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The Guardian (29/Apr/2005) - Obituary: Kay Walsh

(c) The Guardian (29/Apr/2005)

Kay Walsh

Talented actor who kept her radical views through a busy, 50-year film career

Described by fellow actor James Mason as "witty, bright and petite", Kay Walsh, who has died aged 90, made 17 films between her 1934 debut How's Chances? and a breakthrough into quality work with Noël Coward's In Which We Serve (1942), co-directed by her then husband, David Lean.

Born in London, Walsh and her sister lived with their grandmother, who first encouraged her love of films. Early on, she took any parts offered in a frantic bid to escape the poverty of the early 1930s. She never forgot those years of struggle, retaining leftwing sympathies that were often at odds with her fellow workers, not least the ultra-snobbish Coward.

Around the time of this wartime classic, British feature production was forced to mature, employing indigenous personnel to recreate the grim realities of British life. During that particular heyday, Walsh enjoyed a successful career acting with the elite of her profession, including making five movies with Alec Guinness.

By her own admission, she was never a star, but she enjoyed "working, just working". Any regrets in later years were expressed privately, when she lamented the lack of roles for women - and her own comparative idleness.

Walsh began as a dancer, but after her debut film, and Get Your Man (also 1934), she concentrated on the cinema, with occasional sorties into television. Initially, the movies were low budget, although Secret Of Stamboul (1936) had Valerie Hobson in the lead, above Mason and Walsh. In that decade, she also played in the shadow of George Formby, in Keep Fit (1937) and I See Ice (1938). Those comedies were bigger budget, she recalled, and she received a £400 fee for each.

Walsh met Lean while shooting Stamboul, and lived with him for four years before becoming his second wife in 1940, divorcing him nine years later. Her poignant role in In Which We Serve was as the wife of a sailor (John Mills) presumed missing in action. The scene in which she receives news of his rescue - moving from joy to tears of relief - was echoed in many films of the period, but never surpassed.

Two years later, Walsh was well cast as the defiant Queenie in the over-colourful version of Coward's domestic drama, This Happy Breed. She was outstanding among a starry cast, injecting a welcome note of realism, but did not act again until Vice Versa, written and directed by Peter Ustinov in 1947.

Part of the reason for this was her relationship with Lean, of whom, despite his infidelities, she was supportive, having urged him to seek his co-director credit alongside Coward. She relished working on his screenplays and received a credit on Great Expectations (1946), having successfully reworked the ending of the Dickens novel.

On Vice Versa, Walsh met Anthony Newley, making his pawky screen debut as Roger Livesey's son. She immediately advised Lean that Newley would make the perfect Artful Dodger in the planned Oliver Twist. In that fine adaptation (1948), she not only played Nancy, but devised the memorable opening sequence. Later, she claimed that Lean sanitised her role as Nancy, but it remains a moving portrayal of a brutalised woman.

Throughout 1950, Walsh was especially busy, first in a minor Ealing comedy The Magnet, then as the sympathetic landlady to Guinness as a "dying" man in Last Holiday. She completed the year opposite Marlene Dietrich, in one of Alfred Hitchcock's lesser thrillers, Stage Fright. Despite its comparative inferiority, she enjoyed "working with giants".

Although still in her 40s, she was established as a character actor, and was especially memorable as the over-talkative Miss Reid in the Winter Cruise episode of Encore (1952) - the second of the portmanteau films based on W Somerset Maugham's stories. She was equally fine as the disheartened wife to a dying vicar (Robert Donat) in Lease Of Life (1954). But she had more fun in Coward's triple bill movie, Meet Me Tonight (1952), where she trod the boards alongside Ted Ray in the Red Peppers episode.

Walsh flirted with Hollywood, first in the historical drama Young Bess (1953), alongside other such notable British actors as Jean Simmons, Deborah Kerr and Kathleen Byron. But she returned home to greater acclaim in the thriller Cast A Dark Shadow (1957), as the blousy bartender in The Horse's Mouth (1958) and, again with Guinness and Mills, in the sturdy Tunes Of Glory (1960).

Although British cinema matured further during the 1960s, Walsh, who had remarried, worked less often. She enjoyed the efficient thriller, 80,000 Suspects (1963), and a lively showbiz story, The Beauty Jungle (1964), both directed by Val Guest. She also graced two neglected examples of the prevalent British realist school, Reach For Glory (1962), and the gritty thriller, He Who Rides A Tiger (1965).

She subsequently played opposite two fading Hollywood legends, Joan Fontaine, in the horror movie, The Witches (1966), and Bette Davis, in the dour Connecting Rooms (1970). Her final films included the DH Lawrence-inspired The Virgin And The Gypsy and the uninspired musical Scrooge (both 1970). After the satire The Ruling Class (1972), she was regretfully inactive until a small role in the factually based Night Crossing (1982), her last screen appearance.

After her divorce from Lean, Walsh married Elliott Jacques, the psychologist: they adopted a daughter in 1956, but that marriage, too, was dissolved.

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