[1] 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 Warner Bros.

[3] Her mother had been born in Nova Scotia, Canada, and was a successful actress and singer on a hardscrabble theatrical circuit under the stage name Katharine Clinton.

Secretly married in October 1925, their marriage was short-lived,[6] with only occasional visits between Bill in Boston and Kay in New York City following her mother's footsteps onto the stage.

With the coming of sound pictures, even more Broadway actors were enticed to Hollywood, including Ann Harding, Aline MacMahon, Helen Twelvetrees, Spencer Tracy, Paul Muni, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Joan Blondell and Leslie Howard.

She frequently co-starred with William Powell, first teaming in Street of Chance (1930) when David Selznick fought for the pairing after having seen Francis briefly in Behind the Make-up (1930).

[15] Francis's career flourished at Paramount in spite of a slight, but distinctive rhotacism (she pronounced the letter "r" as "w") that gave rise to the nickname "Wavishing Kay Fwancis".

On December 16, 1931, Francis and her co-stars opened the newly constructed art deco Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, with a gala preview screening of The False Madonna.

As Belinda in Give Me Your Heart (1936) with co-stars George Brent and Roland Young, her performance had "reticence and pathos" and garnered welcoming reviews from The New York Times.

[23] In October 1937, Francis met aviation businessman Raven Freiherr von Barnekow at a party of Countess Dorothy Dentice di Frasso's in Beverly Hills.

Eventually, Francis herself became dissatisfied with these vehicles and began openly to feud with Warner Bros., even threatening a lawsuit against them for inferior scripts and treatment.

[26] 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 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.

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.

At the end of the war, Four Jills was given a four-star production by 20th Century Fox, but still needed distribution through Monogram, and the decade found Francis virtually unemployable in Hollywood.

Francis spent the remainder of the 1940s on the stage, appearing with some success in State of the Union and touring in various productions of plays, old and new, including Windy Hill, backed by former Warner Bros. colleague Ruth Chatterton.

Declining health, aggravated by an accident in Columbus, Ohio during a tour of State of the Union in 1948, when she was badly burned by a radiator after passing out from an accidental overdose from pills, hastened her retirement from show business.

Her manager and traveling companion had arrived at Francis's hotel room and, in an attempt to revive the unconscious actress with fresh air, burned her legs on the radiator near the window.

[37] Her diaries, which are preserved along with her film-related material in an academic collection at Wesleyan University open to scholars and researchers, paint a picture of a woman whose personal life was often in disarray.

"[5] Having no living immediate family members, Francis left more than $1 million to The Seeing Eye, an organization in New Jersey, which trains guide dogs for the blind.