Fabia Drake

Early life

Born Ethel McGlinchy, the actress's Irish father, a caterer, was an actor manqué. She passed an entrance test to the Academy of Dramatic Art (later to become RADA) in December 1913. (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) (Pope Fabian). Her contemporaries at the Academy of Dramatic Art, which was founded by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, included the actress Meggie Albanesi, Eva Le Gallienne, and Miles Malleson – a senior student who wrote plays for her. Despite being about five feet seven inches tall she 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 to whose teaching she responded – "he gave you confidence, he inspired you with his enthusiasm", and Helen Haye, to whom she did not respond 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 titled 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 Noël Coward. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. In the same year, 1916, she met 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. 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 other’s work, stay in each other’s 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 16, 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 Reims, in ruins after World War I, to Versailles, Chartres, the Forest of Fontainebleau, and she was taught by Georges Le Roy sociétaire of the Comédie-Française 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 Albanesi in her dressing room during her 'waits' in Albanesi's current success A Bill of Divorcement at St Martin's Theatre. Drake wrote "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, whose most famous pupil was Charles Laughton. She then signed 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, played both of the two women's parts in the play, Yasmin and Pervaneh, when Isabel Jeans (Yasmin) and Laura Cowrie (Pervaneh) 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 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 titled 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) wrote "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) wrote "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."

RADA ex-students formed The RADA Players, and Drake became the second of its secretaries. In a play of Allan Monkhouse's titled Sons and Fathers, Drake played opposite 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.

Personal life and death

Drake married Maxwell Turner, a barrister-at-law and brother of John Hastings Turner, the dramatist of her two plays with Marie Tempest, in December 1938. The marriage produced one child, a daughter.

Drake died on 28 February 1990.

Filmography

Autobiography

Blind Fortune published by William Kimber (1978)