The Prince, the showgirl and the baseless rumours that blighted her life
In Pat Kirkwood’s centenary year, how one foxtrot with Philip came to overshadow her glittering career
MEMORABLY described as the only Briton to rival Broadway Queen Ethel Merman, veteran showgirl Pat Kirkwood found fame on stage and screen. Yet despite her stunning beauty and the fact she was one of Britain’s most famous theatrical exports, Kirkwood is probably best remembered for a “good old-fashioned foxtrot”.
At the crux of this enduring tale is her dance partner, a young Prince Philip. That brief encounter at a fashionable London nightclub in the late Forties sparked unfounded claims of a romance between the “Prince and the Showgirl”, which came to overshadow her fabulous career.
Kirkwood was a Lancashire lass. Born in Salford on February 24, 1921, her father was a Manchester shipping clerk. She was talentspotted after singing at a gala night when on holiday on the Isle of Man with her parents.
Her first booking was on BBC Children’s Hour and then, billed as the “Schoolgirl Songstress”, she began to appear in local variety shows.
She made her West End debut in 1937 aged just 16, in the supporting role of Dandini in Cinderella. Just two years later she was the star, appearing as George Formby’s leading lady in the ukulele-playing comedian’s film Come On George! She also opened at the London Hippodrome in the smash-hit revue Black Velvet, to tremendous acclaim.
“One of the most exhilarating things to see and hear in London is still Pat Kirkwood in Black Velvet,” the Bystander magazine enthused in 1940. “Kirkwood’s career has so far been a fairy tale come true.With no theatrical background or training she has come to the top through sheer personality.”
The Tatler called her “the first star of the war period”. Award-winning actress Patricia Hodge, 74, who starred in TV sitcom Miranda, worked with Kirkwood on stage.
“During and after the war she dominated the West End like a colossus,” she said. “Her presence in any restaurant would create a hush; in any nightclub she would guarantee an entrance round of applause: her every professional and social activity was newsworthy.”
Like the trouper she was, Kirkwood kept on singing through the Blitz even when enemy bombs were falling all around her, which happened when she was appearing in the show Top Of The World with Tommy Trinder and The Crazy Gang.
“When bombs fell near the theatre, the show went on,” Kirkwood recalled. “No one left, all stayed in their seats because the theatre was safer than the streets. The cast would make bets as to who would be on stage when the bombs began to fall.”
Kirkwood went from one success to another. In 1943, she played the lead in the Cole Porter musical Let’s Face It. She also took part in a special Royal command performance in front of the Royal Family, including Princess Elizabeth, atWindsor Castle.
In 1944, Hollywood came calling. Kirkwood was offered no fewer than seven lucrative film contracts. She signed up for MGM and, three days after VE Day in May 1945, she flew with her mother to America.
But life in Tinseltown proved to be an unhappy experience. She had to wait eight months to start shooting on her first film and was put on a strict diet – and given pills to help her lose weight. She starred alongside US silver screen star Van Johnson in No Leave, No Love, but suffered a physical and nervous breakdown.
After she had recovered in a sanitorium she returned to England and the stage. In October 1948, she appeared in the musical Starlight Roof with the entertainer Vic Oliver, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law, and a young Julie Andrews.
It was there, in her dressing room at the Hippodrome, after the second of her two nightly shows, that she first encountered Prince Philip, then a dashing young buck of 27, and married to the future Queen Elizabeth for less than a year.
“Dressed to the nines”, Kirkwood was waiting patiently with her mother and her dresser for her boyfriend, the Court photographer Baron Nahum, to come and take her out dancing. He phoned to say he was bringing a friend. Nahum belonged to the Thursday Luncheon Club – a laid-back gathering of writers, actors and aristocrats who met once a week at a Soho restaurant to drink and swap stories. Its members included Prince Philip and, on that night, he accompanied Nahum.
“I have to say I wasn’t utterly delighted. I was starving and I just wanted a nice dinner and dance with my boyfriend,” Kirkwood later recalled.The Prince entered the room first, causing Kirkwood’s dresser Bessie to curtsy. There was then a comical scene as Bessie, who was a rather large woman, couldn’t straighten up.
“She got stuck three quarters of the way down,” Kirkwood recalled. “It took Philip, me and Mother to get her upright again.”
Kirkwood, Nahum, the Prince and his naval equerry, Captain “Basher” Watkins, set off by car to Les Ambassadeurs restaurant in Mayfair. On arrival, the maitre d’ told them that every table was taken, adding: “Besides, we’ve already played God Save the King.”
“Tell them to play it again,” replied Philip, and a table was found. After dinner Philip suggested the party go upstairs to the Milroy nightclub. He offered to buy everyone beer.
“Beer?” replied Kirkwood. “I don’t drink beer. I would like Champagne!”
The Prince, clearly taken with the personable young actress whose legs were once dubbed “the eighth wonder of the world” by theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, asked her to dance. “He was so full of life and energy. I suspect he felt a bit trapped and rarely got a chance to be himself. I think I got off on the right foot because I made him laugh,” Kirkwood said years later. She also said the Prince was “a really good dancer and great company”.
The happy evening for the party of four ended with scrambled eggs for breakfast at Baron’s flat before the photographer drove Kirkwood home.
IT DIDN’t take long for news to get out that the man who was married to the heir to the throne had been out dancing in the company of a glamorous actress. It was said that King George VI was furious when he found out.
A few weeks later, Kirkwood was in a cinema when she overheard two women sitting in front of her saying that Prince Philip had a mistress, and named her. They also said the Prince had bought his mistress a white RollsRoyce. She was horrified.
In her 1999 autobiography, The Time Of My Life, the actress wrote: “This was in 1948 and yet, to this day – more than 50 years later – rumours of this sort, and worse, have been circulated about myself and the Prince that have absolutely no foundation.
“This has caused much embarrassment to the Prince, to myself, and to the Queen herself, I have no doubt, although I am sure she never gave them any credence.”
If Princess Elizabeth was aware of the
unfounded gossip, she showed no sign of it when she was introduced to the actress. That happened four years later when Kirkwood was presented to the royal couple after the Royal Command Performance.
“I haven’t seen you since that night in Les A. Oh, I did enjoy it,” the Prince told her.
Kirkwood wasn’t lucky in love. She was married for the first time at the age of 19 to John Lister, an entertainment business manager, but the marriage proved to be a disaster and she later said it scarred her for life.
In 1952, having divorced Lister, she married the Greek-Russian ship owner Spiro “Sparky” de Spero. But he died in her arms from a heart attack two years later.
Marriage number three was to the actor and composer Hubert Gregg. They toured in plays together but, after 20 years, drifted apart. Her fourth husband was solicitor Peter Knight, whom she wed in 1981.
Although she had periods of retirement, Kirkwood remained a star from the 1950s to the 1990s. In 1953, she appeared in the lead role in the BBC spectacular Our Marie, telling the story of the Queen of Music Hall, Marie Lloyd. She had to effect more than 30 changes in costume, sing 13 different songs and appear in around 100 scenes.
A year later she became the first woman to have her own television series, The Pat Kirkwood Show. She regularly topped the bill in pantomimes, with critic Harold Hobson hailing her as “the greatest Principal Boy of the century”.
In the early 1990s, she enjoyed something of a revival, starring in the revue Noel/Cole: Let’s Do It at the 1994 Chichester Festival at the age of 73.
Earlier that year, she appeared as the subject of This Is Your Life when a galaxy of stars from the entertainment world paid tribute.
KIRKWOOD spent her final years in her personal suite at a private nursing home on the Yorkshire Moors, suffering from Alzheimer’s. She passed away on Christmas Day 2007, aged 86. Before she died, she declined to appear in a documentary about Prince Philip.
“I long ago brought down the curtain on the subject. It is an episode that has done me an immense amount of harm, and it is a subject I no longer discuss,” she said. Letters exchanged between the Prince and Kirkwood appear to show there was indeed no affair, as she always insisted. Philip referred to “that ridiculous rumour”, spread by “evilminded people”. Several years ago it was revealed that she had twice been recommended and rejected for the OBE, possibly because of the embarrassing rumours. If so, it was a cruel and unnecessary snub.
Writing in the latest edition of The Call Boy, the journal of the British Music Hall Society, Kirkwood’s friend Michael Thornton, who has custody of her letters, writes of her glittering 60-year career: “Kirkwood changed forever the hitherto somewhat ethereal concept of the British leading lady in a musical and established herself as the genre’s first truly modern star.”
‘Pat overheard two women saying that Prince Philip had a mistress and named her. She was horrified’