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Kay Kendall (1927-1959) was a United
Kingdom|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 in
film|1946), notable for being one of the costliest
flops in British film history. She co-starred with
Clark again in Dance Hall (1950 in film|1950), and
was featured in a quick succession of forgettable
films before gaining fame in "Genevieve" (1953 in
film|1953).

Later she starred opposite Rex Harrison in the
comedy The Constant Husband (1955 in film|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 in film|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).

==External links==
* imdb name|id=447608|name=Kay Kendall