Frances Day, the Forgotten Bisexual Icon of 1930s Stage and Screen
personal note: I have often mooted the idea that the extraordinary Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta or Lady GaGa to you, could well star in a biopic of the artist Tamara Lempicka and it occurs to me she could well be chosen to star in similar for our Frances here too! For me the resemblance is uncanny . . . . . . . . . anyone?
January 06, 2024 1920s, 1930s, celebrity & famous people, portraits
Frances Day (born Frances Victoria Schenk; December 16, 1907 – April 29, 1984), film and stage actress and singer. The American-born actress began in New York as a nightclub singer before achieving great popularity in the 1930s on the musical stage in London.
The Australian impresario, Beaumont Alexander, brought her to London, changed her name to Frances Day, transformed her into a platinum blonde (not her natural colour), sent her to elocution lessons to lose her New Jersey accent, then managed her career as one of London’s first erotic cabaret stars, dancing in West End nightclubs, where she created a sensation by performing in a G-string with only an ostrich fan for cover.
In 1932 she found stardom in the West End musical Out Of The Bottle, aged just 23. The following year, she found film stardom for her sexual performance as a notorious nightclub singer in Alexander Korda’s movie The Girl From Maxim’s.
Day was flagrantly bisexual, having affairs with Tallulah Bankhead (* why IS it that Tallulah features in these accounts - is there anyone of the period who didn’t have an affair with her? check out Billie Holiday! ) and Marlene Dietrich, and attracting the passionate admiration of Eleanor Roosevelt and George Bernard Shaw, who wrote one of his last plays for her, and was the mistress of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), his brother Prince George, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, Prince Bertil of Sweden, and Britain’s Foreign Secretary and future British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden.
She bought and refurbished Wayneflete’s Tower in 1941, installing drainage and water, and a lift (to supplement the spiral staircase) found on a bombsite.
In 1965, she disappeared completely from public life, changing her name to Samta Young Johnson and denying that she was the famous Frances Day of years past.
The former star and sex symbol died in 1984 at the age of 75.
Howard McBrien, an employee in an office beneath Johnson’s apartment, who knew her only as the friendly lady who lived upstairs, was astonished to learn that she had left her house and entire £162,000 estate to him in her will.
This from the always brilliant and fascinating Vintage Everyday
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