Gabrielle Drake (born 30 March 1944) is a British actress. She appeared in the 1970s in television series The Brothers and UFO. In the early 1970s she appeared in several erotic roles on screen. She later took parts in soap operas Crossroads and Coronation Street. She has also had a stage career.
Her brother was the musician Nick Drake, whose work she has consistently helped to promote since his death in 1974.
Early life and education
Drake was born in Lahore, British India, the daughter of Rodney Shuttleworth Drake (1908 - 1988) and amateur songwriter Molly Drake. She is the sister of songwriter and composer Nick Drake. Her father was an engineer working for the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation. The family moved from Burma to Britain when she was eight.[2]
She later commented that,
Until then, life was fairly easy out east. There were lots of servants ... not that I remember having a spoilt childhood. Then suddenly we were back in England and in the grips of rationing. And yet, we were lucky in a way. We came back with my nanny who knew far more about England than mummy did. I remember the two of them standing over the Aga with a recipe book trying to work out how to roast beef, that sort of thing![3]
Drake first gained wide attention for her portrayal of Lieutenant Gay Ellis in the 1970 science fiction television series UFO, in which her costume consisted of a silver suit and a purple wig.[4] In the series, the character is the commander of the SHADO Moonbase, which is Earth's first line of defence against invading flying saucers. Drake appeared in roughly half the 26 episodes produced, leaving the series during a break in the production to pursue other acting opportunities.
In 1971, Drake appeared in a short film entitled Crash!, based on a chapter in J. G. Ballard's book The Atrocity Exhibition. The film, directed by Harley Cokeliss, featured Ballard talking about the ideas in his book. Drake appeared as a passenger and car-crash victim. Ballard later developed the idea into his 1973 novel Crash. In his draft of the novel he mentioned Drake by name, but references to her were removed from the published version.[5] In the 2009 BBC documentary Synth Britannia clips of Ballard and Drake from Crash! were inserted into the 1979 video for Gary Numan's song "Cars". A reviewer in The Scotsman commented that the presence of Drake "brought serious glamour to urban alienation".[6]
Her early television appearances include The Avengers (1967), Coronation Street (as Inga Olsen in 1967) and The Saint (1968). On 26 December 1968 she played opposite American actor Robert Lansing in a BBC television series called Journey to the Unknown in an episode called "The Beckoning Fair One", and an episode called "Sorry Is Just a Word" of Special Branch. In 1970, she auditioned for the part of Jo Grant in Doctor Who, reaching the final shortlist of three alongside Katy Manning and Cheryl Hall, with Manning winning the part.
In the early 1970s, Drake was associated with the boom in British sexploitation movies, repeatedly appearing nude or topless. She played a nude artist's model in the 1970 film Connecting Rooms, and was one of Peter Sellers' conquests in the film There's a Girl in My Soup. She also played one of the lead roles in the sex comedy Au Pair Girls (1972) and appeared in two Derek Ford films, Suburban Wives (1971) and its sequel Commuter Husbands (1972), in which she played the narrator who links the disparate episodes together.
She gained wide exposure in The Brothers, the hit BBC family drama series, in which she appeared as a regular for the first four seasons playing Jill, the girlfriend (and later wife) of David Hammond. She also appeared in an episode of Brian Clemens' 1970s series Thriller, in The Kelly Monteith Show (as Monteith's wife 1979–80), a television version of The Importance of Being Earnest (1985, for LWT/PBS), Crossroads (1985–87, as motel boss Nicola Freeman) and returned to Coronation Street in 2009 as Vanessa. In The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (2003–05) she played the protagonist's mother.
Elsewhere, she has appeared in her one-woman show, Dear Scheherazade, as the 19th century writer Elizabeth Gaskell (2005, 2007, 2010).[25][26] At the Chipping Campden Literature Festival in 2011, she and Martin Jarvis read extracts from the letters and diaries of Robert and Clara Schumann in the recital, Beloved Clara.[27] She had appeared in the same piece the previous year, again with Jarvis and the pianist Lucy Parham, at the Wigmore Hall in London.[28]
Personal life
Drake's home Wenlock Abbey (left), attached to the ruins of the medieval priory
Drake has helped to ensure the public renown of her brother Nick Drake and her mother Molly Drake. She can be heard accompanying Nick on a number of songs that he recorded privately, and which have since been released on the album Family Tree. After the release of songs written and performed by her mother, she said "Her creativity was a personal thing, and she was lucky to be able to develop it in an environment where that side of her was totally accepted. Indeed, my father encouraged it. He was so proud of her. On one occasion, he even made the 20-mile drive to Birmingham to get four songs pressed onto a disc."[3] In 2014, she co-wrote and edited, with Cally Callomon, Nick Drake: Remembered for a While, a memoir of her brother.[29] In April 2018, she collected the Hall of Fame Folk Award 2018 on her brother's behalf in Belfast.
She lives in Wenlock Abbey in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, in a house she bought in 1983 with her husband, South African-born artist Louis de Wet, who died in 2018.[30] They renovated their home over several years as an artistic project and, in 2004, he described it as "the most beautiful building site in the world".[2] Drake was the co-producer, with Cally Callomon, of In the Gaze of the Medusa, a 2013 film by Gavin Bush about the renovation project and her husband's designs for the house.[31]
^Murray, Braham (7 September 2007). The Worst It Can Be Is a Disaster: The Life Story of Braham Murray and The Royal Exchange Theatre. Methuen. p. 173. ISBN978-0713684902.
