Fabia Drake
| Fabia Drake | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Ethel McGlinchy 20 January 1904 Herne Bay, Kent, England |
| Died | 28 February 1990 (aged 86) London, England |
| Occupation | actress |
Fabia Drake OBE (20 January 1904 – 28 February 1990) was a British 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.
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. 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). Founded by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, her contemporaries at the Academy of Dramatic Art included the actress Meggie Albanesi, 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 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 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 Noël 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.
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