Florence Fancott, 98; Leading lady of Ottawa's amateur stage
Hyfler/Rosner
Actress was the leading lady of Ottawa's amateur stage
Trained in Britain, she arrived in Canada in 1949 and soon
plunged into theatre life. Over the years, she performed in
about 150 Ottawa Little Theatre productions, and also took a
turn at directing
BUZZ BOURDON
Special to the Globe and Mail
December 22, 2008
OTTAWA -- When actor Florence Fancott walked into the Ottawa
Drama League to audition for a part in September, 1949, she
was so thrilled to be there that she declared to management
that she'd be happy to scrub the stage.
An accomplished actress from England who first performed at
the age of 9, she never had to fulfill her promise. Instead,
she won the lead part. The director at once recognized a
talent that had been honed in hundreds of amateur plays.
"I loved the theatre. As soon as I arrived in Ottawa and
heard there was a theatre, I wanted to join. I went to the
workshop tea and said that I was willing to do anything,"
she told author Iris Winston in Staging a Legend: A History
of Ottawa Little Theatre (1997).
Playing Sally Carroll in The Two Mrs. Carrolls, by Martin
Vale, Ms. Fancott opened on Dec. 5, 1949, to kick off the
38th season of what would later become the Ottawa Little
Theatre. That long-forgotten play was the first of about 150
OLT productions she acted in over the next 35 years. She did
it for free, too, as only a very few people - the cleaner,
box-office staff - were paid for their work.
The daughter of a hairdresser, she grew up in Northampton,
which is about 100 kilometres north of London. She attended
Notre Dame Convent High School, where she studied art and
music. After leaving school at 15, she worked in her
father's salon and began taking parts in the local amateur
dramatic society. She also performed with the professional
Northampton Repertory Company.
It was a busy life, since the Players put on a new
production pretty much every week and Mrs. Fancott appeared
in most of them. She even acted with a young Errol Flynn in
February, 1934, when the company produced the comedy Yellow
Sands. "He was very charming," Mrs. Fancott said of the
Hollywood legend decades later.
In 1937, she met a young architect named Ted Fancott who had
started designing sets for the local theatre group. They
fell in love and married that December.
Playing a wide variety of roles during the Depression gave
Mrs. Fancott the experience she needed to move the
professional theatre in London's West End. As it turned out,
she never made the jump.
"A few West End producers and directors knew she was good,
and she was asked to go there, but she preferred to stay
with her husband and family in Northampton," said her
daughter, Mitzi Hauser.
After the Second World War, and after Britain was plunged
into a long period of austerity, Mr. Fancott decided to try
his luck in Canada. He set off in 1947, and ended up in
Ottawa. His family joined him two years later.
Ms. Fancott soon checked out the state of amateur drama in
Ottawa. The theatre proved to be impressive, and
comparatively modern.
Management at first assigned her to do props. "I had never
done props before, but I didn't care. I just wanted to be a
part of it, in that theatre. The theatre! I couldn't believe
that this was an amateur theatre," she told Ms. Winston. "In
England, we'd acted in draughty, old halls."
Soon, she was the leading lady of Ottawa's amateur stage.
Celebrated for her precise diction, versatility and
commanding presence, Ms. Fancott could play Shakespeare,
Ibsen, Wilde and Chekhov, and such later playwrights as Noel
Coward and Terence Rattigan and Neil Simon.
"She could play any role, young, old, comedy, tragedy. She
was superb, a very special person with a gift," said Joe
O'Brien, who appeared opposite Ms. Fancott in a 1963
production of the Archibald MacLeish play J.B.
It was Mr. O'Brien's first big role. At 27, he was half her
age and he found himself in a very difficult, emotional play
that saw a husband and wife lose their three children. "I
was overwhelmed that she asked me to play the husband. That
was very good for my ego," he said. "I had watched Flo act
and you were just overwhelmed at this beautiful woman who
could act so superbly. She had such a commanding stage
presence."
Adept at leading a double life from decades of practice, Ms.
Fancott juggled her roles of homemaker and mother before
leaving for the theatre and a make-believe world of costumes
and grease paint. In secret, she suffered from bouts of
bashfulness, said her daughter. The shyness, however, made
her doubly determined to succeed on the stage. "Many actors
are shy but on the stage they transform themselves into
their characters," said Ms. Hauser, who first acted with her
mother at the OLT when she was 6. "She was very sensitive,
but she didn't care about the critics. She would say, 'as
long as I did what the director wanted, that's what my job
was.' "
By all accounts, audiences could not take their eyes off her
when she was on the stage.
"One of her significant attributes was the way she would
react to the scene being played. Her reactions were as
compelling as her line delivery. Her concentration was
absolutely complete [and] when she took a role she would
lose herself completely in the character."
As an acting coach, Ms. Fancott helped anyone who asked.
"She taught hundreds of young people in Ottawa how to act,"
Ms. Hauser said. "She had a way of pulling out whatever she
wanted from actors."
In 1957, Ms. Fancott achieved one of her greatest triumphs
when she played Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower girl in
Shaw's Pygmalion. The production took the top three awards
at the Eastern Ontario Drama Festival and Mrs. Fancott,
whose Eliza local critics described as a "character of
unusual credibility," was judged best actress. The award was
presented by then governor-general Vincent Massey.
A decade later, Mrs. Fancott played Eliza again, this time
in My Fair Lady, the musical version by Alan Jay Lerner and
Frederick Loewe. But it wasn't easy playing Eliza the second
time around. Originally, Mrs. Fancott wanted to play the
housekeeper but the director had other ideas and asked her
to play Eliza.
"She said, 'don't be silly, I'm too old and I can't sing.'
He convinced her and she did it. She wanted to prove to
herself that she could do it," said Ms. Hauser. "She worked
very hard to learn to sing and she pulled it off."
Reviewer Audrey Ashley of the Ottawa Citizen was less
convinced, and gave Mrs. Fancott a mixed review. "Her
Cockney accent in the early scenes was a delight to hear,
and she handled the transition from flower girl to lady
convincingly ... So far as her singing is concerned, she
manages, but only just, and her voice doesn't project very
well."
While she also appeared in the occasional television
production and took part in summer-theatre productions, Ms.
Fancott did not always command centre stage. Rather than
perform, she often preferred to work from the wings and over
the years directed many productions, working with such
up-and-coming luminaries as William Shatner, Christopher
Plummer, William Hutt, Claude Jutras, Amelia Hall and Rich
Little.
She continued to act and direct at the OLT until 1983, when
she suffered a stroke. After that, she quit the stage but
never complained, Ms. Hauser said.
FLORENCE FANCOTT
Florence Fancott was born Jan. 17, 1910, in Northampton,
England. She died in Ottawa on Nov. 21, 2008, of natural
causes. She was 98. She leaves her children David, Mitzi and
Stephen, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
She was predeceased by her husband, Ted, who died in 1990.