LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Jessie Matthews
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Jessie Matthews was a theatre and cinema star who rose to the top of her profession only to fall flat again. Born to a Berwick Street Market fruit-seller, she was a good dancer who became one of the biggest revue stars in the '20s, which led to a career in British film musicals, the best of which was First a Girl, the forerunner of Victor/Victoria. Eventually, though, her star waned and the film career came to an end, and thereafter she toured in repertory. In 1963 she took over in the radio serial Mrs Dale's Diary. Ironically she even appeared on stage in The Killing of Sister George, in the role of June Buckridge, based on Ellis Powell, the former Mrs Dale who was fired by the BBC.
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Gangway (Gaumont-British) is the third British musical in little more than a year to tackle the task of making Jessie Matthews as popular in the U. S. as she is in England. A slavish imitation of the current Hollywood musical comedy formula, Gangway sometimes comes close to clicking, gives one more indication that British cinema can as yet boast few native screen writers within trailing distance of Hollywood's best, but that British producers are still trying to pick up the trail.
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Born to the impoverished family of a Soho, London fruitseller, Jessie Matthews displayed an interest in dancing from a very early age, and by the time she was 12 was making a living entertaining in her neighborhood. She worked in the chorus line of various musicals, and got small parts in some early silent films. Among those who took note of Matthews was Irving Berlin, who provided her with the song "I Want To Go Back To Michigan" for a London stage review. During the late '20s, she began working with the celebrated stage producer Charles B. Cochran, who engaged Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart to write songs for his revue One Dam Thing After Another -- they provided Matthews with the song "My Heart Stood Still," which became a major success for her. During 1930, Rodgers and Hart were engaged to write the stage musical Evergreen, which included the major hit "Dancing On the Ceiling." The show became a success for Matthews and her husband, Sonnie Hale, and was brought to the screen three years later by director Victor Saville under the title Evergreen, with a new plot, and Hale moved over the the role of the producer and Barry McKay (substituting for Fred Astaire, whose studio refused to let him do the film) as the romantic lead.
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Jessie Matthews, currently the most popular young musicomedienne in London, is 27, tall, brunette and possessed of banjo-eyes and the best publicized legs in England. Her father was a tailor. Her brother, Billy, was a fisticuffer who claimed the lightweight championship of Europe. At 15 Jessie Matthews left school to become a chorus girl in the London edition of Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue, has since appeared mostly in Charles B. Cochran productions. She visited the U.S. in the chorus of two Chariot Revues, appeared in Earl Carroll's Vanities, starred in Wake Up and Dream. Her present husband is John Robert Hale-Monro ("Sonnie Hale").
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Living Era has already released discs devoted to Gertrude Lawrence, Gracie Fields and Evelyn Lane so a selection of Jessie Matthews’s recordings was a racing certainty. And so here is a decade and a half’s worth of her discs.
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Rebecca Caine and Gerald Moore stylishly celebrate the lives and music of the glamorous ladies of stage and screen, in a tribute to stars such as Gertrude Lawrence, Jessie Matthews and Julie Andrews. Gerald Moore performs as an assortment of co-stars, composers and accompanists from Noel Coward and Cole Porter to Ivor Novello and Olive Gilbert!
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Jessie Matthews