Ruby Ray (actress)
Ruby Ray (born Blanche Arnold Hameen Nicol, 14 August 1881 – after 1973) was an Argentine-born English stage actress, dancer and singer who performed mainly in Edwardian musical comedy. Ray began her stage career in London in 1897 despite the misgivings of her late father's family. She played in both musical comedies and drama before travelling to Australia in 1900. There she starred in the play A Message from Mars and the musical Three Little Maids, among other pieces. She later appeared in London and New York, creating supporting roles in The Catch of the Season (1904) and The Belle of Mayfair (1906). She married in 1909 and left the stage, living with her husband and children in Ceylon, then Switzerland, and later Jersey. Early life Ray was born in Buenos Aires to a Scottish father, James Watson Nicol, and an English mother, Blanche Caunter. Her paternal grandfather was the figure and genre painter Erskine Nicol, and her maternal grandfather was the writer and clergyman John Hobart Caunter. Her parents married at Morro Velho, Brazil; her older brother Erskine was also born in Buenos Aires. Her father, a planter who ran the estancia La Aroma southeast of Buenos Aires, drowned at Altamirano just over two months after her birth. The family relocated to England, where they lived in Kensington, London. Ray was often ill as a child and also experienced bouts of illness in adulthood. As a young woman, she enjoyed painting, needlework and punting on the Thames, and was fond of animals of all kinds. Career Ray first took the stage in London at the age of sixteen in late 1897, initially as a chorus dancer, and moved on quickly to solo dancing, singing and eventually acting. She studied dancing with John D'Auban. She adopted the stage name Ruby Ray to keep her real name out of the press, as her Scottish paternal family regarded the theatre "with a holy horror" and objected to her choosing the stage for a profession. Her ambition was to work up from musical comedy and pantomime to high comedy. She secured the dramatic role of Lucius in Herbert Beerbohm Tree's revival of Julius Caesar (1900). After the run of this drama she was engaged by George Edwardes, the father of Edwardian musical comedy. An early favourite part of hers was Iris, initially played by Letty Lind, in Edwardes' Gaiety Comedy A Greek Slave. She became interested in seeing Australia because "all England was talking of the Australians and their pluck in South Africa." She travelled to Australia in 1900 as leading lady of the Hawtrey Comedy Company, which was managed by William F. Hawtrey, the brother of actor-manager Charles Hawtrey. On her travels she was chaperoned by her mother, "a lady as pleasant and bright as her daughter", from whom she was inseparable, according to one interviewer. Mrs Nicol, however, took precautions not to be overbearing and left all business decisions to her daughter. After touring Australia, Ray went to New York, where