Gwen Ffrangçon-Davies

Gwen Ffrangçon-Davies (1891-1992) was a distinguished actress, singer, and theatrical entrepreneur.

(Her name sometimes written without the French cédille as Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies or Gwen FfrangCon-Davies - and also occurs as Gwen ffrangçon-Davies, particularly so in South Africa.)

Biography

Born in London on 25 January 1891, the only daughter of David Ffrangcon-Davies, a Welsh operatic baritone. She was trained by Mrs L.M. Hicks and Agnes Platt and began as an operatic singer, then joined the Old Vic, for which her first stage appearance was in A Midsummer Night's Dream. She went on to Birmingham Rep as a dramatic actress, also working in the West End and at the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon. In 1924, she played Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and Queen Anne in Richard of Bordeaux in 1934, both with John Gielgud, Henry V (with Ivor Novello, 1934), Gas Light (1934) and Macbeth (1942).

She moved to South Africa in 1940 with Marda Vanne and became a director of the resuscitated Pretoria Repertory Theatre and in 1942 they formed the Gwen ffrangçon-Davies / Marda Vanne Company and toured the country to present fine classical and modern productions. (See Gwen ffrangçon-Davies / Marda Vanne Company, also referred to as the Marda Vanne-Gwen Ffrangçon-Davies Company in some sources).

She returned to Britain in 1946 to continue with a long and distinguished career on the British stage.

She retired from the stage in 1970, but continued to appear on radio and television. She was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1991, aged 100, six months before her death at age 101, and made her final acting appearance in a teleplay of the Sherlock Holmes story The Master Blackmailer opposite Jeremy Brett that same year. Her other films included The Witches (1966) and The Devil Rides Out (1968).

She died in January 1992 in London at the age of 101.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

She played leads in and/or directed works such as Twelfth Night 1940/41, Watch on the Rhine (1943 at the Standard Theatre), Flare Path (194*), What Every Woman Knows (194*), Blithe Spirit (1944), Milestones (194*), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1945), The Wind of Heaven (1946), A Month in the Country (1946) and The Taming of the Shrew (1948), her last production before she went back to England.

In 1943, she pleaded unsuccessfully for the establishment of a national “Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts”.

After her return to Britain she occasionally returned to work in South Africa, for instance in 1950 directing Macbeth in Afrikaans for the National Theatre at His Majesty's Theatre and starred André Huguenet and Anna Neethling-Pohl, in 1951 she directed Much Ado about Nothing starring Margaret Inglis and Jack Ralphs for the inauguration of the new Reps Theatre (designed by Manfred Hermer). She also appeared in Waters of the Moon by N.C. Hunter and produced and acted The Innocents in 1953. In 1971 she appeared in Dear Antoine for CAPAB.

Sources

Phyllis Hartnoll. The Oxford Companion to the Theatre

Percy Tucker. 1997. Just the Ticket. My 50 Years in Show Business. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

P.J. du Toit. 1988. Amateurtoneel in Suid-Afrika. Pretoria: Academica

"Gwen Ffrangçon-Davies" in Wikipedia[1]

"Schach on plays and plans". 1970. The Pretoria News 16 July.

Scenaria (120), January 1991.

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