Kathy Kirby – the ‘other Marilyn’
Despite being the highest-paid star of her generation, Sixties singer Kathy Kirby met an end as tragic as the Hollywood icon she was often compared to
Kathy Kirby was barely out of convent school when, at the Ilford Palais one night, she audaciously strode up to the celebrated bandleader Bert Ambrose and demanded to sing with him and his orchestra.
Despite having worked with the likes of Vera Lynn and Anne Shelton, Bert for some reason let this unknown teenager, dressed in her tight black dress and evening gloves, have her way. But as this pitchperfect voice bellowed from Kathy’s mouth, Bert had no choice but to hand her a management contract right there and then.
Next came a recording deal, quickly followed by a hit album and a Eurovision entry. After a series of TV appearances on the likes of Stars and Garters and Ready, Steady, Go! she was given her own Saturday primetime programme on the BBC which drew audiences of more than 20 million. She was also in demand to tour with the likes of Cliff Richard, Arthur Askey and Tom Jones and even reached the top of the bill at the London Palladium. Kathy Kirby had become the highest-paid female singer in the UK and with her golden hair, kissable glossed lips and voluptuous looks, she was constantly nicknamed Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe. She came up with hit after hit, from Dance On to Let Me Go Lover, You’re the One to a famous recording of Doris Day’s Secret Love. But for Kathy it was both her secret and not-so-secret loves that would be the beginning of a downfall that was perhaps inevitable with such strong comparisons to the life of tragic Marilyn Monroe.
SECRET LOVE
Although there were 40 years between them and he was married, Kathy’s manager Bert also became her lover. He was a possessive, domineering man who made sure he had absolute financial and artistic control over everything Kathy did. He refused to let her do film tests or record songs that later became hits for other stars. He also stalled her ambitions of making it big in America and as a compulsive gambler, frittered away most
of her money. Behind all the Marilyn-like glamour, Kathy’s life was falling apart and miserably unhappy, it’s reported she started a brief affair with Bruce Forsyth. Eventually in 1974 Bert Ambrose, passed away. But rather than embracing her new-found freedom away from his controlling behaviour, she instead found she could barely stand on her own two feet without Bert to pull the strings. Kathy’s behaviour became erratic and her performances few and far between. While she had a brief marriage to a writer and former policeman, Fred Pye, during these latter years of her life she battled a number of mental breakdowns. While she’d once been the talk of the town
as the brightest star in Britain with the biggest voice, now she only hit the headlines when she was accused by the tabloids of having a scandalous affair with a fan or when it was rumoured she was so destitute she was sleeping in shop doorways. She attempted a comeback in the early Eighties by selling the story of her downfall to a Sunday newspaper and releasing a new version of Charles Aznavour’s ‘She’. It wasn’t a great success and in 1983 Kathy made her last public performance at Blackpool’s Horseshoe Theatre Restaurant for a television show. After that she quietly slipped away from the spotlight that had ruined her until her death in 2011, by that time sadly barely remembered as the dazzling star with the Hollywood looks that she once was.