Charles Bickford
from the trailer for the film Johnny Belinda (1948)
Born	Charles Ambrose Bickford (1891-01-01)January 1, 1891 Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Died	November 9, 1967(1967-11-09) (aged 76) Los Angeles, California, United States
Resting place	Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery, Santa Monica
Years active	1929-67
Spouse	Beatrice Loring (1916-67) (his death) 2 children

Charles Bickford (January 1, 1891 – November 9, 1967) was an American actor best known for his supporting roles.^[1] He was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for The Song of Bernadette (1943), The Farmer's Daughter (1947), and Johnny Belinda (1948). Other notable roles include Whirlpool (1948), A Star is Born (1954) and The Big Country (1958).

Early life[link]

Bickford was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the first minute of 1891.^[2] The fifth of seven children, he was a very independent and unruly child who was tried and acquitted at nine years old of the attempted murder of a trolley motorman who had callously driven over and killed his dog.^[3] In his late teens he drifted aimlessly around the United States for a time. Before breaking into acting he worked as a lumberjack, investment promoter, and for a short time, ran a pest extermination business. He was a stoker and fireman in the United States Navy when a friend dared him to get a job in Burlesque. He did and remained on stage for the next sixteen years.

Acting career[link]

Bickford had intended to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to earn an engineering degree, but while wandering the country, he became friends with the manager of a burlesque show, who convinced Bickford to take a role in the show. He debuted in Oakland, California in 1911.^[4] Bickford enjoyed himself so much that he abandoned his plans to attend M.I.T.^[5] He made his legitimate stage debut with the John Craig Stock Company at the Castle Square Theatre in Boston in 1912.^[6] Bickford eventually joined a road company and traveled throughout the United States for more than a decade, appearing in various productions. In 1925, while working in a Broadway play called Outside Looking In, he and co-star James Cagney (in his first Broadway role) received rave reviews.^[7] He was offered a role in Herbert Brenon's 1926 film of Beau Geste, but anxious not to give up his new-found Broadway stardom, turned it down. Following his appearance in the critically praised but unsuccessful Maxwell Anderson-Harold Hickerson drama about the Sacco and Vanzetti case, Gods of the Lightning (Bickford was the Sacco character), Bickford was contacted by filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille and offered a contract with MGM studios to star in DeMille's first talking picture, Dynamite.^[8] He soon began working with MGM head Louis B. Mayer on a number of projects.

He became a star after playing Greta Garbo's lover in Anna Christie (1930), but never developed into a romantic lead. Always of independent mind, strong-willed and quick with his fists, Bickford would frequently argue and nearly come to blows with Mayer. During the production of DeMille's Dynamite, he punched out his director. He rejected numerous scripts and made no secret of his disdain for much of the material he was offered. His association with MGM was short-lived, and Bickford asked for and received a release from his contract, but found himself blacklisted at other studios.^[9] He became an independent actor for several years. Bickford was mauled by a lion and nearly died while filming East of Java in 1935. While he recovered, he lost his contract with Fox as well as his leading man status due to extensive neck scarring coupled with his advancing age.^[10] Much preferring the character roles that now became his forte, Bickford appeared in many notable films including The Farmer's Daughter, Johnny Belinda, A Star is Born, and Not As a Stranger.^[11]

Bickford found his greatest success playing character actor roles, both in films and later in television. He became highly sought after; his burly frame and craggy, intense features, coupled with a gruff, powerful voice lent themselves to a wide variety of roles. Most often he played lovable father figures, stern businessmen, heavies, ship captains or authority figures of some sort. During the 1940s, he was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He served as host of the 1950s television series The Man Behind the Badge. He continued to act in generally prestigious projects right up until his death. He guest starred in NBC's The Barbara Stanwyck Show and The Eleventh Hour medical drama. In his final years, Bickford played rancher John Grainger, owner of the Shiloh Ranch on NBC's The Virginian western series.

In 1965, he published his autobiography, Bulls Balls Bicycles & Actors.^[12]

Death[link]

He died in Los Angeles of a blood infection at the age of seventy-six, just days after filming a 1967 Virginian episode. He had a son, Rex and a daughter, Doris.

Partial filmography[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Charles Bickford

• Charles Bickford at the Internet Movie Database
• Charles Bickford at AllRovi
• Charles Bickford at the Internet Broadway Database
• "Charles Bickford". Find a Grave. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=6653618. Retrieved August 10, 2010. 
• Charles Bickford at Virtual History

Coordinates: 52°43′N 2°10′W / 52.72°N 2.17°W / 52.72; -02.17

Bickford
Bickford  Bickford shown within Staffordshire
OS grid reference	SJ8814
Shire county	Staffordshire
Region	West Midlands
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Police	Staffordshire
Fire	Staffordshire
Ambulance	West Midlands
EU Parliament	West Midlands
List of places: UK • England • Staffordshire

Bickford is a village in Staffordshire, England.

External links[link]

Media related to Bickford at Wikimedia Commons

This Staffordshire location article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Kay Francis
in the trailer for The Feminine Touch (1941)
Born	Katharine Edwina Gibbs (1905-01-13)January 13, 1905 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S.
Died	August 26, 1968(1968-08-26) (aged 63) New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	actress
Years active	1925–1948
Spouse	James Dwight Francis (1922–1924; divorced) William Gaston (divorced) Eric Barnekow (1939 – 19??; divorced) John Meehan (divorced) Kenneth MacKenna (1931–1933) (divorced)

Kay Francis (January 13, 1905 – August 26, 1968) was an American stage and film actress.^[1] After a brief period on Broadway in the late 1920s, she moved to film and achieved her greatest success between 1930 and 1936, when she was the number one female star at the Warner Brothers studio, and the highest-paid American film actress.^[2] Some of her film-related material and personal papers are available to scholars and researchers in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives.^[3]

Early life[link]

Francis was born Katharine Edwina Gibbs in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1905.^[4] Her parents, Joseph Sprague Gibbs and his actress wife Katharine Clinton Francis, were married on December 3, 1903 in New York City at the Church of the Transfiguration, and they moved to Oklahoma City the following year. But, by the time Katharine was four, her father had left. Joseph Gibbs, who stood 6’4”, gave his daughter the gift of height – she was Hollywood's tallest leading lady (5 ft 9 in) in the 1930s. (Ingrid Bergman and Alexis Smith matched her in height, but did not become stars in Hollywood until the 1940s.)

While she never discouraged rumors that her mother, Katharine ("Kay") Gibbs, was a pioneering businesswoman who established the "Katharine Gibbs" chain of vocational schools, Francis was actually raised in the hardscrabble theatrical circuit of the period. Her mother was actually a moderately successful actress and singer, who used the stage name "Katharine Clinton". In Nova Scotia where she was born to Capt. George Francis and Jennette Burgess Francis, she was known as Katie Francis. She performed at least one concert at Windsor, Hants County, Nova Scotia and was possibly part of a tour of her home province. Katie moved to the United States in 1897 with her parents. Katie Francis married Joseph Gibbs and became an American citizen. Her father Capt. George Francis returned to Nova Scotia before 1911 and died in the Freemasons Home in Windsor, NS in 1922.^[5]

Young Kay was out on the road with her mother, and attended Catholic schools when it was affordable, such as when she was a student at the Institute of the Holy Angels at age five.^[6] After attending Miss Fuller’s School for Young Ladies in Ossining, New York (1919) and the Cathedral School (1920), she enrolled at the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School in New York City. At age 17, Kay became engaged to a well-to-do Pittsfield, Massachusetts man, James Dwight Francis. Their December 1922 marriage at New York's St. Thomas Church ended in divorce.^{[citation needed]}

Stage career[link]

In the spring of 1925, Francis went to Paris to get a divorce. While there, she was courted by a former Harvard athlete and member of the Boston Bar Association, Bill Gaston. Kay and Bill saw each other only on occasion; he was in Boston and Kay had decided to follow her mother’s footsteps and go on the stage in New York. She made her Broadway debut^[7] as the Player Queen in a modern-dress version of Shakespeare's Hamlet in November 1925.^[8] Francis claimed she got the part by “lying a lot, to the right people”. One of the “right” people was producer Stuart Walker, who hired Kay to join his Portmanteau Theatre Company, and she soon found herself commuting between Dayton, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati, playing wise-cracking secretaries, saucy French floozies, walk-ons, bit parts, and heavies.

By February 1927, Francis returned to Broadway in the play Crime.^[9] Sylvia Sidney, although a teenager at the time, had the lead in Crime but would later say that Kay stole the show.

After Kay's divorce from Gaston, she became engaged to a society playboy, Alan Ryan Jr. She promised Alan's family that she would not return to the stage – a promise that lasted only a few months before she was back on Broadway as an aviatrix in a Rachel Crothers play, Venus.^[10]

Francis was to appear in only one other Broadway production, a play called Elmer the Great in 1928.^[11] Written by Ring Lardner and produced by George M. Cohan, Walter Huston was the star. He was so impressed by Francis that he encouraged her to take a screen test for the Paramount Pictures film Gentlemen of the Press (1929). Francis made this film and the Marx Brothers film The Cocoanuts (1929) at Paramount's Astoria Studios in New York.

Film career[link]

By that time, film studios had started their exodus from New York to California, and many Broadway actors had been enticed to travel west to Hollywood to make films, including Ann Harding, Aline MacMahon, Helen Twelvetrees, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart and Leslie Howard. Francis, signed to a Paramount contract, also made the move, and created an immediate impression. She frequently costarred with William Powell, and appeared in as many as six to eight movies a year, making a total of 21 films between 1929 and 1931.

A combination of striking dark beauty, stature, and a deep, supple voice ideally suited to early sound-reproduction technology made Francis one of the top film stars of the early 1930s. So striking were her looks and screen presence that Francis was widely publicized as the epitome of the "American glamour girl" throughout the 1930s. Her success came in spite of a minor, but distinct speech impediment (she pronounced the letters "r" and "l" as "w") that gave rise to the nickname "Wavishing Kay Fwancis."

Francis' career at Paramount changed gears when Warner Brothers promised her star status at a better salary. She appeared in George Cukor's Girls About Town (1931) and Twenty-Four Hours (1931). After Kay's career skyrocketed at Warners, she would return to Paramount for Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932).

In 1932, Warner Brothers persuaded both Francis and Powell to join the ranks of Warners stars, along with Ruth Chatterton. In exchange, Francis was given roles that allowed her a more sympathetic screen persona than had hitherto been the case—in her first three featured roles she had played a villainess. For example, in The False Madonna (1932), she played a jaded society woman nursing a terminally ill child who learns to appreciate the importance of hearth and home.

At the top[link]

From 1932 through 1936, Francis was the queen of the Warners lot and increasingly her films were developed as star vehicles. By the mid-thirties, Francis was one of the highest-paid people in the United States.

She had married writer-director John Meehan in New York, but soon after her arrival in Hollywood, she consummated an affair with actor and producer Kenneth MacKenna, whom she married in January 1931.^{[citation needed]} When MacKenna's Hollywood career foundered, he found himself spending more time in New York, and they divorced in 1934.

She frequently played long-suffering heroines, in films such as I Found Stella Parrish, Secrets of an Actress, and Comet over Broadway, displaying to good advantage lavish wardrobes that, in some cases, were more memorable than the characters she played—a fact often emphasized by contemporary film reviewers. Too frequently, however, Francis' clotheshorse reputation led Warners to concentrate resources on lavish sets and costumes, designed to appeal to Depression-era female audiences and capitalize on her reputation as the epitome of chic, rather than on scripts. Eventually, Francis herself became dissatisfied with these vehicles and began openly to feud with her employers, even threatening a lawsuit against them for inferior treatment. This in turn led to her demotion to programmers such as 1939's Women in the Wind and, in the same year, to the termination of her contract.^{[citation needed]}

Decline[link]

After her release from Warners, Francis was unable to secure another studio contract. Carole Lombard, one of the most popular stars of the late 30s and early 1940s (and who had previously been a supporting player in Francis' 1931 film, Ladies' Man) tried to bolster Francis' career by insisting Francis be cast in In Name Only (1939). In this film, Francis had a supporting role to Lombard and Cary Grant, but wisely recognized that the film offered her an opportunity to engage in some serious acting. After this, she moved to character and supporting parts, playing catty professional women—holding her own against Rosalind Russell in The Feminine Touch, for example—and mothers opposite rising young stars such as Deanna Durbin. Francis did have a lead role in the Bogart gangster film King of the Underworld, released in 1939.

World War II era[link]

Kay Francis and Mitzi Mayfair pose in faux-Army style uniforms after a USO tour

With the start of World War II, Francis did volunteer work, including extensive war-zone touring, which was first chronicled in a book attributed to fellow volunteer Carole Landis, Four Jills in a Jeep, which became a popular 1943 film of the same name, with a cavalcade of stars and Martha Raye and Mitzi Mayfair joining Landis and Francis to fill out the complement of Jills.

Despite the success of Four Jills, the end of the war found Francis virtually unemployable in Hollywood. She signed a three-film contract with Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures that gave her production credit as well as star billing. The results—the films Divorce, Wife Wanted, and Allotment Wives—had limited releases in 1945 and 1946. Francis spent the balance of the 1940s on the stage, appearing with some success in State of the Union and touring in various productions of plays old and new, including one, Windy Hill, backed by former Warners colleague Ruth Chatterton. Declining health, aggravated by an accident in 1948 in which she was badly burned by a radiator, hastened her retirement from show business.^{[citation needed]}

Personal life[link]

Francis married five times. Her diaries, preserved in an academic collection at Wesleyan University, paint a picture of a woman whose personal life was often in disarray.

In 1966, Francis was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy, but the cancer had spread and proved fatal. Having no living immediate family members, Francis left more than $1,000,000 to Seeing Eye, Inc., which trained guide dogs for the blind. She died in the summer of 1968 and her body was immediately cremated; her ashes were scattered.

Filmography[link]

Features[link]

Short subjects[link]

• Screen Snapshots Series 16, No. 3 (1936)
• Show Business at War (1943)

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Callahan, John, Kay Francis: Secrets of an Actress, Bright Lights Film Journal, May 2006. Retrieved December 4, 2006
• Kear, Lynn & Rossman, John (2006). Kay Francis: A Passionate Life and Career. McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-2366-8. 
• 'Kay Francis: A Passionate Life & Career' by Lyn Kear & John Rossman. (Limited view at Google Books)
• O'Brien, Scott (2006). Kay Francis: I Can't Wait to Be Forgotten. BearManor Media. ISBN 1-59393-036-4. 
• 1910 United States Federal Census, Fort Lee, Bergen County, New Jersey, Election District 11