1971: Year of the Drake

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Ballardian: Gabrielle Drake

From outer space to inner…
LEFT: Gabrielle Drake in UFO. RIGHT: Ms Drake in Crash!.

Pringle: [In Crash!] you were playing opposite a professional actress, so it wasn’t as though it was purely a documentary.

Ballard: Yes, that was… oh, what was the name of the actress? A rather pretty actress, I suppose she’s now in her 50s. Gabrielle Drake! She briefly appeared as a mysterious woman that I drove around with. It was fun.

David Pringle, “The SFX Interview with J. G. Ballard”, 1996.

The film was based on my interest in the car crash — as it emerged through the pages of The Atrocity Exhibition. It was made in the early 70s. With Gabrielle Drake. She was quite a serious actress in her early days, but then she moved off into Crossroads or something. She was very sweet. I met her a few times on the set, as it were, chasing around multi-storey car-parks in Watford.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Iain Sinclair in Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s “Trajectory of Fate”, 1999.

At the terminal risk of coming on like a refugee from io9, this post is in honour of the actor Gabrielle Drake, the most beautiful and stylish woman to ever appear in SF film or TV. How could so many American boys waste their sci-fi wet dreams on Carrie Fisher in Star Wars, especially given that Ms Drake, playing Lt. Gay Ellis in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s UFO TV series, had much, much cooler hair and clothes than Princess Leia. Give me Gay’s sexy purple wig and slinky silver spandex catsuit over Leia’s ridiculous side-buns and risible toga-cum-kimono any day of the week.

As for technical ability, well, Ms Drake is a well-respected Shakespearean actress! But if that doesn’t impress, consider that in the role of Lt. Ellis she was required to not only portray a character who lacks confidence but to also invest that character with a determination to overcome her self-doubt and rebirth herself as a dynamic officer type. Plus she convincingly portrayed unrequited love for a fellow officer, unrequited love being a difficult task for any actor and a far cry from Leia’s cartoonish are-they-or-aren’t-they “bromance” with that pansy Luke Skywalker. Also, any glance at UFO can tell you that Ms Drake’s eyes say so much, a riot of organic semiology fluttering beneath the candy, subtlety beyond compare.

Ms Drake also had the enormous good taste, the good sense, during the UFO era (1970-71) to work with none other than the Sage of Shepperton himself, starring opposite JGB in Harley Cokliss’s short film, Crash! (1971). She performs admirably, playing the very first Ballardian woman-catalyst on film, beautiful but utterly doomed, stripped of identity in the face of an encroaching technological landscape, her coquettish sexuality reduced to literally nothing more than a hood ornament: Ms Drake makes us believe it all in Crash!. I very much doubt that Ms Fisher would be able to switch from space opera to inner space with such ease, skill and grace. And as for Ms Drake vs. either Rosanna Arquette or Holly Hunter in the other Crash, the Cronenberg version, well again there really is no contest, is there? It’s got to be Gabrielle all the way down the line, and then some. (Weiss’s cypher-woman looked the part but she clearly couldn’t act).

Ballard and Gabrielle Drake, sister of the mythologised singer/songwriter Nick Drake. Colonials all. Ex-pats, with memories of tropical splendour, marooned among the concrete atolls of Watford. The Drakes had grown up in Burma. Gabrielle’s parents had been evacuated from Rangoon to India when the Japanese invaded. She recalls her father composing “an entire comic operetta about an Englishman who was based out East”. (Ballard, paying his respects to the earlier film, used the name Gabrielle for the character in Crash who would be played by Rosanna Arquette.)

Iain Sinclair, David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s “Trajectory of Fate”, 1999.

To further demonstrate Ms Drake’s versatility in that magical year of 1971, I have interpolated stills of her in the UFO series with screengrabs of her in Crash!. There are also YouTube clips of both works towards the end. And I must thank The Diary of a Mad Natural Historian for alerting me to the existence of Gabrielle on Flickr, from which the stills were lifted. For more, visit Poletti’s “The Ladies of UFO” set.

NOTE: See the Noise blog for a warm interview with Ms Drake, in which she remembers her brother and his music.

SIX DEGREES OF J.G. BALLARD: Ms Drake is connected to JGB in other ways. In 1970 Ballard received his first screen credit (misspelled as “J.B. Ballard”), providing the story for Val Guest’s prehistoric potboiler, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. In 1972, just one year after UFO and Crash!, Guest directed Au Pair Girls, starring none other than Ms Drake, who appeared, gulp, naked as the day she was born.

1971: YEAR OF THE DRAKE

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Ballardian: Gabrielle Drake