Jessie Matthews: Evergreen
By Karen Burroughs Hannsberry
During a career that spanned six decades, Jessie Matthews was known, at varying times, as the Dancing Divinity, Princess Personality, and the British Ginger Rogers. One critic said that her feet were “winged with thistledown,” while another likened her legs to “twin exclamation marks after the word beautiful!” And in a 1987 documentary on her life, actor Dirk Bogarde called her “an enormous, blinding star . . . one of the most important stars we ever had.”
But, Bogarde added, “she’s rather forgotten, I’m afraid.” And when Matthews was asked, late in her life, if she would do it all again, she responded without hesitation, “No. Not for all the tea in China. No. No. No. Definitely no.”
Nonetheless, for a time, Jessie Matthews was one of the brightest stars of the British stage and screen and was poised to capture the hearts of America’s filmgoers as well, before it all came crashing down.
Jessie Margaret Matthews was born in Soho, London, on March 11, 1907, one of 16 children (one of her brothers, Billy, would grow up to be the 1922 featherweight boxing champ of England). The family lived in a small flat above a butcher shop and her father sold fruits and vegetables from a stall; the actress once described her childhood as “three or four in a bed, bread and scrape for supper some nights, and a swipe from Dad if we got in his way.” At an early age, though, she demonstrated a talent for dancing, an ability that was noted and nurtured by her older sister, Rosie, who used her wages in a button shop to pay for Jessie’s dance classes and gave her sister lessons in elocution to tone down her broad Cockney accent. Years later, Matthews recalled that her sister used to tell everyone that she was the best dancer in England. “Actually, this was very good for me, because I was a timid child and needed this kind of encouragement,” Matthews said. “I used to be terribly embarrassed by Rosie’s outbursts of what a genius I was but, in its way, this brushed off on me. Rosie gave me a sense of my own ability.”
After making her debut at the age of 10 in a local show called Bluebell in Fairyland, Matthews was on her way. In just a few years, she was working as a chorus girl in theatrical producer C.B. Cochran’s Music Box Revue of 1923. During her years in the chorus, Matthews didn’t hesitate to share that “sense of her own ability” with her chorus girl colleagues. “I always knew my name was going to be up there in lights . . . this used to cause an awful lot of atmosphere with the other chorus girls. Because if they were at all unpleasant to me, I used to say, ‘You’re being very stupid, you know. Because one day I’m going to be a star. And one day, you may need help.’ Which, of course, must have been infuriating to them. But I was so serious about this. And I couldn’t see why they couldn’t see that I was going to be a star.”
But Matthews could see it — and she wasn’t wrong. Her career kicked into high gear when she joined the chorus of the 1926 revue staged by French-born impresario Andre Charlot and starring famed singer Gertrude Lawrence. After traveling with the show to New York, Matthews was named as Lawrence’s understudy, and in true show-biz tradition, she took over the starring role when Lawrence contracted pneumonia; Matthews’s warbling singing voice, high kicks, and graceful dance moves were a hit with audiences and critics alike. The 1926 revue was also notable as the production where Matthews met her first husband, fellow performer Henry Lytton, Jr. She was 18 when they married, but her new spouse was reportedly a womanizer and deeply in debt, and the union was doomed from the start.
In Cochran’s 1928 production The Year of Grace, written by Noel Coward, Matthews became a full-fledged star, but it would mark the beginning of a series of scandals and tragedies that would plague the actress for decades to come. First, she began an affair with her Year of Grace co-star, comedian Sonnie Hale, who was married at the time to actress Evelyn Laye. Both Matthews and Laye filed for divorce against their respective spouses; during Laye’s trial, Matthews’s love letters to Hale were read aloud in court and the judge denounced her as “odious.” (The judge “spared neither Sonnie or myself. We were the villains of the piece,” Matthews recalled in her 1974 memoir. “Had we been criminals, I don’t think the judge could have done a better job. And we were just two young people who had fallen love.”)
Matthews and Hale starred together in the 1930 stage production of Ever Green, written by popular composers Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and the following year, the couple married. A few months later, Matthews was seen in Out of the Blue, her first major movie role (she’d appeared in small parts in a few silents during the early 1920s), but the film wasn’t well-received. She fared better with her 1933 film The Good Companions, which would mark her first of six films with director Victor Saville for the Gaumont-British Studios. (One of her non-Saville films, Waltzes from Vienna, was a 1934 operetta directed by the future master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.)
Her career took another leap when she starred with Hale in the film version of Evergreen (1934). Critics seemed unable to find enough glowing accolades to describe Matthews’s appearance in this feature, where she played the dual role of a music hall singer and her own daughter. (The film included the song “Over My Shoulder,” which would become Matthews’s signature song, the title of her memoir, and the title of a 2001 musical stage show about her life.) The Daily Mirror’s reviewer declared that Matthews had given the finest performance of her screen career, and when the film premiered across the pond at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, the critic for Variety wrote: “She can sing. She can dance. She can act. She has charm, youth, beauty and a million dollars of magnetism. This is not a prediction, this is a promise. Jessie Matthews will be one of the biggest box-office best in America within the next six months.”
Matthews followed Evergreen with several more successful teamings with Victor Saville, including First a Girl (1935), which was remade decades later as Victor/Victoria (1982) starring Julie Andrews, and It’s Love Again (1936), co-starring American actor Robert Young. By 1938, Matthews was the fourth biggest British star at the box office. Unfortunately, Saville left the Gaumont-British Studios after a salary dispute (he would move to America and go on to direct movies like Green Dolphin Street [1947] and produce several movies based on Mickey Spillane novels). Matthews tapped her husband — who’d always harbored a hankering to be a director — to helm her pictures, but this decision marked the beginning of the end of her screen career. (Of one of Matthews’s post-Saville movies, Gangway [1937], English writer/journalist Grahame Greene wrote: “Miss Jessie Matthews has only been properly directed by Mr. Victor Saville. Mr. Sonnie Hale, whatever his qualities as a comedian, is a pitiably amateurish director.”)
Matthews turned to her roots on the stage, but her 1939 musical with Hale, I Can Take It, premiered just a week after the announcement of the war with Germany and the production was cancelled. And after delayed rehearsals and countless rewrites, an American production, The Lady Comes Across, opened for previews in Boston the same week that Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. In 1942, American newspaper columnist Jimmie Fidler confidently predicted that Matthews would team with Fred Astaire in his next “filmusical” but this wouldn’t be the first time she would come close to a pairing with the popular dancer – only to be met with disappointment. As early as 1932, reports were circulating that Matthews would star with Astaire in The Gay Divorcee (1934) but Ginger Rogers got the part after her standout dance number with Astaire in Flying Down to Rio (1933). Then, Victor Saville had sought to cast Astaire opposite Matthews in Evergreen, but Astaire’s home studio, RKO, refused the loan-out. (“I was denied a brilliant bit of casting," Saville wrote in his 1976 autobiography. “The team might have easily been Matthews and Astaire instead of Rogers and Astaire.”) And later, the Gaumont-British Studio blocked a deal for Matthews to appear with Astaire in Damsel in Distress (1937) — the part was played by Joan Fontaine instead.
Sadly, Matthews’s professional disappointments were the least of her woes. During the production of Evergreen in 1934, the actress suffered the first of several nervous breakdowns, and at the end of the year, she gave birth to a son, who died a few hours later. (Early the next year, Matthews and Hale adopted a daughter, Catharine.) Matthews had another breakdown in 1936, and in 1942, she was hospitalized in New York after the Lady Comes Across debacle, with one news account reporting that she was “near death.” In her memoir, Matthews detailed her harrowing experience in the New York hospital, which included being force-fed, wrapped in rubber sheets and immersed in hot water, and confined to a straitjacket.
Victor Saville later stated that before Matthews’s illness, “it was well on the cards that I could sell her to (MGM studio head) Louis B. Mayer. But after the breakdown, it was hopeless. Nobody wanted to know.” And when Matthews was finally well enough to return to England, she learned that Hale had fallen in love with Mary Kelsey, their daughter’s nanny; Matthews and Hale divorced in 1944 and Hale married Kelsey the following year. Five months after Hale’s marriage to Kelsey, Matthews got married for a third time, this time to Lt. Brian Lewis, of the Queen’s Royal regiment, but she had a stillborn child a few months later. Matthews and Lewis would be together until 1956.
Professionally, Matthews performed for soldiers through the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA). “That’s a tough life touring in wartime,” Matthews recalled later. “But what marvelous audiences the troops were.” After the war, Matthews and Lewis bought a pub in Farnham called the Alliance Inn, which they operated together for a number of years. She also appeared in a Tide detergent commercial and toured in a few productions, including Pygmalion (1950) and Private Lives (1954), but for a time, unable to find work in London, Matthews traveled with her husband to South Africa (“I do not think I am forgotten,” she told reporters before departing. “I am not temperamental. There has been nothing wrong with my health. But I have no offer here of a play, film, or a radio or TV series.”)
Later, Matthews was seen in Nest of Robins (1957), which reunited her with ex-husband Sonnie. And after an absence of nearly 15 years, she returned to the big screen in 1958 for the children’s movie tom thumb, playing the mother of the six-inch-tall title character. After this film, Matthews moved to Australia, where she worked in radio and on a television game show, and opened the Jessie Matthews School of Speech and Drama in her one-bedroom flat. “I enjoyed teaching stagecraft to these enthusiastic young Australians,” she recalled.
In 1961, back home in London, Matthews was feted on the popular television show This Is Your Life, where host Eamonn Andrews told the audience: “Before or since, in England, America or anywhere, there’s never been anyone quite the same.” And she was introduced to an entirely new set of fans two years later when she took on the role of Mrs. Dale on the long-running radio serial The Dales (previously known as Mrs. Dale’s Diary) which, according to Matthews, was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth’s. She remained with the show until it ended in 1969. The year after The Dales ended, Matthews was awarded the Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE), with her daughter, Catharine, and her ever-supportive sister, Rosie, in attendance.
Throughout the next decade, Matthews continued to keep busy with a variety of projects, including the role of Bessie Merryman, the aunt of Wallis Simpson in the BBC television series Edward and Mrs. Simpson (1978), and a 1979 one-woman show in Los Angeles, which earned her the United States Drama-Logue Award for the year's best performance in concert. Her last appearance was the following year in Night of One Hundred Stars at London's Royal National Theatre. She died of cancer less than a year later, in August 1981. She was 74 years old.
In 1987, the BBC produced a documentary on Matthews’s life called Catch a Fallen Star. In it, it was revealed that the actress was buried on the grounds of St. Martin's Church in the west London town of Ruislip, in an unmarked grave; fortunately, this sad fact was rectified after the episode was aired. And she hasn’t been completely forgotten, as Dirk Bogarde opined in the documentary. In 1995, a memorial plaque on Berwick Street in Soho, located just steps away from the flat where she was born, was unveiled by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and stage actress Ruthie Henshall. There is an active group dedicated to her life and career on Facebook; her movies on YouTube have been seen by tens of thousands of viewers; and in February 2024, a white fox fur stole — gifted to her in the 1930s by Sonnie Hale — was purchased in an auction presented by London’s Hansons Auctioneers.
As the host proclaimed in her This Is Your Life episode, Matthews “sang and danced her way from the back streets of Soho onto the front pages of the world.” And whether you haven’t yet discovered her — or it’s been a while since you’ve visited her films — she’s undeniably a star to remember.
If you're looking for an introduction to Jessie Matthews' work, Film Masters has released, "It's Love Again," (1936), which stars Matthews.
Karen Burroughs Hannsberry is the author of two books on film noir, Femme Noir: The Bad Girls of Film and Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir. She is also the editor-in-chief of The Dark Pages film noir newsletter, founded in 2004. She can be found on Twitter at @thedarkpages.
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