FRANCES DRAKE ,AMERICAN ACTRESS BORN OCTOBER 22,1912

FRANCES DRAKE ,AMERICAN ACTRESS 

BORN OCTOBER 22,1912

Frances Drake (October 22, 1912 – January 18, 2000)[1] was an American actress, best known for playing Eponine in Les Misérables (1935).[

Early years[edit source]
Drake was born in New York City as Frances Morgan Dean to a wealthy family. She was educated at Havergal College in Canada and at age 14 "she was sent to school in England, under her grandmother's wing."[3] She was there when the stock market crashed in 1929.

Career[edit source]
Needing to make money for the first time in her life, Drake became a dancer and stage actress and found that film paid even better.[4] In 1933, she explained: "I met an actor in London -- Gordon Wallace, who was in Eva Le Gallienne's repertory company for a while -- and he asked me to form a dance team with him. We danced, and a stage producer asked us to take parts in a play. Then I was invited to make films in England."[5]

She returned to the United States in 1934,[6] Offered a contract by Paramount, which changed her name to Frances Drake (after the studio initially wanted her new name to be Marianne Morel)[3] to avoid confusion with the then-popular star Frances Dee. She returned to America in 1934, where she was coached by opera singer and actress Marguerite Namara while continuing in film. She was often typecast in "damsel in distress" roles and appeared in proto-horror and proto-sci-fi films opposite stars like Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre.[2] One film reference book summed up Drake's career as follows: "She played leads in many Hollywood productions of the '30s, often as the terrified heroine of horror and mystery tales."[6]

Personal life[edit source]

On February 12, 1939, Drake married Hon. Cecil Howard (1908–1985), second son of Henry Howard, 19th Earl of Suffolk, who disapproved of her career. She retired from the screen when he received his inheritance.[6] After Howard's death in 1985, she married David Brown in 1992;[7] he died in 2009.











Recognition[edit source]

She has a star in the Motion Picture section of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, located at 6821 Hollywood Boulevard.

Death[edit source]
Drake died in Irvine, California on January 18, 2000, aged 87.[8] She is interred in Section 8 Garden of Legends in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California.

Partial Filmography[edit source]
The Jewel (1933)
Meet My Sister (1933)
Bolero (1934)
The Trumpet Blows (1934)
Ladies Should Listen (1934)
Forsaking All Others (1934)
Mad Love (1935)
Les Miserables (1935)
Without Regret (1935)
Transient Lady (1935)
The Invisible Ray (1936)
And Sudden Death (1936)
I'd Give My Life (1936)
Florida Special (1936)
The Preview Murder Mystery (1936)
Midnight Taxi (1937)
She Married an Artist (1937)
Love Under Fire (1937)
The Lone Wolf in Paris (1938)
There's Always a Woman (1938)
It's a Wonderful World (1939)
I Take This Woman (1940)

The Affairs of Martha (1942)

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HOLLYWOOD ACTRESS BETSY DRAKE BORN 1923 SEPTEMBER 11

HOLLYWOOD ACTRESS BETSY DRAKE 

BORN 1923 SEPTEMBER 11

Betsy Drake (September 11, 1923 – October 27, 2015) was a French-born American actress and writer. She was also known for being the third wife of actor Cary Grant.


Early life and education[edit]

Drake, the eldest child of two American expatriates, was born in Paris, France. Although her grandfather, Tracy Drake and his brother, had opened the Drake Hotel in Chicago on New Years Eve in 1920.[1] The Drakes lost their money in the 1929 stock-market crash. As a result, she returned to the U.S. on the SS Île de France with her parents, brothers, and a nanny. She grew up in Chicago, Westport, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Virginia, North Carolina, and New York City. She went to twelve different schools, both private and public, before concentrating on theatre and acting at a junior college in Rock Creek Park.

Career[edit]

She began looking for work as an actress in New York City, supporting herself by working as a Conover model. She met the playwright Horton Foote, who offered her a job as an understudy in his play Only the Heart, which enabled her to join the Actors' Equity Association and thus become a professional actress.[citation needed]

After coming to the attention of the producer Hal Wallis, Drake was pressured by her agent to sign a Hollywood contract. She hated Hollywood and managed to get herself released from the contract by declaring herself insane. She returned to New York City and, in 1947, read for the director Elia Kazan for the lead role in the London company of the play Deep Are the Roots. Later that year, Drake was selected by Kazan as one of the founding members of the Actors Studio.[2]

Cary Grant first spotted her in 1947 while she was performing in London.

 The two, who both happened to be returning to the U.S. on the RMS Queen Mary, struck up an instant rapport. At the insistence of Grant, Drake was subsequently signed to a film contract by RKO Pictures and David Selznick, where she appeared, opposite Grant, in her first film, the romantic comedy Every Girl Should Be Married (1948). New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther called her performance “foxily amusing.”[3]





On Christmas Day 1949, 

Drake and Grant married in a private ceremony organized by Grant's best man, 

Howard Hughes, and deliberately chose a low-key, introspective private life. They delved into transcendentalism, mysticism and yoga. She took up causes including the plight of homeless children in Los Angeles.[4] In 1954, they bought the "Las Palomas" estate in the Movie Colony neighborhood of Palm Springs, California.[5]









The couple co-starred in the radio series Mr. and Mrs. Blanding (1951). They appeared together in the comedy-drama film Room for One More (1952), and Drake appeared in a number of leading roles in England and the U.S., and a supporting role in the satiric comedy film Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957). 

Drake subsequently gave up acting to focus on her other interests, such as writing. Under the name 'Betsy Drake Grant', her novel Children, You Are Very Little (1971) was published by Atheneum Books. She worked as a volunteer and studied at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, and earned a Master of Education degree from Harvard University.[6]

Drake's most recent screen appearance was in the documentary film Cary Grant: A Class Apart (2005), in which she reflected on Grant and their time together and denied rumors alleging he was bisexual.

Personal life[edit]

In July 1956, Drake survived the sinking of the Italian ocean liner SS Andrea Doria. At the time, she had been visiting Grant in Spain and was returning to the United States. She boarded the Doria, along with dozens of other wealthy travelers and tourists, at Gibraltar, which was one of many stops the ship made between her home port of Genoa and her final destination of New York. Drake sailed as a first-class passenger, occupying a single cabin on the ship's boat deck. When the Doria collided with the Stockholm, Drake waited with the other passengers for rescue, as the ship's severe list rendered half the Doria's lifeboats useless. She was among more than 700 people rescued from the Doria by the famed French passenger liner Ile de France.[7]

Drake wrote the original script for the film Houseboat (1958), starring her husband Cary Grant, who originally intended that she would star with him. However, after Grant began an affair with Sophia Loren while filming The Pride and the Passion (1957),[8] Grant arranged for Loren to take Drake's place in Houseboat, with a rewritten script for which Drake did not receive credit. The affair ended in bitterness before The Pride and the Passion's filming ended, causing problems on the Houseboat set.[9]

Grant and Drake separated in 1958, remaining friends, and divorced in 1962. Their marriage constituted his longest union. Grant credited her with broadening his interests beyond his career and with introducing him to the then-legal LSD therapy, which he claimed helped him finally to achieve a degree of mental peace, and to hypnosis, which he used to successfully quit smoking. Later, Drake took LSD as a way of recovering from the trauma of divorce. Drake had no children with Grant.

Drake spent the latter part of her life in London, where she died aged 92 on October 27, 2015.[10]