Frank Fay

Fay, [Francis Anthony] Frank (1897–1961), actor. The “handsome, saturnine and brilliantly redheaded” monologuist was born in San Francisco and made his stage debut as the child in Quo Vadis? (1901). His early career ran a theatrical gamut, from playing a teddy bear in the original Babes in Toyland (1903) to walking on as one of the crowd in Sir Henry Irving's The Merchant of Venice (1903). For a while he was part of the vaudeville team of Dyer and Fay, with Johnny Dyer, but by 1918 critics and playgoers were taking note of him as a lone storyteller. His soft‐spoken, daffy yarns told of such quirky people as the little boy who would not get off the wagon and the family who saved scraps of string. During this same period, from 1918 to 1933, he also appeared in a number of Broadway musicals, generally failures. Then his career languished for about a decade until he scored his most memorable success when he returned to Broadway to play Elwood P. Dowd, the boozer whose best friend is an invisible rabbit, in Harvey (1944). Autobiography: How to Be Poor, 1935.

Fay, Frank (1871-1931), actor. Born in Dublin, he was a member of his younger brother W.G. Fay's National Dramatic Society which merged with the Irish Literary Theatre to become the Irish National Theatre Society, the originating body of the Abbey. Fay was an excellent tragic actor with a superb speaking voice. With his brother he left the Abbey in 1908, after which he worked in America and in England.

Fay, Frank, 1870–1931, and W. G. Fay, 1872–1947, brothers, both Irish actors. The Fay brothers formed the Irish National Theatre, an amateur group founded on the conviction that only Irish actors could perform in Irish plays. Around the nucleus of this company Dublin's Abbey Theatre was formed in 1904 with W. G. Fay as its guiding force. The Fays emigrated to the United States in 1908, where they appeared in a repertory of Irish plays.

Bibliography

See W. G. Fay and C. Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre (1935, repr. 1971).

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