The Gabrielle Ray Home Page



	Click on the picture to download a high resolution copy to keep.

WHO ON EARTH IS GABRIELLE RAY?
Don't know who Gabrielle Ray is? Well she was probably the first "supermodel". In the early 1900's she posed for hundreds of picture postcards making a career from looking good! Many of these can be picked up at postcard fairs in England. The picture above is a typical example.

She was most active in the early 1900's as an actress and a dancer. She was married to Eric Loder but the couple split up due to Eric's philandering tendencies and Gabrielle never married again or had any children. She retired in 1924 and shortly thereafter had a nervous breakdown which institutionalised her for the remaining 50 years of her life.

One of the high points of her career must've been her showstopping dance routine at Maxim's, in a production of "The Merry Widow". She did a whirling dervish dance on top of a table, held high by 4 men. She performed high kicks, handstands, acrobatic turns and numerous other acrobatics not commonly used by dancers of the day. She brought the house down with a thundering ovation.

NEW!
To find out more about Gabrielle Ray's career please read this excellent short biography by Robin Edwardes.

VISIT THE GABRIELLE RAY PICTURE GALLERY
I have assembled some favourite scans of Gabrielle Ray postcards showing her particular aptitude for being photographed. These are presented as small thumbnail pictures of which high quality copies can be downloaded for your own personal archive.

To view the Gabrielle Ray picture gallery go this way!

I WANT MORE INFORMATION!
Information on Gabrielle Ray is very sparse. What I've put here is all I've been able to find out about her and my thanks go to Robert Waters who provided some of the details for the brief biographical notes above and also to Robin Edwardes who wrote the other excellent longer biography linked to from above and here.

If you have more information or would just like to get in touch then email me and I'll make sure that anything new you have to say will be posted here.

To email me use the address: gray@squelch.demon.co.uk

Meanwhile, here is a fragment from a book by Cecil Beaton describing Gabrielle Ray:

"Gabrielle Ray was not a talented actress, not even a good dancer, but her parakeet features were not without possibilities. By sheer cleverness she was able to fascinate an audience and make it susceptible to her self created prettiness. She metamorphosed herself into a sort of Maude Goodman nusery picture book unreality, with masses of soft, silky curls falling about her raised head and a straw hat hanging over her shoulder from a ribbon. The effect was as though butter would never melt in her mouth, yet there was an intriguing perversity about such excessive prettiness. Gabrielle Ray was the precursor of the Marie Laurencin school of pink-and-white feminity.

Lily Elsie, the star of the operettas in which Miss Ray appeared, was to tell me many years later of some of her collegue's experiments in make-up. A past mistress of pointillisme, Gabrielle Ray would, for her stage appearance, put mauve and green dots at the edges of her eyes, with little red and mauve dots at the corner of her nostrils. As meticulously as Seurat working over one of his canvases, she shaded her eyelids and temples in different colours of the mushroom, while her cheeks were tinted with varying pinks from coral to bois de rose. The chin was touched with a hare's-foot brush dipped in terracotta powder, and the lobes of the ears and the tip of the nose would be flicked with salmon colour. Thus painted Gabrielle Ray appeared before the audience enamelled like a china doll.

Perhaps better than any other actress, this dancer knew how to pose for a photographer. Doubtless she was one of those forerunners of photographic facial surgery, for she would have a piece of silk thread held under her nose by assistants who stood at either side of her, uptilting the nose just the amount that she wished. With little talent but much imagination Gabrielle Ray, during her brief career, turned herself into a small work of art."

taken from "The Glass of Fashion" by Cecil Beaton first published 1954.