Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Twentieth-Century Actress

Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies is a paradox; a famous actress whose career spanned most of the twentieth century, she is now largely forgotten. Her personal story is a journey through a social and cultural landscape in which what it meant to be a woman, an actress and a lesbian shifted enormously. Drawing on material held in Ffrangcon-Davies's personal archive, Grime demonstrates how the career of Ffrangcon-Davies, on and off the stage, can be read against the grain of its apparent conventionality. This book reveals a skilled navigator of social and professional networks who excelled in playing with notions of identity and confounded society’s expectations, finally defying all attempts at reductive categorization.