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Draper, Ruth

The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre

Draper, Ruth (1884–1956), American actress who achieved world-wide fame with dramatic monologues which she wrote herself. She first employed her gift for mimicry in short sketches performed at private parties and charity performances, and it was not until 1920 that she made her first professional appearance at the Aeolian Hall in London. She quickly established herself as an international figure and for the rest of her life toured continuously, elaborating and adding to her repertory but never changing the basic formula—a bare stage, a minimum of props, and herself as one person responding to invisible companions (as in ‘Opening a Bazaar’ or ‘Showing the Garden’) or as several people in succession (as in ‘Three Generations’, ‘Mr Clifford and Three Women’, or ‘An English House Party’). The texts of her monologues served as aides-mémoire only, since she varied them at every performance. Her career was a long series of triumphs on the Continent, in New York, where she often remained in the same theatre for four or five months, and in England.

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© The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre 1996, originally published by Oxford University Press 1996.

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