Actress and the first star of Kiss Me Kate
Born: March 19, 1915;
Died: May 20, 2018
PATRICIA Morison, who has died aged 103, became the toast of Broadway in the late 1940s after a distinctly lukewarm start to her career in Hollywood. Handpicked by the great composer Cole Porter for the leading role in his musical Kiss Me Kate, the elegant actress was a sensation and went on to enjoy further success opposite Yul Brynner in the 1954 run of The King and I.
Eileen Patricia Augusta Fraser Morison was born in New York to an English actor/playwright father and an Irish mother who had worked for British intelligence during the First World War. The unusual spelling of her surname was, according to her father, because his family was “too stingy to put two Rs in Morrison”.
After studying painting at the Art Students’ League, acting at the Neighbourhood Playhouse and dance with Martha Graham, Morison made her Broadway debut in a 1933 flop, Growing Pains. She understudied Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina in 1935, but never went onstage.
In 1938, scouts from Paramount Studios spotted Morison in her second Broadway show, an operetta entitled The Two Bouquets – and offered her a contract. They were on the look-out for an actress with the sultry exoticism of MGM’s Hedy Lamarr and their own Dorothy Lamour. Indeed, the publicity campaign which launched her proclaimed: “Lamour plus Lamarr equals La Morison!”
Morison made her film debut in 1939’s Persons in Hiding, a low-budget, thinly veiled take on the story of Bonnie and Clyde. A string of lacklustre leading roles in forgettable films followed, and Morison grew frustrated that she was not appearing in more prestigious output or making use of her singing talents. She left Paramount in 1942.
After taking part in a services tour of Britain during which she had plenty of opportunities to sing, Morison returned to Hollywood and began to land better roles in better movies. She appeared alongside John Garfield and Maureen O’Hara in the 1943 thriller The Fallen Sparrow, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in the 1945 romantic comedy Without Love, but she probably made more of an impression as a haughty English femme fatale – named Mrs Hilda Courtney – in the 1946 Sherlock Holmes outing Dressed to Kill. She also played Georges Sand opposite Dirk Bogarde in the Liszt biopic Song Without End (1960).
Morison’s most noteworthy screen role was arguably the one that has never been seen. In the superb and unsettling 1947 film noir Kiss of Death, she played the wife of a gangster played by Victor Mature. Her character is raped and commits suicide by gassing herself in her kitchen oven. But her scenes were deemed inappropriate by the censors, and she was edited out of the film completely.
Kiss Me Kate, which opened in 1948 and was only Morison’s fourth Broadway show, could not have come along at a better time. As the shrewish and severe-looking actress Lilli Vanessi, she won rave reviews both for her comedic skills and her singing. She starred in Kiss Me Kate for 18 months on Broadway and reprised the role in later revivals on stage and on TV – but she missed out on the 1953 movie version.
From the 1950s until the early 1990s, she made the very occasional TV appearance, including a 1989 trip to the iconic Cheers bar. Morison, who never married and has no survivors, was active on stage through the 1960s and 1970s, and made special appearances well into the 2000s. At a Broadway charity event in 2014, she performed Brush Up Your Shakespeare from Kiss Me Kate, and received a six-minute standing ovation.
ALISON KERR
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