Fay Compton

Fay Compton, born Virginia Lilian Emmeline Compton-Mackenzie on 18 September 1894 in Fulham, London, was an English actress whose career spanned stage, film, and television from 1911 until the late 1960s. She was the sixth and youngest child of actor and manager Edward Compton, whose real surname was Mackenzie, and his wife Virginia Frances Bateman, herself an actress and daughter of Baltimore actor Hezekiah Linthicum Bateman. One of her brothers achieved prominence as the author Compton Mackenzie. Compton died on 12 December 1978 in Hove at the age of 84.

Compton made her first professional appearance in 1911 with the concert party The Follies, led by H. G. Pelissier, whom she married while still a teenager. Pelissier died in September 1913 at the age of 39, leaving Compton a young widow with an infant son who would later become the producer and director Anthony Pelissier. In 1914, at Maidenhead, she married the singer Lauri de Frece. That same year she made her first appearance on the American stage at the Shubert Theatre in New York in the musical To-Night's the Night, a production that is among her verified Broadway credits, and she subsequently toured in the same role. Also among her Broadway credits are the play God and Kate Murphy and the play Olympia, with her Broadway appearances spanning the years 1914 to 1959.

During the First World War, Compton took on a range of roles in London, including the title role in Peter Pan in 1917. In 1921, J. M. Barrie wrote the play Mary Rose specifically for her, and Compton starred in the title role. That same year her second husband, Lauri de Frece, died at the age of 41. In February 1922 she married the actor Leon Quartermaine, with whom she had previously appeared in a revival of Barrie's Quality Street. Also in the 1920s, Compton played Ophelia opposite John Barrymore's Hamlet, marking the first of several Shakespeare roles she would take on throughout her career. In 1927 she opened the Fay Compton Studio of Dramatic Art in London, an acting school that remained in operation until the start of World War II and counted Alec Guinness and John Le Mesurier among its notable alumni.

Throughout the 1930s Compton moved between West End productions, pantomime, and Shakespeare, taking on roles including Titania, Lady Rosaline, Calpurnia, and Paulina in The Winter's Tale. In 1931 she appeared successively as the title character in the pantomime Dick Whittington and as Ophelia to Henry Ainley's Hamlet. She also toured Australia and New Zealand during this period in productions of Victoria Regina, Tonight at 8.30, and George and Margaret. In 1939 she played Ophelia to John Gielgud's Hamlet, first at the Lyceum and subsequently at Elsinore Castle. Her third marriage, to Leon Quartermaine, was dissolved in 1942, and that year she married the actor Ralph Michael; that marriage was dissolved in 1946.

During the 1940s Compton appeared at the Old Vic as Regan in King Lear and played Ruth in Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit for fifteen months. Additional roles in the decade included Regina in The Little Foxes and Gina Ekdal in The Wild Duck, her first appearance in an Ibsen play. She also toured Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Switzerland for the British Council in productions of Othello, Candida, and Hamlet. In the 1950s she rejoined the Old Vic company, appearing at the 1953 Edinburgh Festival as Gertrude in Hamlet and continuing with the company in London during the 1953–1954 season in roles including the Countess of Rossillion in All's Well That Ends Well, Constance of Bretagne in King John, Volumnia in Coriolanus, and Juno in The Tempest. In 1957 she played Queen Margaret in Richard III opposite Robert Helpmann's Richard, and in 1959 she appeared as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest.

At the first Chichester Festival, running from July to September 1962, Compton played Grausis in The Broken Heart and Marya in Uncle Vanya. Her stage work in the 1960s also included Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals and the Comtesse in Barrie's What Every Woman Knows. Beyond the stage, Compton appeared in more than forty films between 1914 and 1970, among them Odd Man Out (1947), Laughter in Paradise (1951), Orson Welles' Othello (1952), The Haunting (1963), and I Start Counting (1969). Her television work included the role of Aunt Ann in the BBC's 1967 adaptation of The Forsyte Saga and Mrs Brown in a BBC adaptation of Dickens' Dombey and Son in 1969. Compton was awarded the CBE in 1975.