks, and suffered multiple miscarriages since the early 1930s. Their only child survived the birth for only a few hours in 1934. In New York, Matthews was treated in a mental hospital, where he was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia .

Jessie Matthews eventually returned to England, where her marriage to Sonnie Hale finally fell apart. During World War II, Matthews appeared in the service of the Entertainments National Service Association . During her appearances, she met officer Brian Lewis, who was twelve years her junior, whom she married in 1945. In 1943 she worked alongside many other British film stars in the fundraiser Auf Ewig und three days produced by RKO . It was Matthew's first American film. She also starred in the British B-movie Candles at Nine in 1944 , which was to be her last feature film appearance for the next 14 years.

After the end of the World War, Jessie Matthews tried her hand at stage actress (including Pygmalion , 1950) in serious roles, but could not build on her earlier successes. In the years that followed, Matthews played on provincial stages and was remembered with appearances on nostalgic radio and television shows. In 1958 she played a small role in George Pal's film adaptation of the fairy tale The Little Thumble , but her singing was dubbed in the film.

In 1963, the BBC offered her the lead role in the radio soap opera The Dales, which had been running since 1947 . The weekday series ran through 1969 and brought Jessie Matthews back into the spotlight. After the end of The Dales , she was raised to the rank of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1970 , presented her autobiography ( Over My Shoulder , 1974) and made numerous stage and television appearances. In 1978 she played Wallis Simpson's aunt in the mini-series Edward & Mrs. Simpson . In 1979 she appeared with the one-woman show Miss Jessie Matthews in Concert in Los Angeles ; the concert won the Drama-Logue Award.

Jessie Matthews had her last public appearance on December 14, 1980 at the Royal National Theater on the television show Night of One Hundred Stars . She succumbed to cancer eight months later at the age of 74.

Filmography

  • 1923: The Beloved Vagabond
  • 1923: This England
  • 1924: Straws in the Wind
  • 1931: Out of the Blue
  • 1932: There Goes the Bride
  • 1932: The Midshipmaid
  • 1933: The Man from Toronto
  • 1933: The Good Companions
  • 1933: Friday the Thirteenth
  • 1933: Waltzes from Vienna
  • 1934: Evergreen
  • 1935: First a Girl
  • 1936: It's Love Again
  • 1937: Head Over Heels
  • 1937: gangway
  • 1938: Sailing Along
  • 1938: Climbing High
  • 1943: For ever and a day (Forever and a Day)
  • 1944: Candles at Nine
  • 1958: Little Thumble ( Tom Thumb )
  • 1978: The Hound of the Baskervilles

literature

  • Roger Philip Mellor: Matthews, Jessie . In: Brian McFarlane (Ed.): The Encyclopedia of British Film . 3rd edition. Methuen, London 2008, ISBN 978-0-413-77660-0 , p. 490.
  • Jeffrey Richards: The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930-1939 . Routledge & Paul, London 1984, ISBN 0-7100-9764-6 .
  • Michael Thornton: Jessie Matthews: A Biography . Hart-Davis, London 1974, ISBN 0-246-10801-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d H. F. Oxbury: Matthews, Jessie Margaret (1907–1981) . In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004 (online version as of January 2011).
  2. ^ Stanley Green (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Musical Theater . Da Capo Press, New York 1980, ISBN 0-306-80113-2 , pp. 8f.
  3. ↑ a b Michael Thornton: Jessie Matthews: The Diva of Debauchery . In: Daily Mail , June 27, 2007.
  4. ^ Michael Balcon: A Lifetime of Films . Hutchinson, London 1969, pp. 63-65.
  5. ↑ Jeffrey Richards: The Age of the Dream Palace , p. 214.
  6. ^ Geoffrey Macnab: Searching for Stars: Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema . Cassell, London 2000, ISBN 0-304-33351-4 , pp. 76-78.
  7. ↑ cited in Michael Thornton: Jessie Matthews: A Biography , p. 155.
  8. ^ William K. Everson: Jessie Matthews . In: Films in Review , 26, No. 10 (December 1975), p. 581.
  9. ^ Rachael Low: The History of the British Film. Vol. VII: 1929-1939; Film making in 1930s Britain . Routledge, London 1997, ISBN 0-415-15451-0 , p. 244.
  10. ^ The New York Times : JESSIE MATTHEWS DEAD AT 74; STARRED IN MUSICAL COMEDIES , August 21, 1981.
personal data
SURNAME Matthews, Jessie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Matthews, Jessie Margaret (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British actress
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH 19th August 1981
Place of death Eastcote , Middlesex