Fabia Drake

Fabia Drake (20 January 1904 — 28 February 1990) 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 life long friend of Lord Olivier.

Early Life

Born not Drake, but McGlinchy, the actress's Irish father 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 II), was, I swear, more likely to engender sustained effort than the more customary,'Don't be lazy'! " She passed an eentrance 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. She attended also Tree's Academy, founded by Sir Herbert Tree. Contemporaries at the Academy 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 the sung St. 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 troumph and disaster" she wrote, though she never played with him again.

Selected filmography

• White Corridors (1951)
• Fast and Loose (1954)
• The Good Companions (1957)
• Operation Bullshine (1959)
• Seven Keys (1961)
• What a Whopper (1961)
• Tam-Lin (1970)
• A Room with a View (1985)
• Valmont (1989)

Autobiography

• Blind Fortune published by William Kimber (1978)

External links

• Selected performances in the Theatre Archive, University of Bristol
• Fabia Drake on Internet Movie Database