page_title: Fabia Drake
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Fabia Drake / Early life / Career
caption_attribution_description: SS Megantic
context_page_description: Fabia Drake OBE 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, and her last role was as Madame de Rosemonde in Miloš Forman's Valmont.
  Drake was a lifelong friend of Noël Coward and Laurence Olivier.
context_section_description: 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, her most famous pupil - 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, playrf 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 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.
  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 25, just a touch on the young side when the Hamlet is nearing 40'), Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Viola in Twelfth Night. 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 m
caption: Drake was offered a contract for a six-month tour of the U.S. and Canada – a very demanding one, nine plays, eight of them to be presented one after the other in the first week. She had to learn her parts in three weeks. " Mistress Page proved a great stumbling block. She speaks only prose...only two days were left for Mrs Page: 'Oh I can finish her off (she nearly finished me off) on board the boat ", (the SS Megantic, above) – Drake wrote that the 'cramming' required to play all the parts harmed her ability to play some of these later in her career.
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