Patsy Kelly

The woman who screamed better than anyone

Patsy Kelly never asked permission to step into the frame. She came to film from New York vaudeville with a voice that seemed to have swallowed gravel and an energy that unsettled the most conservative producers of the time. In 1933, she signed with Hal Roach to replace ZaSu Pitts and form a comedy duo that didn't rely on feminine delicacy.

She wasn't interested in being the pretty face of the show. Her job was to be the loud, somewhat rough-edged friend of the leading lady. It worked so well that her professional partnership with Thelma Todd in shorts such as Beauty and the Bus or Done in Oil became a pillar of physical comedy during the Great Depression.

She was the perfect counterpoint.

After Todd's death in 1935, Kelly's career stayed afloat thanks to her ability to steal scenes. She worked on Every Night at Eight and Pigskin Parade. But her lifestyle outside the spotlight began to create tension in an industry that demanded absolute discretion about its employees' private lives.

The price of honesty in old Hollywood

Kelly never made much effort to hide her sexual orientation in an industry that routinely manufactured marriages of convenience. That attitude came back to haunt her when her contract with Roach ended in 1937. Offers from the major studios began to dry up, and she was relegated to B-movie productions that didn't make use of her gift for rapid-fire dialogue.

And the industry decided to turn its back on her.

But she didn't sit around waiting for a phone call that never came. During the forties and fifties, she turned to theater and radio to survive. She even worked as personal assistant to Tallulah Bankhead for almost a decade. It was a time of resistance, when visibility cost her her status as a movie star on the big screen.

The system had no patience for those who didn't follow the established social script. Despite the gap in her film career, her name still carried weight in East Coast theater circles. So she held on until the cultural climate in the United States began to shift slightly in the late sixties.

Her Return from the Broadway Stage

Her return to the spotlight came in 1971 with the musical No, No, Nanette. Her performance as Pauline earned her a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical and restored the respect of New York critics. It marked the start of a second professional youth that brought her back to the studios in California.

The public had not forgotten her.

In 1976, she appeared in the original version of Freaky Friday alongside a young Jodie Foster. In that film, she played the family's maid with the same sarcasm that had made her famous forty years earlier. She also appeared in television series and in the Disney film The North Avenue Irregulars, shot in 1979.

Her last professional appearance was in an episode of the series The Love Boat before her health declined for good. Patsy Kelly died on September 24, 1981 in Woodland Hills after battling cancer and the aftereffects of a stroke. She was 71 years old. Her body was buried at the Church of the Immaculate Conception cemetery in New Jersey.