Frances Drake, Hollywood Horror Star and Horsewoman: Halloween Edition

 by

 Tobi Lopez Taylor

This essay is part of the ongoing Halloween Horror Horsewomen series, which also includes profiles of Virginia Bruce and Martha O’Driscoll.  

Just in time for Halloween🎃, here’s the story of another equestrian actress from the Golden Age of Universal horror films: Frances Drake (b. 1912, d. 2000). It also features a cameo by Drake’s wealthy mother-in-law, the Countess of Suffolk (born Margaret Leiter), who built a vast estate in Tucson, Arizona, called Forest Lodge. 

Born in New York City to a well-to-do family, Drake (born Frances Morgan Dean) was educated in Canada and England. When the stock market crashed in 1929, her family’s assets were wiped out, so Frances became part of a dance team to earn money. She was soon performing in plays, and even a couple of films, in England. The British director Paul Stein liked what he saw, and made a screen test of Frances, which was sent to Paramount Pictures in California. 

In 1933, Frances signed a three-year contract with Paramount, moved to Los Angeles, and changed her surname to Drake on the advice of the studio. In December of that year, Drake—who loved riding—was given a traffic citation at the corner of Hollywood and Vine for using her horse to “commute” on city streets to Paramount from her home at the Garden of Allah Hotel.  

Drake had a small part in her first American film, the hit musical drama Bolero (1934), starring George Raft and Carole Lombard. That was followed by the less-successful The Trumpet Blows (1934), which re-teamed her with Raft. Also in 1934, Paramount paired her with Cary Grant in a charming light comedy, Ladies Should Listen (a precursor, plot-wise, of the 1960 MGM musical Bells Are Ringing—which, incidentally, features a clever song, “It’s a Simple Little System,” about an ingenious, illegal racetrack betting scam). A reviewer in Variety observed that Frances “turns in her best performance yet and does much to establish herself.” Unfortunately, Ladies Should Listen didn’t particularly help the careers of Grant or Drake.

During her time at Paramount, Drake appeared in about four films a year, in a variety of genres, as the studio tried to find her niche. These included the Oscar-nominated period drama Les Misérables (1935) as well as comedies, musicals, and murder mysteries. Paramount also lent her out to other studios. She particularly enjoyed her role in in MGM’s love-triangle picture, Forsaking All Others (1934), in which she played “the other woman” who stole Joan Crawford’s fiancé. As Drake remarked, “ “I adore playing bitches– it’s so rewarding!”  

In late 1935, because of her love of horses, Drake was invited to join the Santa Anita Turf Club. Other high-profile members who joined that year were Marlene Dietrich, Gene Raymond, and Maria “Ria” Gable (spouse of Clark Gable). The filly Drake is posing with in the above photo, Little Miracle (Bud Lerner-Nida, by *Whisk Broom II), grew up to be a multiple stakes winner for owner Elizabeth Arden.

As the years went by, Drake found herself relegated to smaller and smaller parts in B movies, so she asked the production chief at Paramount, Bill LeBaron (who was also a Thoroughbred breeder), to release her from her contract. He obliged her, and she signed with Twentieth Century Fox, hoping for better parts. The studio cast her in a musical, You Can’t Have Everything (1937), and a crime drama, Midnight Taxi (1937), neither of which did much business. Drake then signed with Columbia Pictures, where she appeared in three films and spent an inordinate amount of time spurning the advances of mogul Harry Cohn. Her final three films—which premiered in 1939, 1940, and 1942—were for MGM. In total, she appeared in 24 films in the U.S. and the U.K. over a nine-year period. In 1960, she received a star on Hollywood Boulevard, which is in front of what is now the Dolby Theatre. 

Today, Drake is best known for her work in two horror films: Mad Love (1935) and The Invisible Ray (1936). When horror movies were syndicated for broadcast on television in the late 1950s, they reached a new, young generation of viewers, some of whom went on to establish fan magazines, like Famous Monsters of Filmland and Castle of Frankenstein, and write in-depth books about the subject. Gregory Mank’s 1999 book, Women in Horror Films: 1930s, features a well-researched chapter on Drake’s career.

In Mad Love, Drake was cast as “the wife of tormented pianist Colin Clive and the object of Peter Lorre’s twisted passion,” according to the horror film experts John and Michael Brunas, who interviewed her in 1991 for Scarlet Street magazine. Although Mad Love is now considered a cult classic, Drake told the Brunas brothers that she found it “boring” and “slow” when she watched it for the first time in decades. Contemporary audiences disagree, with one reviewer calling it “a hugely successful example of ’30s horror style at its most unhinged and portentously Germanic.”

The next year, Drake played Boris Karloff’s wife, Diana Rukh, in the Universal science-fiction horror film, The Invisible Ray, which also featured Bela Lugosi. In it, she “narrowly escaped the deadly clutches of radium-poisoned Boris Karloff as he and Bela Lugosi battled for control of the invisible ray,” as the Brunas brothers noted. Drake recalled that Karloff and Lugosi were both good to work with and that they got along quite well, even though the media liked to portray them as bitter rivals. 

In 1937, Drake met her future husband, the Honorable Cecil John Arthur Howard (b. 1908, d. 1985), in Los Angeles. He was the second son of the Earl of Suffolk (who was killed during World War I)  and the previously mentioned Margaret, Countess of Suffolk. (The Countess, a native of Chicago, was an heir to the Marshall Field department store fortune and had her portrait painted by John Singer Sargent [see below]. Her two sisters also wed British subjects: Mary Leiter married Lord Curzon and became Vicereine of India, and Nancy Leiter married Major Colin Powys Campbell, a polo devotee from Scotland; the latter purchased land in Goleta, near Santa Barbara, California, and built the expansive Campbell Ranch.)

One stipulation regarding the Countess’s inheritance was that she spend four months a year in the U.S. The Countess first visited Tucson in the early 1930s. Like her future daughter-in-law, the Countess was an avid horseback rider. It was during a ride across the desert in north Tucson that she found the 640-acre parcel on which her massive new estate would be built. In 1935, she commissioned architect Richard A. Morse to build her a 16-room home as well as a superintendent’s house, a chauffeur’s cottage and garage, and a stable. (Click link for more on this iconic International Style home.) 

Cecil Howard visited his mother at Forest Lodge on a number of occasions, even taking part in amateur theatricals with the Tucson Little Theatre. A 1938 article noted that Cecil had gone to Hollywood “because he wanted to see Miss Drake again.” In February 1939, the couple (shown below) married in Tucson, with the Countess in attendance. The wedding was held at the recently built St. Philip’s in the Hills Church, designed by well-known local architect Josias Joesler. 

Frances Drake and Cecil Howard were, by all accounts, a devoted couple. They were married for 46 years, until Cecil’s death in 1985. 

Drake’s cousin, Margo Dean, wrote in 2012:  “Frances had my heart from the time I was a small child. I was a skinny, gangly girl, but she was elegant, kind and generous in every way—as was Cecil. I didn’t learn until my teens just who Frances Drake was. To me she was a mysterious and beautiful member of my family. One day I was in Hollywood walking down Hollywood Blvd. near Grauman’s. I looked down and there was Frances’s star—I did not know she had one on the Walk of Fame. I took a photo of it and sent it to her…she just laughed it off…[To her,] that was in the past.”