Virginia Lilian Emmeline Compton-Mackenzie, CBE (/ˈkʌmptən/; 18 September 1894 – 12 December 1978), known professionally as Fay Compton, was an English actress.

This work was partly inspired by Compton's own tragic marriage to the West End satirist H. G. Pélissier and her subsequent youthful widowhood.

"[1] Compton's second husband, the actor Lauri de Frece, died in 1921, aged 41, and in February 1922 she married Leon Quartermaine, with whom she had acted in a revival of Barrie's Quality Street.

[1] Compton had a reputation for versatility,[1] and in 1931 she appeared successively in the title role of the pantomime Dick Whittington and Ophelia to Henry Ainley's Hamlet.

[3] Throughout the 1930s Compton moved between West End plays, mostly ephemeral, pantomime and Shakespeare – Titania, Lady Rosaline, Calpurnia, and Paulina in The Winter's Tale, one of her favourite parts[3] – and toured in Australia and New Zealand in Victoria Regina, Tonight at 8.30 and George and Margaret.

[5] During the 1940s Compton appeared at the Old Vic as Regan in King Lear, played Ruth in Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit for 15 months, Regina in The Little Foxes, toured for the British Council, in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Switzerland, in Othello, Candida and Hamlet, and made her first appearance in an Ibsen play as Gina Ekdal in The Wild Duck.

Her most popular performances in films are Odd Man Out (1947), Laughter in Paradise (1951), Orson Welles' Othello (1952), The Haunting (1963) and I Start Counting (1969).