Olga Edwardes
Olga Florence Edwardes Davenport was a South African-born British actress and artist, born in c.1915.
Personal life
Her father was Joseph Michael Solomon, an architect partner of Herbert Baker, but he committed suicide in 1920 at the age of 33, in Cape Town.Her mother was Jean Elizabeth Emily Cox née Hamilton, who was a divorcée when she married Solomon. She was a South African actress. They had a younger son, Paul Lionel Joseph.
Her mother married another husband in 1922, Hugh Edwards, a company secretary in South Africa, thus was the stepfather of Olga and Paul.
Olga Edwardes married Anthony Max Baerlein in 1941, but he was killed in action later the same year.
In 1946 she married her second husband Nicholas Davenport, an economist and journalist who was more than twenty years her senior. He died in 1979; she died in Elstree, Herts in 2008.
Years 1930–1956
Olga Edwards, or maybe Olga Solomon, first exhibited her paintings in Cape Town at aged about 15. A year later, she came to England with her mother and her brother. She wanted to study painting, acting and ballet. First she danced in corps de ballet in a company of Anton Dolin.Edwardes appeared in several films and plays from the mid-1930s into the mid-1950s.
Filmography
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
| 1936 | The Amateur Gentleman | Maid at inn | Uncredited |
| 1936 | The Man Who Could Work Miracles | minor role | Uncredited |
| 1937 | The Dominant Sex | Lucy Webster | |
| 1937 | Over She Goes | Reprimanded maid | Uncredited |
| 1940 | Contraband | Mrs Abo | |
| 1945 | Caesar and Cleopatra | Cleopatra's lady attendant | |
| 1950 | The Angel with the Trumpet | Monica Alt | |
| 1951 | The Six Men | Christina | |
| 1951 | Scrooge | Fred's wife | she played the unnamed wife of Scrooge's nephew Fred |
| 1953 | Black Orchid | Christine Shaw | she was a principal character |
Theatre work
;Repertory:- This is where Edwardes learned stagecraft. In Oxford rep there is a new play every week, including one that she took a bow in Romeo and Juliet with John Byron.
- in Royal Shakespeare Company, during the first half of 1936, at the new Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon.
- During the war, she spent a year with the BBC Repertory Company.
- As You Like It – Open Air 1934 – the stage débuts of Olga Edwardes and Frank Tickle
- Party 1860 – Open Air 1934
- Androcles and the Lion – Open Air 1934 – George Bernard Shaw watched it on its first night
- Romeo and Juliet – Open Air 1934
- Young Madame Conti – Savoy 1936
- Tsar Lenin – Westminster Theatre, 1936 – 1937
- Peril at End House, "Nick" Buckley, opened at Brighton, then Richmond and then moved to Vaudeville but only 38 performances in May 1940
- Twelfth Night – just two matinees for Twelfth Night holiday, on 30 Dec 1940 and 31 Dec 1940
- Landslide, Marian, Westminster – opened in 5 Oct 1943 until 6 Nov 1943
TV work
Edwardes was an early player in the fledgling BBC television, which started in November 1936 until it was closed at the beginning of the War, and restarted in 1946.
::(She was also listed as an announcer on 30 March 1939, until her last appearance on 20 August 1939.
;restarting in 1946:
Years 1956–2008
In fact since her marriage in 1946, she led a new career, as in the house of Hinton Waldrist manor. Her husband had bought it in 1922, and now together they entertained, they held court, to the most influential radical artists, economists, philosophers, and politicians of the day at grand gatherings. Both she and her husband were long-time leading Fabians – she had known Harold Laski quite a while. Nicholas Davenport worked with Alexander Korda then joined Harold Wilson with the National Film Finance Corporation. Even though a Fabian, he still kept friend with R. J. G. Boothby and close to Winston Churchill.Thus Olga Davenport carried on the line which had been part of history for more than 350 years. She was, as a young woman, an astounding beauty. She was also an impressive creative force. It is a heady combination. Men chucked caution to the wind. There is a bust of Olga by the sculptor F. E. McWilliam; two portrait drawings of her in her collection by Theyre Lee-Elliott, and another gouache drawing of her dancing also by him, with a verse by the artist on the reverse dedicated to her. His was not the only verse inspired by Olga's muse: another was from A. P. Herbert on the train to and back from Frinton-on-Sea.
Then back at once to where he was before?
Does not the ocean under Olga's sway,
Commit the same sweet folly twice a day?
Thus the mad fish pursue the moon in vain,
But will, as happily, pursue again.
Thus climbers, having made the steep ascent,
Salute the stars, and then return – content
She had been trained in painting, and returned to that art form following her acting career. In fact when she entered into the theatre, between performances she studied at the Westminster School of Art with Mark Gertler and through him and his wife, met Matthew Smith and Ivon Hitchens. In 1956, following a career as an actor with mostly minor roles in films, she returned to studying fine art painting at the Chelsea Polytechnic at the Royal College of Art and at Peter Lanyon's school in St Ives, Cornwall. Davenport was not merely an accomplished artist, or a collector; but her deep friendships with British artists from the 1950s onwards place Davenport as a key and perhaps surprisingly influential figure in the British art scene of the time. In St Ives, Davenport was to meet and befriend some of the greatest British artists of the 20th century and during her life she acquired important paintings for her own collection, including works by Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Terry Frost, and William Scott. She spent hours at Eagle's Nest, and Elm Tree Cottage. She sat on the board of the Bear Lane Gallery and formed relationships with influential people such as Clement Greenberg and Pauline Vogelpoel. She had a studio in the south of France.
She exhibited with the London Group and with the Women's International Art Club. Since then she has shown in a number of group exhibitions including an Arts Council tour, at the Leicester Galleries, at the Whitechapel, the Artists' International Association|, the Drian Gallery, Galerie Creuse, Paris, Athens School of Fine Arts, 'Women in the Arts Today' at the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, the Bear Lane Gallery in Oxford, Grabowski Gallery, and at the Demarco Gallery.
She had two one-person shows at the Piccadilly Gallery in London's Cork Street in 1969, and in 1976; and in 1978 she had a solo show of oils at the Oxford Gallery.
Her later work is mainly concerned with the depiction of landscapes and is recognised for the use of gentle, yet dynamic colours which reduce forms to abstracted shapes. She uses broad, fluid brushstrokes of colour to capture the outlines of natural environments. The painted landscapes embody a delicate compromise between the wholly self-involved abstraction of modernist formalism and a fascinations with the experience and representation of the natural world. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Nuffield Foundation, St Anne's College Oxford, Warwick University, the Department of the Environment, and in private collections in England, Switzerland, South Africa, Belgium and the United States of America.
At her death, her own art collection was sold at auctioned, at a value around £550,000.