Jessie Matthews - Biography

Born to a huge, poor family in Soho in London's West End, Jessie Matthews became a big stage star in the late 1920s and 1930s, enjoying some crossover success in musical films. Her career never quite relaunched after the war, though, but she staged a comeback when she replaced the lead actress in the radio soap "Mrs Dale's Diary" in the 1960s. Her life was blighted by breakdowns of relationships and her own struggles with bad health and insecurity, and she wound up, amazingly, buried in an unmarked grave (only rectified after a TV documentary in the late 1980s brought this to light--beg, steal or borrow a copy of BBC's Timewatch (1982) documentary series episode "Catch A Fallen Star"). An amazing life.