The Incorrigible Kay Francis: The biopic we’d love to see
A good biopic film has to be specific.
As the likes of Bohemian Rhapsody, Jobs, Back to Black, Elvis and countless other overblown, underwritten biopics have shown us, going the “womb to tomb” route is a recipe for disaster. Without a single exception, you get a truncated, skin-deep Wikipedia summary of a truly fascinating life that deserves to be covered in a full-length book. Making a movie out of it just shows the shortcomings of not only the creatives involved but the medium as a whole. These are the kinds of stories that movies just aren’t built to tell, or at least that’s what it feels like.
No, the greatest biopics are when you pick a segment of someone’s life and allow that particular story to actually be told, rather than sped through to collect all the bits that the audience already knows. That’s how you get A Complete Unknown, that’s how you get The Social Network, hell, Coal Miner’s Daughter, the Loretta Lynn biopic, ends before any of her most iconic songs are written. Walk Hard is something to avoid, not embrace, no matter what so many biopics would have you believe.
Thus, if you want a great biopic, the best thing to do isn’t look for someone with an incredible life; it’s to look for someone with a few incredible moments to choose from. Kay Francis, the first true sex symbol in Hollywood history, has both. Look up her incredible episode of Karina Longworth’s riveting podcast, You Must Remember This, as a primer for her whole, fascinating life. However, we’re not making a movie about her life; we’re making a movie about one part of it.
While Francis did spend many years as one of the world’s most famous people, our story would start long before that, when she was 20 years old and already divorced.
How did Kay Francis become an actor?
Born Katharine Gibbs in 1905, Kay Francis learned the value of letting people believe what they want to believe about you very early. The daughter of an actress, the two spent most of Francis’ early years on the road together, chasing the next gig. However, Francis often let people believe that her mother was actually Katharine Gibbs, one of the most successful businesswomen in the world at the time. This knack for playing on people’s assumptions came in very handy when Francis’s first marriage came to an end in 1925.
Francis was 20, a divorcee, jobless and had a knack for causing utter chaos wherever she went. Living a libertine life of pleasure at any and all costs. Dating a string of high society men, bedding any man or woman that took her fancy and, according to her journals, having a string of abortions that were, at the time, deeply illegal. This is where our story would begin, with Francis getting close enough to high society wealth to taste it, before the chaos that swirls around her constantly starts up once more, and everything falls apart.
This leads her to needing a line of work separate from any man in her life, so she goes back to what she knows. The life of an actor. By her own admission, Kay Francis got her first role onstage by “lying to a lot of the right people,” and that would be the meat of the film. Her journey swindling and sleeping through the theatrical underbelly of New York City, the wolf constantly at the door, living against the law and eventually coming to understand that her “chaotic streak” is actually her desire to have agency over her own life.
Which would lead to a bittersweet ending where she gets one of the best stage debuts any actor could ask for, playing the Player Queen in a Broadway production of Hamlet. Her performance goes down a storm, but she stares down a life that’s a poisoned chalice. Technically, she will have her independence. Or at least as much of it as a young actress could have in the late 1920s. Yet she will also spend the next two decades as one of the biggest figures in the public eye. Beholden to celebrity, a more fickle and exploitative mistress than anyone she could possibly carry on with.
It’s Marty Supreme meets All That Jazz. It’s Babylon for New York theatre. It’s Mikey Madison’s second ‘Best Actress’ Oscar for the title role, and all it needs is the funding. And the script. And to exist. I’ll get to it later, I swear.