Cinephiles will know that Kay Kendall’s life was certainly brief, the beautiful English actress dying of leukemia when only 32 years old, in London on September 6, 1959. This fact and a few others are generally known, but was she madcap too, as the book title says? It can often be as entertaining to read about the stars as it is to watch them on the screen.

Here we find a personality described as veering wildly from dazzling self-confidence to a bitter inferiority complex. Kendall swapped flats at the drop of a hat – especially when the rent was due in the early days – and didn’t much care for home conveniences, such as having furniture. She was likely to drop in unexpectedly on friends and bed down for a while.

Intimates say she was scatty, mad as a hatter, completely nuts and didn’t give a damn about things. She could be unconstrained in public, with wicked humour. At her most penniless she would somehow treat herself to little extravagances. Despite her zany ways she was mostly loved, nonetheless. She discovered sex early and took to it with great enthusiasm.

Kendall’s life of drama began in the womb. She was the third and final baby of former actress Gladys Kendall who, having endured two difficult births, was less than thrilled with a third pregnancy. Gladys tried every homemade remedy she knew to end it – hot baths, jumping off chairs, for instance – but still Justine Kay Kendall McCarthy appeared on May 21, 1927.

All three siblings were born in their mother’s childhood home in Withernsea, a fishing village on the east coast of Yorkshire. The house was a stone’s throw from the local landmark, a lighthouse, and this has been transformed into the Kay Kendall Memorial Museum by elder sister Kim Kendall Campbell. Kim cooperated on this 2021 paperback update of Eve Golden’s book first published in 2002, apparently the only biography of Kay.

Their maternal grandmother was Lavinia Drewery, a maid, and it was rumoured that she was one of the many illegitimate children of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. Lavinia’s mother was a sewing maid at Tranby Croft country house, Yorkshire, where Edward often stayed. “Don’t you think we look like the Royal Family?” Kay would delight in crowing.

Hers was a showbiz family. Kay’s paternal grandmother Marie Kendall was a star of music halls and pantomimes, Gladys was a chorus girl touring the English seaside resorts and big cities, and Kay’s father Terry was a dancer and comedian. Kay became movie-mad and saw plays too. She marched in a Bank Holiday Carnival in Withernsea in 1932, beating a drum.

Kay went to ballet school at age six years and in July 1939 had two featured numbers in an “Evening of Ballet”. She didn’t like schooling and late that year gained her first professional job, in the chorus of a touring company. Under-age the 12-year-old may have been, but she was maturing early. A growth spurt saw her reach full height and she looked more like a soigné café-society woman than the colt-like rambunctious kid she still was, Golden recounts.

When the Second World War broke out, Kim and Kay formed a music-hall song-and-dance duo. But they were quite awful and were fired at the end of their first week. The sisters then went on the road with the Entertainments National Service Association, or ENSA,  (unkindly known as Every Night Something Awful), providing diversions for Britain’s armed forces.

In 1944 Kay began her film career, the tall, thin and leggy English rose providing background glamour as a faceless, nameless, five-pound-a-day extra. Slowly she graduated to bit parts and earned a prestigious place as a student at the Rank Organisation’s Charm School.

She was cast as one of the female leads in “London Town” in 1946, a big budget Technicolour musical extravaganza that film producer J. Arthur Rank planned would put the British industry right up alongside Hollywood. Unfortunately, the result has gone down in cinematic history as a notorious flop, even, perhaps, Britain’s biggest – it was bad, over-long and out-performed by several brand-new imported Hollywood musicals. Audiences merely shrugged.

Just about everyone involved fell from grace. Kendall was feted before the film’s opening then politely ignored afterwards, barely willing to show her face in public. As she later recalled, there were “no more bazaars to open, no more premieres, no more autographs”.

Rank did not renew the option on her contract. She swore off show business altogether and fled to the United States for a while before skulking back to England. Her confidence shattered, she faced a long grind back to the top, not returning to the big screen for another four years. She appeared fleetingly in “Dance Hall”and was among a bevy of “nightclub girls” in “Night and the City”, both in 1950. Blink and you miss her. She got a newly bobbed nose that Golden says brought her features together, making her look slim, elegant and attractive.

A series of high-profile personal relationships helped push her name up the bill, and she kept at work in small roles,. After “It Started in Paradise” in 1952 she secured a Rank contract and a year later landed the role that made her a bonafide star, in the 1953 British comedy “Genevieve”, set against the London-to-Brighton car rally. Kendall had never been a talented dancer, far less a good singer, and “Genevieve” permitted her to show off her true talents, irresistibly blending funny and flirty. Her true forté was as a light comedienne, and the scene in which she jumped up in a nightclub and “played” trumpet became her defining moment.

Her career reignited, she was allowed a greater choice of the kind of roles she wanted, but other than a sound cameo in 1954’s “Doctor in the House” they were thin on the ground.  She shone in “The Constant Husband” and again during a glorious battle of the sexes in “Simon and Laura”, both in 1955. These gave a glimpse of her international potential and Hollywood came calling. Kendall played with Gene Kelly in the musical “Les Girls” in 1957, for which she and Taina Elg won a joint Golden Globe for Best Actress, Comedy or Musical.

But already ill with leukemia she made only two more films, “The Reluctant Debutante” in 1958 and “Once More, with Feeling!”, released posthumously in 1960. Her death was naturally difficult for the authors to tackle, but the circumstances mde it even more so.

Kendall and Rex Harrison had begun a very public affair after starring together in “The Constant Husband”,  though he was married to his second wife, actress Lilli Palmer. When Kendall and Harrison had blood tests, it was Harrison to whom the doctor confided that she had leukemia. Asked by the doctor if she had family, Harrison replied, “Not anyone she cares about” – a statement that would shock her parents and siblings in later years.

In the 1950s, writes Golden, it was chonic for people with mortal diseases to be kept in the dark, and Harrison, Palmer and the doctor agreed that if Kendall were not to be told, Harrison  must marry her and nurse her to the end. So he and Palmer divorced, and on June 23, 1957, Kendall, 30, and Harrison, 49, married toward midnght in a New York City church.

It remains unclear if she ever knew she was dying, though the news spread quickly in New York society. Newspaper accounts of her leukemia were blithely dismissed by Harrison as anemia, a lifelong complaint of hers. Increasingly weak with hospitalisations, constant blood transfusions and pills, Kendall obviously knew something was seriously wrong but was also told it was anemia. To her family the death was a complete and sudden shock. Kim knew Kay was ill but Harrison kept the truth from her. She had no chance to say goodbye to her sister.

”Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind,” wrote poet John Donne in 1624. Yes, but some deaths are crueller than others. Here is one life, touchingly told.