Her contemporaries at the Academy of Dramatic Art, which was founded by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, included the actress Meggie Albanesi, Eva Le Gallienne, and Miles Malleson – a senior student who wrote plays for her.

In the same year, 1916, she met Ellen Terry, when she played Robin, Falstaff's diminutive page in scenes from The Merry Wives of Windsor, for a week, at the Palace Pier Theatre in Brighton.

"His subsequent intimate friendship became one of my most treasured possessions; we would watch each other’s work, stay in each other’s houses, be available during public and private moments of triumph and disaster" she wrote, though she never played with him again.

She was taken to Reims, in ruins after World War I, to Versailles, Chartres, the Forest of Fontainebleau, and she was taught by Georges Le Roy sociétaire of the Comédie-Française who was to become one of the great teachers of the Paris Conservatoire.

Drake wrote "Albanesi was by now established as the most talented young actress in England, under contract to Basil Dean...the warmth and sympathy of her personality was like a lodestar in my bleak night sky."

Having tried, and failed, to gain employment with J. E. Vedrenne, Drake decided to join Madame Alice Gachet's French acting classes at RADA, another teacher of brilliance, whose most famous pupil was Charles Laughton.

This proved a memorable production: incidental music was by Frederick Delius, the great ballet in the House-of-the-Moving-Walls was devised by Fokine, and the cast included Malcolm Keen as the Caliph and Henry Ainley as Hassan.

When C. Aubrey Smith needed an actress to play his daughter in a production of Roland Pertwee's The Creaking Chair, his wife suggested Fabia and she was released from Hassan to create her own, first, part.

And James Agate in The Sunday Times (3 October 1926) wrote "Miss Fabia Drake is probably the best ingénue on the present-day stage, and provided she is able to conceal, her brains will one day make a popular success.

In 1929, she went with the Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon on its tour of the United States – in three weeks she had to learn the parts of Lady Macbeth, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, the Queen in Hamlet ('but I should never have been cast to play Gertrude.

Shortly before leaving on the White Star liner SS Megantic rehearsing Macbeth she suffered a recurrence of the spasm in her throat and so the trip began with an element of fear.

Afraid of a choking fit and being unable to speak her lines she nevertheless got through her performances in Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St Louis, Denver, and Washington – but in Chicago, she finally reached the end of her strength.

She sought psychiatric help and with the psychiatrist traced the first intrusion of her phobia into her work on the stage and its possible origin in a lie she had told to avoid catechism when she had made herself sick by pushing a spoon down her throat.

Over 10 years of provoking physical sickness before each and every performance had taken its toll, but in 1943, when Sir Kenneth Barnes asked her to join his depleted teaching staff at RADA she was recovered and available.