Kathleen Saintsbury

Saintsbury was born in London in 1899, the younger daughter of the actor H.A. Saintsbury (also a playwright under the name Jay Nibb) and his Irish wife, Florence. According to the 1911 census, her parents were married in 1893, but there is no record of a marriage in England.^[2] Saintsbury's older sister, Dorothie Helen (known as Helen) was also an actress. Helen married first the actor Edgar Norfolk and, after a divorce, Captain Buckley Rutherford, a son of Sir Ernest Rutherford (a wine importer, not the physicist Ernest Rutherford, although they were both born in 1871 and are sometimes confused^[3]).^[4] The marriage to Rutherford took place in 1932; four months later Rutherford shot himself.^[5] Distraught, less than a month after Rutherford's suicide, Helen also shot herself.^[6] There is some suggestion that Helen was married three times,^[7] but it is possible this reflects that her first husband was originally called Edgar Greenwood, and changed his name to Norfolk for the stage.^[8]

Early in her career, Saintsbury appeared in stage productions:

• Ivor Novello and Constance Collier's The Rat at the Grand Opera House, Belfast, Theatre Royal, Bath and Lyceum Theatre, Newport, 1925^[9]
• Robert Buchanan and Charles Marlowe's The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown, Palace Theatre, Fleetwood, 1928^[10]
• F. Brooke Warren's The Face at the Window, Little Theatre in the Adelphi, London, 1929^[11]
• The Crimes of Burke and Hare, New Theatre, London, 1931^[12]
• Uncle Tom's Cabin (a Tom show), The Brixton Theatre, 1931^[13]