Gwen Ffrangcon Davies

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Dame Gwen Lucy Ffrangcon Davies DBE (born January 25, 1891 in London , † January 27, 1992 in Stambourne , Essex ) was a British theater and film actress.

Life

Origin and youth

Gwen Ffrangcon Davies was the daughter of Welsh opera singer David Ffrangcon Davies (1855-1918) and his wife Annie Francis Rayner. Her father named himself after the Welsh valley Nant Ffrancon near his birthplace Bethesda and used an older spelling. The name is often misspelled as Ffrancon Davies or Francon Davies , often with a hyphen. She had (? 1893-) celebrated two younger siblings, Marjorie successes as a singer, and Geoffrey (1895-1915), who in the First World War fell. As a child she lived for some time in Berlin , where her father sang. Her parents were friends with Ellen Terry , who Ffrangcon Davies encouraged to become an actress when she was 14. In 1908 she finished school and went back to Germany for a year to work as an assistant teacher in Watzum near Braunschweig.

Career

Ffrangcon Davies began her career in 1911 as an extra in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night 's Dream . However, she celebrated her first successes as a singer. 1919-20 she sang Etain in the opera The Immortal Hour of Rutland Boughton at the festival in Glastonbury . In the 1920s she worked her way up to one of the leading actresses at the Birmingham Repertory Theater . One of her most important roles was that of Eve in the British premiere of George Bernhard Shaw's Back to Methuselah in Birmingham in 1923 . In 1924 she played Juliet alongside John Gielgud as Romeo in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet , although she was 13 years older than Gielgud, who was then 20. Silent film recordings have been preserved from this performance. She rose to become one of the leading Shakespeare actresses of her generation and interpreted almost all of his female leading roles in her career, including Cleopatra and Lady MacBeth , but her name was mainly associated with the role of Julia.

Her acquaintance with Gielgud led to her role in Richard of Bordeaux , a play by Gordon Daviot . Gielgud directed the production himself in 1932 and thus celebrated one of his first and greatest successes. The piece ran for over a year in London's West End and then toured the UK. In the same year she met the painter Walter Sickert , who was a great admirer of the theater and had written her a fan letter. He discovered a photograph by Bertram Park in one of her albums , which she showed as Isabelle de France in Christopher Marlowe's Edward II in 1923 . After this photograph he created the painting Miss Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Isabella of France , which is now part of the Tate Gallery . In 1933 she was portrayed by the Hungarian-British artist Philip Alexius de László .

In addition to her theater career, she also appeared in films for the first time in the late 1930s. In 1936 she made her screen debut as Mary Tudor in the film Tudor Rose . In the film Richard of Bordeaux in 1938 she played Anne von Böhmen again , whom she had already embodied on the theater stage.

Together with her colleague Marda Vanne , with whom she had a close and lifelong friendship since they first met in London in 1926, she went on a theater tour in South Africa in 1940 . Funded by Vanne, who came from South Africa, the tour was a considerable success and revitalized the theater in South Africa. There she made the acquaintance of the later Johannesburg theater director Cecil Williams , who developed into a friendship. The correspondence with Ffrangcon Davies shaped William's understanding of the theater in the following years. Together with André Huguenet , she campaigned for a South African national theater . Ffrangcon Davies returned to London the same year to play with Gielgud in MacBeth but continued her work in South Africa in 1943. In 1950 she directed a production of MacBeth in Afrikaans .

Back in England, she continued to appear primarily in the theater, her best-known roles being Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill in 1958 and Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams in 1965 . As a film and television actress, she was not as successful, she played a few minor roles, especially in horror films and British television series.

She ended her theater career in 1970 with a role in Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya . But she continued to appear in television games on the BBC and at galas into old age . At the age of 100, she was named Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for her services to the theater . She was last seen in a film adaptation of Sherlock Holmes on television that same year.

Private

Ffrangcon Davies lived at Tagley Cottage in Stambourne, Essex for a good 60 years . She and Marda Vanne bought the cottage in 1934. She never married, but maintained many private and professional friendships with fellow actors and theater colleagues, the closest with her friend Marda Vanne. She maintained personal contacts with Dodie Smith and John Gielgud, who had residences near them in Finchingfield , a popular refuge for artists at the time. Her estate included letters from Cecil Williams, Peggy Ashcroft , Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh . Like her colleague and friend Edith Evans , she was a supporter of the Christian Science movement . She died in her cottage two days after her 101st birthday.

Filmography

literature

  • Martial Rose: Forever Juliet. The Life and Letters of Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, 1891-1992. Larks Press, Dereham 2003, ISBN 1-904006-12-4 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Ffrangcon Davies, Gwen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ffrangcon Davies, Gwen Lucy (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British theater and film actress
DATE OF BIRTH January 25, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH January 27, 1992
Place of death Stambourne , Essex