Kitty Marion

Actor and activist

With the outbreak of World War I, German-born Kitty Marion, suspected of being a German spy and placed under surveillance, sailed from Liverpool for New York. She left a dramatic and colourful life behind: a hectic and fascinating 20-year career as a performer crisscrossing Britain first as a singer, dancer and actress on the musical comedy and pantomime stage, and then in music hall as a ‘refined comedienne’. She campaigned against the sexual abuses rife in the theatre of the day which led her eventually into the suffragette movement where she became a ‘notorious’ militant, responsible for numerous acts of arson. She was imprisoned, went on hunger-strike, and was force-fed more than 300-times. In America, she became a celebrated ‘foot-soldier’ in Margaret Sanger’s birth control movement. Her autobiography, written in the 1930s is published here for the first time.