Kay Kendall
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Kay Kendall (1927-1959) was a British actress.
She was born Kay Justine Kendall McCarthy on May 26, 1927 in Withernsea, a coastal resort in eastern England. Her maternal grandmother was Marie Kendall, a musical-comedy star for her vivacious personality and diction while singing. Her father was Terry Kendall, a vaudevillian. She was commonly known to family and friends as Kate, according to the memoirs of actor Dirk Bogarde.
Her first major screen role was in the Sid Field-Petula Clark musical London Town (1946), notable for being one of the costliest flops in British film history. She co-starred with Clark again in Dance Hall (1950), and was featured in a quick succession of forgettable films before gaining fame in "Genevieve" (1953).
Later she starred opposite Rex Harrison in the comedy The Constant Husband (1955), and an affair soon followed. Harrison was married to actress Lilli Palmer at the time, but when he learned Kendall had been diagnosed with myeloid leukemia from her doctor, he and Palmer agreed to divorce so he could marry Kendall and care for her, never revealing to her the reason for her failing health. Instead, Kendall believed she had an iron deficiency. As for the divorce, Palmer said she was not upset because she had a lover, too; she and Harrison planned to remarry after Kendall's death but Palmer ended up falling in love with her companion, Carlos Thompson, and married him instead.
In 1958, Kendall won a Golden Globe Award for her performance as Lady Sybil Wren in Les Girls, probably the best-known film of her career, the story of three showgirls in postwar Paris (the other actresses were Mitzi Gaynor and Taina Elg). She succumbed to her illness on September 6 the following year, soon after completing the movie "Once More with Feeling", starring opposite Yul Brynner.
Before her marriage to Harrison, Kendall had a romantic relationship with Sydney Chaplin, the elder half-brother of Charlie Chaplin.
Her distinctive nose, an aristocratic swoop, was the result of plastic surgery after a car crash. As she told Bogarde, the surgeon had only two noses in his repertoire, "this one and the other one." The one she chose, Kendall explained, made it difficult to photograph her in profile.
Kendall's life is explored in "The Brief, Madcap Life of Kay Kendall," written by Eve Golden, Kim Kendall, and Kim Elizabeth Kendall (University Press of Kentucky, 2002).