1. Fabia Drake passed an entrance test to the Academy of Dramatic Art in December 1913.
16 Facts About Fabia Drake
1. 2.
Fabia Drake 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 societaire of the Comedie-Francaise who was to become one of the great teachers of the Paris Conservatoire.
3.
Fabia Drake 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.
4.
Shortly after this Fabia Drake worked with Marie Tempest in a play by John Hastings Turner titled The Scarlet Lady.
5.
Fabia Drake has judgment and poise and a mind that lifts a trivial part out of its triviality.
6.
RADA ex-students formed The RADA Players, and Fabia Drake became the second of its secretaries.
7.
Fabia Drake 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.
8.
Fabia Drake 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.
9.
Fabia Drake, 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.
10.
Fabia Drake's students included Roger Moore, John Neville, Robert Shaw, and Richard Johnson.
11.
Fabia Drake undertook a production of Henry V, although it was not with RADA students, but with American Army personnel.
12.
Fabia Drake's teaching work finished at RADA when she began to have pain in her jaw, and she had to leave in the middle of a term.
13.
Fabia Drake 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.
14.
Fabia Drake's husband having died from liver cancer at the age of 53, she was invited by Binkie Beaumont to return to the theatre.
15.
Fabia Drake accepted the offer of a part in a thriller called Write Me a Murder by Frederick Knott.
16.
Fabia 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.