Partner Terence Rattigan, Alexander "Alec" Ross
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Kenneth Frederick Ball aka Kenneth Morgan (1920 - March 1, 1949) was an English actor .
He is best known for his performance in The French Without Tears , which earned him the British Film Institute Award for Best Newcomer in 1941.
He was homosexual and from 1946 to 1948 he had an affair with the playwright
Terence Rattigan [1] . He committed suicide in February 1949 [2] .
In 1938, Rattigan embarked on an affair with a boyish-looking actor, Peter Osborn. The following year, when French Without Tears was filmed, he met the man who would be the love of his life, Kenneth Morgan, who played the juvenile lead, Babe Lake. Morgan was 20, but looked even younger, with large, bright eyes, wavy hair and dazzlingly white teeth. Rattigan was instantly attracted to him. But on the outbreak of war, Morgan disappeared into the Royal Navy, and the lovers were separated.
In 1946, Kenneth Morgan, invalided out of the Royal Navy, resumed his place in Terry’s life. For the next two and a half years, they lived together, although this was carefully concealed from the public. Rattingan had a disastrous closet affair with actor Kenneth Morgan. After a passionate and volatile relationship, Morgan walked away from the playwright’s luxurious champagne lifestyle, and left Rattigan for a younger man, actor Alexander "Alec" Ross (May 23, 1922 - December 4, 1971), whose real sexual preference was for women. The new relationship consequently did not worked out and, in a fit of depression Morgan took took an overdose, then gassed himself, and died on the way to hospital. Ross said that on March 1, 1949, he went out with Ball to the West End, and they arrived home about 12.30 am. "He was a little excited and noisy and I had to reprimand him because we had been warned about noise late at night. I asked him to be quiet. It led to an ordinary little quarrel. He left the house as a result of that. He did not say where he was going, and I thought he was going to walk round the block. I went to bed. My room is on the ground floor, but there is a communicating door between us two. I did not hear anything during the night, but in the morning I went into his room and found him lying in front of the gas fire, which was alight. There was a piece of gas tubing, which is normally connected with the gas cooker, lying across his left shoulder, and he was holding the other end of the tubing in his left hand. His face was covered by a pillow-slip."
Rattigan was devastated when he heard. He was still hoping Morgan would come back to him. As realisation dawned that this would never happen, the great playwright, who was in Liverpool at the time, sat in what seemed like a catatonic trance. Then, after many hours apparently lost in thought, he finally broke his silence on his lover’s suicide with words that amazed and chilled his friend, theatre director Peter Glenville. ‘My new play will open with the body discovered dead in front of the gas fire,’ he said. The play was The Deep Blue Sea. Years later, Glenville still remembered his sense of horror on hearing this. ‘His lover had killed himself, and he was going to put it in a play,’ he said. ‘I suppose it was his way of getting over it. He had to write it down and use it, but it did strike me as shockingly cold-blooded.’
Shortly before Morgan’s suicide, Ross had explained to a mutual friend: ‘Kenneth expects too much of me, and I can’t return it. I don’t care for him like that. I’m not really queer at all’.[1] In The Deep Blue Sea, the central relationship between Hester and her lover Freddie Page is similarly imbalanced with Freddie unable to match Hester’s depth of feeling.
In 1949 homosexual activity between men was illegal. Alec Ross concealed the true nature of his relationship with Kenneth Morgan when giving evidence to the coroner, though this newspaper report drops a number of hints: the mention of the connecting door between their rooms, the headline suggesting that Morgan killed himself after a ‘tiff’ – a word normally associated with lovers.
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