Fabia Drake
Encyclopedia
Fabia Drake OBE was an English actress whose professional career spanned almost 73 years during the 20th century.
Drake was born in Herne Bay
, Kent
. Her first professional role, in a film, was in Fred Paul's Masks and Faces (1917), and her last role was as the inimitable, irresistible Madame de Rosemonde in Miloš Forman's Valmont
(1989).
Drake was a lifelong friend of Laurence Olivier
.
), was, I swear, more likely to engender sustained effort than the more customary,'Don't be lazy'! " She passed an entrance test to the Academy of Dramatic Art
(later to become RADA), in December 1913 - a small class existed at that time for children between the ages of ten and sixteen who attended only in the afternoons but who had an identical adult curriculum with that of senior students. (It was the high-ups at the ADA who decided McGlinchy was too difficult to pronounce and too hard to remember for a stage name so she changed it, ultimately by deed-poll, to Drake which was the second of her father's Christian names and to Fabia which was the second of her baptismal names, chosen because she was born on St Fabian's Day). She attended also Tree's Academy, founded by Sir Herbert Tree
. Contemporaries at the Academy of Dramatic Art included the actress Meggie Albanesi, who burnt herself out at the early age of 24, Eva Le Gallienne
, and Miles Malleson
- a senior student who wrote plays for her. She was small, was called the Shrimp, and played a very wide range of parts - Richard II, Macbeth, Cardinal Richelieu in Bulwer Lytton
's play, the Shaughraun in Dion Boucicault
's The Shaughraun
. Her teachers included Norman Page, whom she admired and whose teaching she responded to - " he gave you confidence, he inspired you with his enthusiasm', and Helen Haye
, whom she did not respond to and who was not, according to Drake, a great teacher.
She made her first professional appearance on a stage at the Court Theatre, Sloane Square
, in a Children's Theatre production called The Cockjolly Bird, as a hermit land-crab
- " in a shell of immense weight and unparalleled discomfort." Her first paid work came when she was cast in a production of The Happy Family. Also in the cast was a young man who " had rather 'stick-out' ears, and his name was Noel Coward
." It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. In the same year, 1916, she met a heroine - Ellen Terry
- when she played Robin, Falstaff's diminutive page in scenes from The Merry Wives of Windsor
, for a week, at the Palace Pier Theatre
in Brighton
.
Besides acting the most formative influence in Drake's childhood was the Anglican religion - later seceded from - and the outstanding memory of her Christmases was the sung Saint Cecilia Mass of Gounod, at the Midnight Mass in the Anglo-Catholic church of All Saints, Margaret Street
. One of the preachers at this church, Geoffrey Heald, produced each year the All Saints choirboys in scenes by Shakespeare, in the clergy house. When one year the chorister set to play Sir Toby Belch in the kitchen scene from Twelfth Night fell ill, Drake was called in to replace him, and so she met a junior chorister also in the production - Laurence Olivier
. "His subsequent intimate friendship became one of my most treasured possessions; we would watch each others work, stay in each others houses, be available during public and private moments of triumph and disaster" she wrote, though she never played with him again. At the age of sixteen she was sent to a finishing school in France, Camposenea at Meudon
-val-Fleury. It had been a hunting lodge of Louis XIV and the sunken marble bath of Madame de Maintenon
was still in place. She was taken to Rheims, in ruins after the First World War, to Versailles
, Chartres
, the Forest of Fontainebleau
, and she was taught, amongst others, by Georges Le Roy sociétaire of the Comédie-Française
who was to become one of the great teachers of the Paris Conservatoire.
, in her dressing room during her 'waits' in Alabanesi's current success A Bill of Divorcement
at St Martin's Theatre
. Drake wrote that, "Albanesi was by now established as the most talented young actress in England, under contract to Basil Dean
...the warmth and sympathy of her personality was like a lodestar in my bleak night sky." Having tried, and failed, to gain employment with J.E.Vedrenne
, Drake decided to join Madame Alice Gachet's French acting classes at RADA, another teacher of brilliance, her most famous pupil - Charles Laughton
. She did then sign with Vedrenne for 18 months, playing small parts, and understudying and was then sent to Basil Dean who was about to produce James Elroy Flecker
's Hassan. This proved a memorable production, incidental music was by Frederick Delius
, the great ballet in the House-of-the-Moving-Walls was devised by Fokine, and the cast included Malcolm Keen
as the Caliph and Henry Ainley
as Hassan. Drake, an understudy, would play both of the two women's parts in the play, Yasmin and Pervaneh - Isabel Jeans
(Yasmin) and Laura Cowrie (Parveneh), both went down with influenza in the epidemic of 1923.
When C. Aubrey Smith needed an actress to play his daughter in a production of Roland Pertwee
's The Creaking Chair his wife suggested Fabia and she was released from Hassan to go off and create her own, first, part. The play ran for six months, directed by Gerald du Maurier
, and starred Tallulah Bankhead
as well as Aubrey Smith.
Shortly after this Drake worked with Marie Tempest
in a play by John Hastings Turner called The Scarlet Lady. In Marie Tempest she found " artistic understanding, comradeship and succour." The play was a success when it opened and brought Drake some critical attention. Charles Langbridge Morgan
, then critic of The Times (October 1926): " Fabia Drake...she has not been long on the professional stage. She has judgment and poise and a mind that lifts a trivial part out of its triviality." And James Agate
in The Sunday Times
(3 October 1926) ; " Miss Fabia Drake is probably the best ingénue on the present-day stage, and provided she is able to conceal her brains will one day make a popular success. She suggests health, physical, mental and moral."
In the London theatre between the First and Second World Wars, Sunday play-producing societies flourished. These societies acted as shop windows for rising players and try-out theatres for new dramatists. RADA ex-students decided to have their own Sunday society, The RADA Players and Drake became the second of its secretaries. In a play of Allan Monkhouse
's called Sons and Fathers, Drake played opposite a young John Gielgud
. She was the victim of serious stage-fright at this period in her career, the result of a spasm in her throat that prevented her from speaking and that she feared would return at inopportune moments.
In 1929 she went with the Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon on its tour of the United States - in three weeks she had to learn the parts of Lady Macbeth, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing
, the Queen in Hamlet ( 'but I should never have been cast to play Gertrude. I was only twenty-five, just a touch on the young side when the Hamlet is nearing forty'), Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor
, Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream
, and Viola in Twelfth Night. Later Drake reflected that Bridges Adams, the resident Director of the Memorial Theatre, ( Royal Shakespeare) did her a disservice in this, for the restrictions of the time-table required she learn her roles by rote. There was no time for her to live with the parts. (As Lady Macbeth in 1933 at Stratford, the Komisarjevsky
production, in the sleepwalking scene, she was painted by Walter Sickert
- the work was exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1934 to celebrate Sickert's election as R.A.) Shortly before leaving on the White star liner SS Megantic rehearsing Macbeth she suffered a recurrence of the spasm in her throat and so the trip began with an element of fear.
Afraid of a choking fit and being unable to speak her lines she nevertheless got through her performances in Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St Louis, Denver, Washington - but in Chicago she finally reached the end of her strength. She sought psychiatric help and with the psychiatrist traced the first intrusion of her phobia into her work on the stage and its possible origin in a lie she had told to avoid catechism
when she had made herself sick by pushing a spoon down her throat. Until her temporary retirement from the stage, when she got married, she was henceforth to make herself physically sick before each and every performance - to get rid of the choking before she went near the stage.
Back in England her friend John Gielgud asked her to play Rosalind in a production of As You Like It
at the Old Vic
- Drake would become closely identified with this role. In 1931 she made another tour of the U.S. and Canada, this time meeting Ivor Novello
in Los Angeles - he too became a friend. Back from Hollywood she played in the opening performance at the Stratford-on-Avon Memorial Theatre
, Henry IV, Part I, which was a near disaster because much of the performance was inaudible. Drake herself, playing the minute part of Lady Percy, was helped by the fact that she played her first scene on the apron-stage, and was completely audible. The critics noticed her performance all the more; H.V. Morton
was covering the event for the Daily Herald and the next morning the Daily Herald produced a placard on its billboards which read : All Stratford talks of one woman.
Following her marriage in December 1938 to Maxwell Turner, a barrister-at-law, she retired entirely from the stage. Her daughter was born in March 1940. Over ten years of provoking physical sickness before each and every performance had taken its toll, but in 1943, when Sir Kenneth Barnes
asked her to join his depleted teaching staff at RADA she was recovered and available. For the three years 1943, 1944, 1945 she worked with students, work which she later described as, 'one of the most stimulating and rewarding periods' of her life. Her students included Roger Moore
, John Neville, Robert Shaw
, and Richard Johnson
. She also undertook a production of Henry V
, although it was not with RADA students, but with American Army personnel. Renée Asherson
also appeared in the production, the French Princess of the film version
. (Having seen this production Robert Donat
asked Drake to undertake the casting and production of his forthcoming post-war season in management at the Aldwych Theatre
). Drake's teaching work finished at RADA when she began to have a pain in her jaw and she had to leave in the middle of a term.
She became interested in researching Shakespeare's troupe of actors, men like Richard Burbage
and Thomas Pope
, and the effect the actors had on Shakespeare's creation of roles for them.
Her husband having died from liver cancer
at the age of 53, she was invited by Binkie Beaumont
to return to the theatre. She accepted the offer of a part in a thriller called Write Me A Murder by Frederick Knott
. Feeling the need for sun and a warmer climate after the play finished she travelled to Ischia
- it was 1962 and the year of the Great Freeze in Britain. From this point travel became an important part of her life, and through this she came to know 'learned gentlemen' who spoke to the travellers on cruises on cultural matters., men like Maurice Bowra
, John Wolfenden, and Mortimer Wheeler
. She wrote later of owing a great deal to Wheeler : " Because, when a woman loses her man in death and is no longer young she can easily move into a resigned approach to old age which Aphrodite Ambologera
is said to postpone". She trusted and valued his friendship, amitié amoureuse.
She continued to work on radio and on television, including work with Dickie Henderson
in comedy sketches for Thames TV, and Leslie Crowther
( in ATV
's Big Boy, Now!), as well as in major series like The Pallisers
and P.G.Wodehouse's, The World of Wooster, playing Bertie Wooster
's outrageous Aunt Agatha
, with Ian Carmichael
(Bertie) and Dennis Price
( the inimitable Jeeves
), and an acclaimed performance as Mabel Layton in The Jewel in the Crown ( 1984 ). There were also two notable screen performances, as Catherine Alan in A Room with a View
( 1985 ) and as Madame de Rosemonde in Valmont
(1989 ).
- in December 1938. Their only child, a daughter Deirdre, was born in March 1940.
Read more: Fabia Drake Biography (1904–1990) Film Reference
Drake was born in Herne Bay
Herne Bay, Kent
Herne Bay is a seaside town in Kent, South East England, with a population of 35,188. On the south coast of the Thames Estuary, it is north of Canterbury and east of Whitstable. It neighbours the ancient villages of Herne and Reculver and is part of the City of Canterbury local government district...
, Kent
Kent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...
. Her first professional role, in a film, was in Fred Paul's Masks and Faces (1917), and her last role was as the inimitable, irresistible Madame de Rosemonde in Miloš Forman's Valmont
Valmont (film)
Valmont is a 1989 drama film directed by Miloš Forman, based on the French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos. It was adapted for the screen with a screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière...
(1989).
Drake was a lifelong friend of Laurence Olivier
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM was an English actor, director, and producer. He was one of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century. He married three times, to fellow actors Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright...
.
Early life
Born not Drake, but Ethel McGlinchy, the actress's Irish father, a caterer, was an actor manqué, whose great love was the theatre and who was given to quoting Shakespeare - in her autobiography Drake recalled: " The dire warning that lies behind 'I wasted time and now doth time waste me' (Richard IIRichard II (play)
King Richard the Second is a history play by William Shakespeare believed to be written in approximately 1595. It is based on the life of King Richard II of England and is the first part of a tetralogy, referred to by some scholars as the Henriad, followed by three plays concerning Richard's...
), was, I swear, more likely to engender sustained effort than the more customary,'Don't be lazy'! " She passed an entrance test to the Academy of Dramatic Art
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art is a drama school located in London, United Kingdom. It is generally regarded as one of the most renowned drama schools in the world, and is one of the oldest drama schools in the United Kingdom, having been founded in 1904.RADA is an affiliate school of the...
(later to become RADA), in December 1913 - a small class existed at that time for children between the ages of ten and sixteen who attended only in the afternoons but who had an identical adult curriculum with that of senior students. (It was the high-ups at the ADA who decided McGlinchy was too difficult to pronounce and too hard to remember for a stage name so she changed it, ultimately by deed-poll, to Drake which was the second of her father's Christian names and to Fabia which was the second of her baptismal names, chosen because she was born on St Fabian's Day). She attended also Tree's Academy, founded by Sir Herbert Tree
Herbert Beerbohm Tree
Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was an English actor and theatre manager.Tree began performing in the 1870s. By 1887, he was managing the Haymarket Theatre, winning praise for adventurous programming and lavish productions, and starring in many of its productions. In 1899, he helped fund the...
. Contemporaries at the Academy of Dramatic Art included the actress Meggie Albanesi, who burnt herself out at the early age of 24, Eva Le Gallienne
Eva Le Gallienne
Eva Le Gallienne was a well-known actress, producer, and director, during the first half of the 20th century.-Early life and early career:...
, and Miles Malleson
Miles Malleson
William Miles Malleson was an English actor and dramatist, particularly known for his appearances in British comedy films of the 1930s to 1960s. Towards the end of his career he also appeared in cameo roles in several Hammer horror films, with a fairly large role in The Brides of Dracula as the...
- a senior student who wrote plays for her. She was small, was called the Shrimp, and played a very wide range of parts - Richard II, Macbeth, Cardinal Richelieu in Bulwer Lytton
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton PC , was an English politician, poet, playwright, and novelist. He was immensely popular with the reading public and wrote a stream of bestselling dime-novels which earned him a considerable fortune...
's play, the Shaughraun in Dion Boucicault
Dion Boucicault
Dionysius Lardner Boursiquot , commonly known as Dion Boucicault, was an Irish actor and playwright famed for his melodramas. By the later part of the 19th century, Boucicault had become known on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the most successful actor-playwright-managers then in the...
's The Shaughraun
The Shaughraun
The Shaughraun is a melodramatic play written by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault. It was first performed at Wallack's Theatre, New York, on 14 November 1874. Boucicault played Con in the original production...
. Her teachers included Norman Page, whom she admired and whose teaching she responded to - " he gave you confidence, he inspired you with his enthusiasm', and Helen Haye
Helen Haye
Helen Haye was a British stage and film actress.She began acting on the stage in 1898 and debuted in London in 1911 as Gertrude in Hamlet. Her film career began in 1917. She often worked with director Alexander Korda...
, whom she did not respond to and who was not, according to Drake, a great teacher.
She made her first professional appearance on a stage at the Court Theatre, Sloane Square
Sloane Square
Sloane Square is a small hard-landscaped square on the boundaries of the fashionable London districts of Knightsbridge, Belgravia and Chelsea, located southwest of Charing Cross, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The square is part of the Hans Town area designed in 1771 by Henry...
, in a Children's Theatre production called The Cockjolly Bird, as a hermit land-crab
Hermit crab
Hermit crabs are decapod crustaceans of the superfamily Paguroidea. Most of the 1100 species possess an asymmetrical abdomen which is concealed in an empty gastropod shell that is carried around by the hermit crab.-Description:...
- " in a shell of immense weight and unparalleled discomfort." Her first paid work came when she was cast in a production of The Happy Family. Also in the cast was a young man who " had rather 'stick-out' ears, and his name was Noel Coward
Noël Coward
Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy...
." It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. In the same year, 1916, she met a heroine - Ellen Terry
Ellen Terry
Dame Ellen Terry, GBE was an English stage actress who became the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain. Among the members of her famous family is her great nephew, John Gielgud....
- when she played Robin, Falstaff's diminutive page in scenes from The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Merry Wives of Windsor is a comedy by William Shakespeare, first published in 1602, though believed to have been written prior to 1597. It features the fat knight Sir John Falstaff, and is Shakespeare's only play to deal exclusively with contemporary Elizabethan era English middle class life...
, for a week, at the Palace Pier Theatre
Brighton Pier
The Brighton Marine Palace and Pier is a pleasure pier in Brighton, England. It is generally known as the Palace Pier for short, but has been informally renamed Brighton Pier since 2000 by its owners, the Noble Organisation, in an attempt to suggest that it is Brighton's only pier...
in Brighton
Brighton
Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...
.
Besides acting the most formative influence in Drake's childhood was the Anglican religion - later seceded from - and the outstanding memory of her Christmases was the sung Saint Cecilia Mass of Gounod, at the Midnight Mass in the Anglo-Catholic church of All Saints, Margaret Street
All Saints, Margaret Street
All Saints, Margaret Street is an Anglican church in London built in the High Victorian Gothic style by the architect William Butterfield and completed in 1859....
. One of the preachers at this church, Geoffrey Heald, produced each year the All Saints choirboys in scenes by Shakespeare, in the clergy house. When one year the chorister set to play Sir Toby Belch in the kitchen scene from Twelfth Night fell ill, Drake was called in to replace him, and so she met a junior chorister also in the production - Laurence Olivier
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM was an English actor, director, and producer. He was one of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century. He married three times, to fellow actors Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright...
. "His subsequent intimate friendship became one of my most treasured possessions; we would watch each others work, stay in each others houses, be available during public and private moments of triumph and disaster" she wrote, though she never played with him again. At the age of sixteen she was sent to a finishing school in France, Camposenea at Meudon
Meudon
Meudon is a municipality in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, France. It is in the département of Hauts-de-Seine. It is located from the center of Paris.-Geography:...
-val-Fleury. It had been a hunting lodge of Louis XIV and the sunken marble bath of Madame de Maintenon
Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon
Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon was the second wife of King Louis XIV of France. She was known during her first marriage as Madame Scarron, and subsequently as Madame de Maintenon...
was still in place. She was taken to Rheims, in ruins after the First World War, to Versailles
Versailles
Versailles , a city renowned for its château, the Palace of Versailles, was the de facto capital of the kingdom of France for over a century, from 1682 to 1789. It is now a wealthy suburb of Paris and remains an important administrative and judicial centre...
, Chartres
Chartres
Chartres is a commune and capital of the Eure-et-Loir department in northern France. It is located southwest of Paris.-Geography:Chartres is built on the left bank of the Eure River, on a hill crowned by its famous cathedral, the spires of which are a landmark in the surrounding country...
, the Forest of Fontainebleau
Forest of Fontainebleau
The forest of Fontainebleau is a mixed deciduous forest lying sixty kilometres southeast of Paris, France. It is located primarily in the arrondissement of Fontainebleau in the southwestern part of the department of Seine-et-Marne...
, and she was taught, amongst others, by Georges Le Roy sociétaire of the Comédie-Française
Sociétaires of the Comédie-Française
The sociétaires of the Comédie-Française are chosen from among the pensionnaires who have been in the company a year or more.They are decided upon in the course of a general assembly of the company's administrative committee, made up of 6 existing sociétaires, the senior sociétaire, and the general...
who was to become one of the great teachers of the Paris Conservatoire.
Career
Back in London in 1921 and unemployed she spent time with Meggie AlbanesiMeggie Albanesi
Meggie Albanesi was a British stage and film actress. She was born Margherita Albanesi in London on 8 October 1899. Her mother was Effie Adelaide Rowlands, a writer, and her father was Chevalier Carlo Albanesi, an Italian violinist. She attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and made her film...
, in her dressing room during her 'waits' in Alabanesi's current success A Bill of Divorcement
A Bill of Divorcement
A Bill of Divorcement is a 1932 American drama film, directed by George Cukor and starring John Barrymore and Katharine Hepburn in her movie debut. It is based on the British play of the same name, written by Clemence Dane as a reaction to a law passed in Britain in the early 1920s that allowed...
at St Martin's Theatre
St Martin's Theatre
St Martin's Theatre is a West End theatre, located in West Street, near Charing Cross Road, in the London Borough of Camden. It was designed as one of a pair of theatres with the Ambassadors Theatre by W.G.R...
. Drake wrote that, "Albanesi was by now established as the most talented young actress in England, under contract to Basil Dean
Basil Dean
Basil Herbert Dean CBE was an English actor, writer, film producer/director and theatrical producer/director....
...the warmth and sympathy of her personality was like a lodestar in my bleak night sky." Having tried, and failed, to gain employment with J.E.Vedrenne
John Eugene Vedrenne
John Eugene Verdenne , often known as J. E. Vedrenne, was a West End theatre producer who co-managed the Savoy Theatre with Harley Granville-Barker, and then the Royal Court Theatre...
, Drake decided to join Madame Alice Gachet's French acting classes at RADA, another teacher of brilliance, her most famous pupil - Charles Laughton
Charles Laughton
Charles Laughton was an English-American stage and film actor, screenwriter, producer and director.-Early life and career:...
. She did then sign with Vedrenne for 18 months, playing small parts, and understudying and was then sent to Basil Dean who was about to produce James Elroy Flecker
James Elroy Flecker
James Elroy Flecker was an English poet, novelist and playwright. As a poet he was most influenced by the Parnassian poets.-Biography:...
's Hassan. This proved a memorable production, incidental music was by Frederick Delius
Frederick Delius
Frederick Theodore Albert Delius, CH was an English composer. Born in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family of German extraction, he resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce...
, the great ballet in the House-of-the-Moving-Walls was devised by Fokine, and the cast included Malcolm Keen
Malcolm Keen
Malcolm Keen was an English film and television actor.Born in Bristol, Keen was an early collaborator with the director Alfred Hitchcock, starring in his silent films The Mountain Eagle, The Lodger and The Manxman.Keen was the father of actor Geoffrey Keen, and the two both played Iachimo in...
as the Caliph and Henry Ainley
Henry Ainley
Henry Hinchliffe Ainley was an English Shakespearean stage and screen actor. He was married three times to Susanne Sheldon, Elaine Fearon and the novelist Bettina Riddle, later Baroness von Hutten zum Stolzenberg...
as Hassan. Drake, an understudy, would play both of the two women's parts in the play, Yasmin and Pervaneh - Isabel Jeans
Isabel Jeans
Isabel Jeans was an English stage and film actress known for her roles in several Alfred Hitchcock films, among others.-Career:...
(Yasmin) and Laura Cowrie (Parveneh), both went down with influenza in the epidemic of 1923.
When C. Aubrey Smith needed an actress to play his daughter in a production of Roland Pertwee
Roland Pertwee
Roland Pertwee was an English playwright, film and television screenwriter, director and actor. He was the father of both Doctor Who star Jon Pertwee and fellow playwright and screenwriter Michael Pertwee...
's The Creaking Chair his wife suggested Fabia and she was released from Hassan to go off and create her own, first, part. The play ran for six months, directed by Gerald du Maurier
Gerald du Maurier
Sir Gerald Hubert Edward Busson du Maurier was an English actor and manager. He was the son of the writer George du Maurier and brother of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies. In 1902, he married the actress Muriel Beaumont with whom he had three daughters: Angela du Maurier , Daphne du Maurier and Jeanne...
, and starred Tallulah Bankhead
Tallulah Bankhead
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was an award-winning American actress of the stage and screen, talk-show host, and bonne vivante...
as well as Aubrey Smith.
Shortly after this Drake worked with Marie Tempest
Marie Tempest
Dame Marie Tempest DBE was an English singer and actress known as the "queen of her profession".Tempest became the most famous soprano in late Victorian light opera and Edwardian musical comedies. Later, she became a leading comic actress and toured widely in North America and elsewhere...
in a play by John Hastings Turner called The Scarlet Lady. In Marie Tempest she found " artistic understanding, comradeship and succour." The play was a success when it opened and brought Drake some critical attention. Charles Langbridge Morgan
Charles Langbridge Morgan
Charles Langbridge Morgan , was an English-born playwright and novelist of English and Welsh parentage. The main themes of his work were, as he himself put it, "Art, Love, and Death", and the relation between them...
, then critic of The Times (October 1926): " Fabia Drake...she has not been long on the professional stage. She has judgment and poise and a mind that lifts a trivial part out of its triviality." And James Agate
James Agate
James Evershed Agate was a British diarist and critic. In the period between the wars, he was one of Britain's most influential theatre critics...
in The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times is a British Sunday newspaper.The Sunday Times may also refer to:*The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times...
(3 October 1926) ; " Miss Fabia Drake is probably the best ingénue on the present-day stage, and provided she is able to conceal her brains will one day make a popular success. She suggests health, physical, mental and moral."
In the London theatre between the First and Second World Wars, Sunday play-producing societies flourished. These societies acted as shop windows for rising players and try-out theatres for new dramatists. RADA ex-students decided to have their own Sunday society, The RADA Players and Drake became the second of its secretaries. In a play of Allan Monkhouse
Allan Monkhouse
Allan Noble Monkhouse was an English playwright, critic, essayist and novelist.He was born in Barnard Castle, County Durham. He worked in the cotton trade, in Manchester, and settled in Disley, Cheshire...
's called Sons and Fathers, Drake played opposite a young John Gielgud
John Gielgud
Sir Arthur John Gielgud, OM, CH was an English actor, director, and producer. A descendant of the renowned Terry acting family, he achieved early international acclaim for his youthful, emotionally expressive Hamlet which broke box office records on Broadway in 1937...
. She was the victim of serious stage-fright at this period in her career, the result of a spasm in her throat that prevented her from speaking and that she feared would return at inopportune moments.
In 1929 she went with the Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon on its tour of the United States - in three weeks she had to learn the parts of Lady Macbeth, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy written by William Shakespeare about two pairs of lovers, Benedick and Beatrice, and Claudio and Hero....
, the Queen in Hamlet ( 'but I should never have been cast to play Gertrude. I was only twenty-five, just a touch on the young side when the Hamlet is nearing forty'), Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Merry Wives of Windsor is a comedy by William Shakespeare, first published in 1602, though believed to have been written prior to 1597. It features the fat knight Sir John Falstaff, and is Shakespeare's only play to deal exclusively with contemporary Elizabethan era English middle class life...
, Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that was written by William Shakespeare. It is believed to have been written between 1590 and 1596. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta...
, and Viola in Twelfth Night. Later Drake reflected that Bridges Adams, the resident Director of the Memorial Theatre, ( Royal Shakespeare) did her a disservice in this, for the restrictions of the time-table required she learn her roles by rote. There was no time for her to live with the parts. (As Lady Macbeth in 1933 at Stratford, the Komisarjevsky
Theodore Komisarjevsky
Fyodor Fyodorovich Komissarzhevsky or Theodore Komisarjevsky, as he is better known in the West, was a Russian theatrical director and designer. He began his career in Moscow, but had his greatest influence in London...
production, in the sleepwalking scene, she was painted by Walter Sickert
Walter Sickert
Walter Richard Sickert , born in Munich, Germany, was a painter who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century....
- the work was exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1934 to celebrate Sickert's election as R.A.) Shortly before leaving on the White star liner SS Megantic rehearsing Macbeth she suffered a recurrence of the spasm in her throat and so the trip began with an element of fear.
Catechism
A catechism , i.e. to indoctrinate) is a summary or exposition of doctrine, traditionally used in Christian religious teaching from New Testament times to the present...
when she had made herself sick by pushing a spoon down her throat. Until her temporary retirement from the stage, when she got married, she was henceforth to make herself physically sick before each and every performance - to get rid of the choking before she went near the stage.
Back in England her friend John Gielgud asked her to play Rosalind in a production of As You Like It
As You Like It
As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 or early 1600 and first published in the folio of 1623. The play's first performance is uncertain, though a performance at Wilton House in 1603 has been suggested as a possibility...
at the Old Vic
Old Vic
The Old Vic is a theatre located just south-east of Waterloo Station in London on the corner of The Cut and Waterloo Road. Established in 1818 as the Royal Coburg Theatre, it was taken over by Emma Cons in 1880 when it was known formally as the Royal Victoria Hall. In 1898, a niece of Cons, Lilian...
- Drake would become closely identified with this role. In 1931 she made another tour of the U.S. and Canada, this time meeting Ivor Novello
Ivor Novello
David Ivor Davies , better known as Ivor Novello, was a Welsh composer, singer and actor who became one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century. Born into a musical family, his first successes were as a songwriter...
in Los Angeles - he too became a friend. Back from Hollywood she played in the opening performance at the Stratford-on-Avon Memorial Theatre
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
The Royal Shakespeare Theatre is a 1,040+ seat thrust stage theatre owned by the Royal Shakespeare Company dedicated to the British playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is located in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon - Shakespeare's birthplace - in the English Midlands, beside the River Avon...
, Henry IV, Part I, which was a near disaster because much of the performance was inaudible. Drake herself, playing the minute part of Lady Percy, was helped by the fact that she played her first scene on the apron-stage, and was completely audible. The critics noticed her performance all the more; H.V. Morton
Henry Vollam Morton
Henry Canova Vollam Morton, was a journalist and pioneering travel writer from Lancashire, England, best known for his prolific and popular books on Britain and the Holy Land...
was covering the event for the Daily Herald and the next morning the Daily Herald produced a placard on its billboards which read : All Stratford talks of one woman.
Following her marriage in December 1938 to Maxwell Turner, a barrister-at-law, she retired entirely from the stage. Her daughter was born in March 1940. Over ten years of provoking physical sickness before each and every performance had taken its toll, but in 1943, when Sir Kenneth Barnes
Kenneth Barnes
Sir Kenneth Ralph Barnes, KGB, CBE was director of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, from 1909 until 1955.He was born in Heavitree, near Exeter, one of six siblings...
asked her to join his depleted teaching staff at RADA she was recovered and available. For the three years 1943, 1944, 1945 she worked with students, work which she later described as, 'one of the most stimulating and rewarding periods' of her life. Her students included Roger Moore
Roger Moore
Sir Roger George Moore KBE , is an English actor, perhaps best known for portraying British secret agent James Bond in seven films from 1973 to 1985. He also portrayed Simon Templar in the long-running British television series The Saint.-Early life:Moore was born in Stockwell, London...
, John Neville, Robert Shaw
Robert Shaw (actor)
Robert Archibald Shaw was an English actor and novelist, remembered for his performances in The Sting , From Russia with Love , A Man for All Seasons , the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three , Black Sunday , The Deep and Jaws , where he played the shark hunter Quint.-Early life...
, and Richard Johnson
Richard Johnson (actor)
Richard Johnson is an English actor, writer and producer, who starred in several British films of the 1960s and has also had a distinguished stage career. He most recently appeared in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.-Life and career:...
. She also undertook a production of Henry V
Henry V (play)
Henry V is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to be written in approximately 1599. Its full titles are The Cronicle History of Henry the Fifth and The Life of Henry the Fifth...
, although it was not with RADA students, but with American Army personnel. Renée Asherson
Renee Asherson
Renée Asherson , born Dorothy Renée Ascherson, is an English actress of stage, film and television.Much of Asherson's theatrical career was spent in Shakespearean plays, appearing at such venues as the Old Vic, the Liverpool Playhouse and the Westminster Theatre...
also appeared in the production, the French Princess of the film version
Henry V (1944 film)
Henry V is a 1944 film adaptation of William Shakespeare's play of the same name. The on-screen title is The Cronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France . It stars Laurence Olivier, who also directed. The play was adapted for the screen by Olivier, Dallas...
. (Having seen this production Robert Donat
Robert Donat
Robert Donat was an English film and stage actor. He is best-known for his roles in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps and Goodbye, Mr...
asked Drake to undertake the casting and production of his forthcoming post-war season in management at the Aldwych Theatre
Aldwych Theatre
The Aldwych Theatre is a West End theatre, located on Aldwych in the City of Westminster. The theatre was listed Grade II on 20 July 1971. Its seating capacity is 1,200.-Origins:...
). Drake's teaching work finished at RADA when she began to have a pain in her jaw and she had to leave in the middle of a term.
She became interested in researching Shakespeare's troupe of actors, men like Richard Burbage
Richard Burbage
Richard Burbage was an English actor and theatre owner. He was the younger brother of Cuthbert Burbage. They were both actors in drama....
and Thomas Pope
Thomas Pope (16th-century actor)
Thomas Pope was an Elizabethan actor, a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men and a colleague of William Shakespeare. Pope was a "comedian and acrobat."-Beginnings:...
, and the effect the actors had on Shakespeare's creation of roles for them.
Her husband having died from liver cancer
Liver cancer
Liver tumors or hepatic tumors are tumors or growths on or in the liver . Several distinct types of tumors can develop in the liver because the liver is made up of various cell types. These growths can be benign or malignant...
at the age of 53, she was invited by Binkie Beaumont
Binkie Beaumont
Hugh 'Binkie' Beaumont was a British theatre manager and producer, referred to as the "Eminence Grise" of the West End Theatre. He was one of the most successful manager-producers in the West End during the middle of the 20th century...
to return to the theatre. She accepted the offer of a part in a thriller called Write Me A Murder by Frederick Knott
Frederick Knott
Frederick Major Paull Knott was an English playwright, best known for writing the London-based stage thriller Dial M for Murder, which was later filmed in Hollywood by Alfred Hitchcock....
. Feeling the need for sun and a warmer climate after the play finished she travelled to Ischia
Ischia
Ischia is a volcanic island in the Tyrrhenian Sea. It lies at the northern end of the Gulf of Naples, about 30 km from the city of Naples. It is the largest of the Phlegrean Islands. Roughly trapezoidal in shape, it measures around 10 km east to west and 7 km north to south and has...
- it was 1962 and the year of the Great Freeze in Britain. From this point travel became an important part of her life, and through this she came to know 'learned gentlemen' who spoke to the travellers on cruises on cultural matters., men like Maurice Bowra
Maurice Bowra
Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra was an English classical scholar and academic, known for his wit. He was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1970, and served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1951 to 1954.-Birth and boyhood:...
, John Wolfenden, and Mortimer Wheeler
Mortimer Wheeler
Brigadier Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler CH, CIE, MC, FBA, FSA , was one of the best-known British archaeologists of the twentieth century.-Education and career:...
. She wrote later of owing a great deal to Wheeler : " Because, when a woman loses her man in death and is no longer young she can easily move into a resigned approach to old age which Aphrodite Ambologera
Ambologera
Ambologera was a cultic epithet of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, from the Greek and , "delaying old age". She had a statue on the acropolis at Sparta under this name, although as there is only one surviving mention of this epithet, from Pausanias' Description of Greece, the precise nature of this...
is said to postpone". She trusted and valued his friendship, amitié amoureuse.
She continued to work on radio and on television, including work with Dickie Henderson
Dickie Henderson
Dickie Henderson, OBE was a London-born entertainer.-Early years:His father, Dick Henderson was a music hall comedian and singer famous for his short, rotund appearance, bowler hat and beautiful singing voice...
in comedy sketches for Thames TV, and Leslie Crowther
Leslie Crowther
Leslie Crowther, CBE was an English comedian, actor and gameshow host.-Biography:Crowther was born in West Bridgford in Nottinghamshire. At the end of 1944 he moved to London with his parents, but was evacuated for a few months to Bute until just after the war ended.His father, Leslie Frederick...
( in ATV
Associated TeleVision
Associated Television, often referred to as ATV, was a British television company, holder of various licences to broadcast on the ITV network from 24 September 1955 until 00:34 on 1 January 1982...
's Big Boy, Now!), as well as in major series like The Pallisers
The Pallisers
The Pallisers is a 1974 BBC television adaptation of Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels.-Cast :*Anthony Ainley: Rev. Emilius*Terence Alexander: Lord George*Anthony Andrews: Lord Silverbridge*Sarah Badel: Lizzie Eustace...
and P.G.Wodehouse's, The World of Wooster, playing Bertie Wooster
Bertie Wooster
Bertram Wilberforce "Bertie" Wooster is a recurring fictional character in the Jeeves novels of British author P. G. Wodehouse. An English gentleman, one of the "idle rich" and a member of the Drones Club, he appears alongside his valet, Jeeves, whose genius manages to extricate Bertie or one of...
's outrageous Aunt Agatha
Aunt Agatha
Agatha Gregson, née Wooster, later Lady Worplesdon, is a recurring fictional character in the Jeeves stories of British comic writer P. G. Wodehouse, being best known as Aunt Agatha, Bertie Wooster's least favourite aunt, and a counterpoint to her sister, Bertie's Aunt Dahlia...
, with Ian Carmichael
Ian Carmichael
Ian Gillett Carmichael, OBE was an English film, stage, television and radio actor.-Early life:Carmichael was born in Hull, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. The son of an optician, he was educated at Scarborough College and Bromsgrove School, before training as an actor at RADA...
(Bertie) and Dennis Price
Dennis Price
Dennis Price was an English actor, remembered for his suave screen roles, particularly Louis Mazzini in Kind Hearts and Coronets, and for his portrayal of the omniscient valet Jeeves in 1960s television adaptations of P. G...
( the inimitable Jeeves
Jeeves
Reginald Jeeves is a fictional character in the short stories and novels of P. G. Wodehouse, being the valet of Bertie Wooster . Created in 1915, Jeeves would continue to appear in Wodehouse's works until his final, completed, novel Aunts Aren't Gentlemen in 1974, making him Wodehouse's most famous...
), and an acclaimed performance as Mabel Layton in The Jewel in the Crown ( 1984 ). There were also two notable screen performances, as Catherine Alan in A Room with a View
A Room with a View
A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the repressed culture of Edwardian England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century...
( 1985 ) and as Madame de Rosemonde in Valmont
Valmont (film)
Valmont is a 1989 drama film directed by Miloš Forman, based on the French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos. It was adapted for the screen with a screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière...
(1989 ).
Personal life
She married Maxwell Turner, a barrister-at-law - and brother of John Hastings Turner the dramatist of her two plays with Marie TempestMarie Tempest
Dame Marie Tempest DBE was an English singer and actress known as the "queen of her profession".Tempest became the most famous soprano in late Victorian light opera and Edwardian musical comedies. Later, she became a leading comic actress and toured widely in North America and elsewhere...
- in December 1938. Their only child, a daughter Deirdre, was born in March 1940.
Selected filmography
- London Belongs to MeLondon Belongs to MeLondon Belongs to Me is a 1948 British film directed by Sidney Gilliat and starring Richard Attenborough and Alastair Sim. It was based on the novel of the same name by Norman Collins...
(1948) - White CorridorsWhite CorridorsWhite Corridors is a 1951 British drama film directed by Pat Jackson and based on a novel by Helen Ashton. It starred Googie Withers, Godfrey Tearle, James Donald and Petula Clark. The film is set in a hospital shortly after the establishment of the National Health Service. At the 1951 BAFTAS it...
(1951) - Young Wives' TaleYoung Wives' TaleYoung Wives' Tale is a 1951 British film directed by Henry Cass. It features one of Audrey Hepburn's earliest film roles, albeit a minor one, as Eve Lester.-Cast:* Joan Greenwood as Sabina Pennant* Nigel Patrick as Rodney Pennant...
(1951) - Fast and LooseFast and Loose (1954 film)Fast and Loose is a 1954 British comedy film directed by Gordon Parry and starring Stanley Holloway, Kay Kendall and Brian Reece. It was based on a play by Ben Travers, in the farcical style of his Aldwych farces...
(1954) - The Good CompanionsThe Good Companions (1957 film)The Good Companions is a 1957 British musical film directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring Eric Portman. It is based on the novel of the same name and is a remake of the 1933 film version.-Cast:* Eric Portman - Jess Oakroyd* Celia Johnson - Miss Trant...
(1957) - Girls at SeaGirls at Sea (1958 film)Girls At Sea is a 1958 British comedy film directed by Gilbert Gunn and starring Ronald Shiner as Marine Ogg and Warren Mitchell as Arthur. It was based on a play by Ian Hay...
(1958) - Operation BullshineOperation BullshineOperation Bullshine is a 1959 British colour comedy film directed by Gilbert Gunn and starring Donald Sinden, Barbara Murray and Carole Lesley. The working title of the film was Girls in Arms that features in the film as a marching song. Gunn had filmed Girls at Sea the previous year...
(1959) - PersuasionPersuasion (1960 series)Persuasion is a 1960 British television mini-series adaptation of the Jane Austen novel of the same name. It was produced by the BBC and was directed by Campbell Logan. Daphne Slater stars as Anne Elliot, and Paul Daneman as Captain Frederick Wentworth...
(1960) - Seven KeysSeven Keys (film)Seven Keys is a 1961 British crime thriller directed by Pat Jackson and starring Alan Dobie.-Plot:Alan Dobie plays a convict who is bequeathed a set of seven keys by a fellow prisoner. After discovering that the deceased was an embezzler who stole £20,000 that was never recovered; he sets out to...
(1961) - What a WhopperWhat a WhopperWhat a Whopper is a 1961 British comedy film, written by Terry Nation.It treats the subject of the Loch Ness Monster in a rather tongue in cheek fashion...
(1961) - A Nice Girl Like MeA Nice Girl Like MeA Nice Girl Like Me is a 1969 British comedy film directed by Desmond Davis. The plot revolves around a girl who lives with her shrewd aunts, goes on a trip, gets pregnant, and must lie to her aunts that the baby is not hers.-Cast:...
(1969) - Tam-LinTam-Lin (film)Tam-Lin, also known as The Ballad of Tam-Lin, The Devil's Widow and The Devil's Woman, is a 1970 British film made by Commonwealth United Entertainment, Winkast Film Productions Ltd. and distributed by American International Pictures . It was directed by Roddy McDowall and produced by Alan Ladd, Jr...
(1970) - A Room with a ViewA Room with a View (film)A Room with a View is a 1985 British drama film directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant. The film is a close adaptation of E. M...
(1985) - ValmontValmont (film)Valmont is a 1989 drama film directed by Miloš Forman, based on the French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos. It was adapted for the screen with a screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière...
(1989)
Selected television
- The PallisersThe PallisersThe Pallisers is a 1974 BBC television adaptation of Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels.-Cast :*Anthony Ainley: Rev. Emilius*Terence Alexander: Lord George*Anthony Andrews: Lord Silverbridge*Sarah Badel: Lizzie Eustace...
(1977) - The Jewel in the Crown (1984)
- Inspector MorseInspector Morse (TV series)Inspector Morse is a detective drama based on Colin Dexter's series of Chief Inspector Morse novels. The series starred John Thaw as Chief Inspector Morse and Kevin Whately as Sergeant Lewis. Dexter makes a cameo appearance in all but three of the episodes....
(1988)
Read more: Fabia Drake Biography (1904–1990) Film Reference