page_title: Kay Francis
section_title: "Box Office Poison" and revival
hierarchical_section_title: Kay Francis / Film career / "Box Office Poison" and revival
caption_attribution_description: English: Kay Francis in First Lady - trailer (cropped screenshot)
context_page_description: Katherine Edwina "Kay" Francis was an American stage and film actress. After a brief period on Broadway in the late 1920s, she moved to film and achieved her greatest success between 1930 and 1936, when she was the number one female star and highest-paid actress at the Warner Brothers studio.
context_section_description: The Independent Theatre Owners Association paid for an advertisement in The Hollywood Reporter in May 1938 that included Francis, along with Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Fred Astaire, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, and others, on a list of stars dubbed "box office poison". After her release from Warners, she was unable to secure another studio contract. Carole Lombard, who had been a supporting player in Francis' 1931 film Ladies' Man, insisted Francis be cast in her film In Name Only (1939). Francis had a supporting role to Lombard and Cary Grant, and it offered her an opportunity to engage in some serious acting. After this, she moved to supporting parts in other films, playing fast-talking, professional women – holding her own against Rosalind Russell in The Feminine Touch, for example – and mothers opposite rising young stars such as Deanna Durbin. 
  Francis had one lead role at the end of the decade opposite Humphrey Bogart in the gangster film King of the Underworld, released in 1939. The movie was a remake of Paul Muni's Dr. Socrates (1935), with Francis in the role of a doctor who is forced to treat Bogart's injured gangster character, and then gets caught up with the law. Originally titled Lady Doctor, the film was shelved then retitled Unlawful for reshoots to beef up Bogart's role. By the films release, Warner Bros. had again changed titles to King of the Underworld while demoting Francis to second billing.
caption: In First Lady trailer
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