Kathleen Blanche Pullan was born in 1871 in New Cross, south London, into a respectable, upward-moving engineering family. That promise collapsed when her mother was left bedridden after childbirth, then died in 1881, and her father deserted the children, leaving Kathleen to grow up in a sibling-run household held together by sheer will rather than parents.

Her escape route came through her older sister Ada, who reinvented herself as the actress and artist’s model Dorothy Dene, muse to Sir Frederic Leighton. Following her into showbusiness, Kathleen took the stage name Kathleen Dene and joined her sisters as “the Misses Dene,” a late-Victorian sister act; she appeared in London comedies like Sixteen, Not Out and toured with respected companies, one of “the Sisters Dene, the well-known actresses” living in a smart West Kensington flat.

After Leighton’s death in 1896 and Dorothy’s in 1899, the scaffolding around Kathleen’s life fell away. By 1901 she was no longer in a fashionable flat but a pauper patient in Marylebone Infirmary; she married a barman, Charles Marvin, appeared again in a Poor Law infirmary in 1903, and by 1904 was being dragged before Marylebone Police Court as a “drunk and incapable” actress, eventually placed on the Habitual Drunkards Register and sent to an inebriate reformatory for three years.

While she was confined, Charles drank himself to death from cirrhosis. In 1908, Kathleen died in the Strand Union Infirmary, a homeless widow in her thirties, weakened by infection and poverty. Her sister’s face lived on in famous Victorian paintings; Kathleen’s survived only in hospital registers, court reports and a single blurred photograph – a forgotten actress whose life slipped from West End applause to a workhouse ward.