Her mother was Jean Cox, a South African actress who was a divorcée when she married Solomon in 1914 in Cape Town.[4][5] Olga hd a brother named Paul.[6]
Her mother married again in Cape Town in 1922 to Hugh Edwards, a company secretary,[7] who became Olga and Paul's stepfather.
Olga married P/O Anthony Max Baerlein in 1941; he was killed in action later the same year.[A][10][11][12][13]
In 1946, she married her second husband Nicholas Davenport.[14] an economist and journalist who was more than twenty years her senior.[2] He died in 1979; she died in Elstree, England, in 2008.
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 the Royal Shakespeare Company, during the first half of 1936, at the new Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon:[15]
Twelfth Night
Olivia
Much Ado About Nothing
Hero
The Taming of the Shrew
Bianca
The Rivals
Julia Melville
Richard II
Queen Isabella
The Tempest
Miranda
The Merchant of Venice
Jessica
During the war, she spent a year with the BBC Repertory Company.
West End
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
Edwardes was an early player in the fledgling BBC television service, which started in November 1936 until it closed at the beginning of the War, and didn't restart until 1946. She also deputised as a television announcer when Elizabeth Cowell was on leave in 1939.[16]
Adaptation for television of the play by Ronald Gow. The action takes place in America in 1859 and moves between John Brown's house in the Adirondack mountains in the North, and the Maryland–Virginia border in the South.
A Romance of the Navy by Ian Hay and Stephen King-Hall The scene is laid in the Captain's lobby and day cabin on board H.M.S. Falcon, a cruiser on the China Station
Au Clair de la Lune A play by Antonia Ridge France 1650 This is a story of two boys and a song. The first boy is Louis XIV, King of France; he is eleven years old, and must live a wearisome existence in great palaces under strict supervision from such eminent adults as his cousin, the great Mademoiselle, and his leading statesman, my Lord the Cardinal. Louis has learned painfully that little kings are not as other little boys. But our other boy, although older, is hardly less unhappy; he's Jean-Baptiste Lulli, one day to be a famous musician, but now an Italian orphan who earns a living by playing his violin for a travelling players' show. And this is also the story of a magnificent banquet which Mademoiselle gives for her young royal relative; for by a series of happy accidents the two boys meet at the banquet, and the occasion is marked by the first performance of one of the loveliest and most famous songs ever written.
The third in a cycle of four plays entitled "The Makepeace Story" by Frank and Vincent Tilsley. The action takes place in and around Shawcross, Lancashire, and in France, between the years 1914-1920.
Since her marriage in 1946, she led a new career, as salonnière in the house of Hinton Waldrist manor. Her husband had bought it in 1922,[C] and together they entertained and held court to influential and 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 for some time. Nicholas Davenport worked with Alexander Korda then joined Harold Wilson with the National Film Finance Corporation. Even though a Fabian,[D] he still kept friendships with R. J. G. Boothby and was close to Winston Churchill.
Olga Davenport continued the social activity of salon gathering which had been part of history for more than 350 years.[E]"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."[10] There is a bust of 'Olga' by the sculptor F. E. McWilliam; two portrait drawings of her in her art collection by Theyre Lee‑Elliott, and another gouache drawing of her dancing also by Lee‑Elliott, 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.
Is he so mad who travels to the shore
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,[F] 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 and 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 placed Davenport as a key and perhaps surprisingly influential figure in the British art scene of the time.[citation needed] 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.[G]
She had two one-person shows at the Piccadilly Gallery in London's Cork Street in 1969,[H] and in 1976;[I][38] and in 1978 she had a solo show of oils at the Oxford Gallery.[J]
Her later work was mainly concerned with the depiction of landscape, and is recognised for the use of gentle, yet dynamic colours which reduce forms to abstracted shapes. She used 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 fascination with the experience and representation of the natural world.[citation needed] Her works are in the permanent collections of the Nuffield Foundation, St Anne's College, Oxford, University of Warwick, Department of the Environment, and in private collections in England, Switzerland, South Africa, Belgium and the United States of America.
After her death, her art collection auctioned around £550,000 (equivalent to £931,800 in 2023).[39][40]
Notes
^Her marriage certificate was given as 'Edwards'. Both mother and brother styled their surname as "Edwardes" when they arrived in England.[8][9]
^ abWith thanks to Simon Vaughan, Alexandra Palace Television Society for the following information: "Olga first appeared on 12 February 1938 as The Maiden in The Lanchester Marionettes. She appeared in a number of drama productions before being listed as an announcer from 30 March 1939, with her last appearance as an announcer on 20 August 1939. I have an audio recording of her in-vision announcement for 3 August 1939."[20]
^In 1932 he was one of the founders of the XYZ Club to advise the Labour Party on economic and financial matters. The XYZ Club was a select dining club which brought City figures into contact with Labour's financial experts, such as Hugh Dalton, Evan Durbin, Douglas Jay. And Nicholas Davenport of course. Hugh Gaitskell for instance, was an early member but not a founder.
^Even as early as Mary Sidney in the beginning of the 17th century, she turned Wilton House into a salon-type literary group sustained by the Countess's hospitality, and which included Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, and Sir John Davies. John Aubrey wrote that "Wilton House was like a college, there were so many learned and ingenious persons. She was the greatest patroness of wit and learning of any lady in her time." The Wilton Circle was an influential group of 16th-century English poets.
^In fact by 1938 the marriage between Mark Gertler and his wife Marjorie Greatorex Hodgkinson was often difficult, punctuated by the frequent ill health of both. In 1939, Gertler committed suicide.
^Olga Davenport (1915-2008) An Olive Grove, Mougins oil on canvas Painted in 1966.
^'Cliff, sun and sea' signed 'Olga Davenport. (on the reverse) and signed and indistinctly inscribed 'CLIFF, SUN AND ****/OLGA DAVENPORT/44 MARKHAM SQ./SW3' (on a fragmentary exhibition label attached to the stretcher)—oil on canvas 35¾ x 47½ in. (89.8 x 120.7 cm.)
I went into the Gallery last week and I thought again how beautiful your pictures look, quiet, personal, bold without aggression, lyrical colour, you have arrived at something very much your own, they are right. Pictures are either right or wrong and no one can really say why.
— (letter from William Scott to Olga Davenport, hand-written and dated 6th May 1969)
This is how William Scott described Olga Davenport's paintings at her first one-woman show at the Piccadilly Gallery in 1969.
^The work was included in Olga Davenport's second show at The Piccadilly Gallery, 1976. Olga Davenport said of her work then "In front of a landscape today the modern artist is aware of a conflict between her subjective feelings and the detachment needed to create a work which will be a plastic object in its own right. I have tried to resolve this conflict and present a synthesis by using colour relationships to suggest space and rhythm, and minimal figuration to present a sense of place."
^Signed and inscribed 'Olga Davenport/'Tuscan Landscape' (on the reverse), oil on canvas 26 x 37 in. (66 x 94 cm) No. 21 Exhibited Oxford, Oxford Gallery, Olga Davenport, February – March 1978. From the Collection of the late Olga Davenport.
Sladen-Smith, Francis (1928). The Sacred Cat, A Play in One Act, Repertory Plays, No. 85. Illustrated – Alan G MacNaughton. London & Glasgow: Gowans & Gray.
The Times (4 Sep 2008). "Obituary". London, England. p. 66.
Walker, Joanna, ed. (1984). "SOLOMON, Joseph Michael". Artefacts: the Built Environment of Southern Africa. U Pretoria. Archived from the original on 13 Nov 2017.
Winters, Edward (2009). "Chapter 1 Olga Davenport: the woman". Olga Davenport. Archived from the original on 1 Feb 2011.
