Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Twentieth-Century Actress by Helen Grime (review)

Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies’s acting career spanned most of the twentieth century. Born in 1891, she began in 1911 as a singing fairy in Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and ended with a cameo appearance with Jeremy Brett in a made-for-TV Sherlock Holmes film at the age of 100 before dying in 1992. She worked at the Gaiety Theatre, played a wide range of roles at Birmingham Rep, appeared perhaps too often in Rutland Boughton’s cult musicdrama The Immortal Hour, sometimes came near to stardom in the 1930s, tried in the 1940s with her partner Marda Vanne to start a National Theatre in South Africa and had a disastrous ENSA tour in Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 1941 with John Gielgud. She played smaller parts on stage and television well into her sixties, and is remembered by most of us for her radio broadcasts (playing Gwendolen in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest at 77), and for her clear and melodious voice. There was a growing interest in her life and her fragmented career from the 1980s onwards, but she did not reach the Honours List (as DBE) until she was 101.

The book is the third in a series edited by Katherine Cockin called Dramatic Lives; the two first volumes to appear are on Ellen Terry and on Charlotte and Marie Stopes. Helen Grime’s book is a labour of love, ten years in the writing, and well supported and referenced by feminist theory. Ffrangcon-Davies is more difficult to write about than she looks in spite of a great deal of press, radio and television material, together with a considerable archive of two thousand letters, press cuttings and photographs, recently acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum. She was no Sybil Thorndike. She expressed no interest in politics and viewed the South African struggle as if it were a conflict between the English and the Afrikaners. She was also a practising Christian Scientist. She played with Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Peggy Ashcroft, and Edith Evans, and achieved considerable success, but not stardom. However, her fragmented acting life is probably more typical than that of the stars. She worked hard at her craft all her life, and she wore very well – she still looked young at 59, when I saw her play Queen Katherine in Henry VIII at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Grime’s is not a linear narrative, and does not attempt to chronicle all her subject’s hundred or so theatrical appearances in everything from Shakespeare to Williams (Emlyn and Tennessee), although the plays are meticulously listed. The story is grouped under headings such as “Actresses and Femininity”, “Sexuality and Discretion”, and “Resurrection and Legacy” and thus a comprehensive and clear picture of a good many aspects of twentieth century theatre emerges. The illustrations are well-chosen. The most charming has her appearing from an egg in George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah in 1928, but the photograph of her bedroom in 1927 is more revealing with its canopied bed, sateen bedspread and crinolined doll in the centre.

Ffrangcon-Davies never co-operated on a biography, but she presented her life at various stages in print and on the radio. Her public persona in interviews and articles was conventional, domesticated, fragile and feminine, even giggly. She was typically shown cooking and making Christmas decorations for the cottage she shared with her “girlfriend” Marda Vanne, an Afrikaner, with whom she had a long-term lesbian relationship. Her immediate family accepted this with no comment, but the outside world seems not to have suspected it. “Her story”, writes Grime, “can be read as a performance of studied normality” (3).

After writing convincingly about the shifting stages and fragmentation of her subject’s life, the author concludes, rather ruefully, that “Ffrangcon-Davies is not clearly identifiable with anything in particular” (202). In a...