| Juliet Ace | |
| Birth Date: | 27 June 1938 |
| Birth Place: | Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, South Wales |
| Occupation: | Dramatist |
| Language: | English |
| Education: | Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama |
Ann Juliet Ace (born 27 June 1938) is a dramatist and screenwriter who contributed to EastEnders and The District Nurse. She also supplied many original scripts and dramatisations to BBC Radio drama, including The Archers. She wrote the screenplay for Cameleon,[1] which won the Golden Spire Award for Best Dramatic Television Feature at the 1998 San Francisco International Film Festival.[2]
Juliet Ace was the third daughter of Charles and Glenys Ace, born and raised in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire in South Wales. She was educated at Llanelli Girls' Grammar School, City of Coventry Training College,[3] which was soon to become Coventry College of Education and be incorporated into the University of Warwick, where she specialised in drama and art. She then trained further at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama.
Ace taught for three years in St Mary Cray before joining a children's theatre company, and then working in weekly repertory at the Grand Theatre, Swansea for two seasons. In 1964, she began to work with children with special needs.
After her marriage to Richard Alexander in 1966 she moved to Dartmouth, Devon, where her husband worked as a civilian lecturer at the Britannia Royal Naval College. For the next 18 years she brought up their two children: Daniel Alexander, now a business consultant, and Catherine Alexander,[4] a theatre director and drama teacher. Meanwhile, Ace continued working with special-needs children, privately and in local schools, and directed and acted with local drama groups.
Juliet Ace began writing plays in 1976, after taking part in an Arvon Foundation writing course. In 1979 she won a Gulbenkian Foundation/Arts Council of Great Britain Award to work with professional directors and actors on new writing. As a result, her first play, Speak No Evil was produced first as a stage play in Bristol and then as a radio play, directed by Enyd Williams. It was nominated for a Pye Award[5]
After her early work in radio, she moved into television, where she worked with Julia Smith and Tony Holland and was taken from The District Nurse series to the creation of the BBC's EastEnders, and then to the short-lived expatriate soap opera Eldorado.
While her dramatic imagination is rich – a leading character in the radio play Lobby Talk[6] is a parrot – her background in life is also significant. Two successful sequences of radio dramas are uncommonly open semi-autobiographical journeys: first there is young Mattie Jones, growing up in South Wales, who appears as a child in The New Look: Tailor's Tacks, set in 1946, and then completes her growth into a teenager in 1955, four plays later, in Mattie and Bluebottle. An older Mattie, liberated by writing and performed by Patricia Hodge in four plays, starting with The Captain's Wife, and concluding with Upside Down in the Roasting Tin,[7] is a testament to experience.
Juliet Ace tutored theatre undergraduates at Dartington College of Arts as a visiting playwright in 1985–87, and postgraduate students of writing and directing in the Media and Communications Department at Goldsmiths College in 1995–2005. She served as a judge of the Koestler Awards, for writing by prisoners, in the 1990s, and is a BAFTA jury member.
In 1988, her play A Slight Hitch was included in the Oxford University Press collection, New Plays, Volume 1, edited by Peter Terson, which included work by Terson, Arnold Wesker and Henry Livings.
Ace's book about the actor Terence Rigby, Rigby Shlept Here: A Memoir of Terence Rigby 1937–2008, was published in November 2014, and the actor and director Peter Eyre described it in his review as "a fascinating and unusual memoir of a fascinating and unusual actor.... There is an unknown and detailed documentation of his work with Pinter, Peter Hall and Ian McKellen, among others, some of it quite shocking."[8] It includes diary entries from Ace covering decades of her friendship with Rigby, interviews with colleagues such as Michael Gambon, and letters and extracts from an attempted autobiography by Rigby, interrupted by his early death.
In October, 2013, Ace was diagnosed with terminal cancer – her radio plays The Captain’s Wife and Skin had reflected on earlier bouts with the disease – and was given a fifty-fifty chance of surviving until Christmas that year. Nearly five years later, in May, 2018, she saw her play Moving the Goalposts performed at London's Southbank Centre as part of B(old][9] a season celebrating age and creativity. At the festival she was even photographed dancing, holding on to her three-wheeled mobility aid, to the music of another featured artist, Cleo Sylvestre.
Moving the Goalposts, despite the gloomy prognosis of Ace's doctors, gave her character Mattie a new lease of life, charting the frustrations, comedy and medical implausibility of her intellectual and physical survival beyond the predictions of concerned consultants. With Cheryl Campbell taking the role of Mattie for the stage, and directed by Nancy Meckler, it was a triumph of wit over malady. Ace joined Campbell and Meckler on to the stage to discuss the process of writing and realising the play. Jude Kelly, who chaired the discussion as one her last acts as departing Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre, gave warm praise to the honesty and resilience of Ace's writing, citing her recognition of its truth through her own experience with a family member. Moving the Goalposts saw further life in a BBC broadcast[10] in March 2020, with the Welsh actor Pam Ferris taking the role of Mattie
Juliet Ace lives in London.[11] In September 2014 she was made a fellow of the renamed Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, in a ceremony which also made Katie Mitchell and Jenny Sealey Honorary Fellows.[12]
| Radio Plays written by Juliet Ace | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Date first broadcast | Play | Director | Cast | Notes | Station Series |
| , and | BBC Radio 4--> | ||||
| Speak No Evil | Enyd Williams | Elizabeth Morgan, John Griffiths and Rhys Powis | Runner-up Society of Authors/Pye Award | BBC Radio 4 Thirty-Minute Theatre | |
| Dreams Remembered[13] | Shaun MacLaughlin | Steve Hodson, Petra Markham, Sean Barrett and Jo Anderson | |||
| A Time Between Comets | Enyd Williams | Iwan Jones, Rhys Thomas, Simon Williams and Guto Harri | BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Theatre | ||
| Model Answers[14] or, Tarzan and the Cross-eyed Baby | Shaun MacLaughlin | Elizabeth Proud and Marcus D'Amico | Runner-up Sony Awards | ||
| Embroideries | Shaun MacLaughlin | Stephen Thorne and Elizabeth Proud | BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play | ||
| The Red Shoes | Penny Gold | Anna Massey, Martin Jarvis and Natasha Pyne | BBC Radio 4 Thirty-Minute Theatre | ||
| Jonathan George Can Walk on the Water | Shaun MacLauglin | Peter Jeffrey and Shirley Dixon | BBC Radio 4Afternoon Play | ||
| – | Crown House[15] | Graham Gauld | Martin Jarvis, Jane Asher, Margaret Rawlings, Dinah Sheridan, Richard Pasco, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Gayle Hunnicutt and Dominic Rickhards | Adapted from Peter Ling's trilogy of Crown House novels. Eight 30-minute episodes. | |
| Digressions | Shaun MacLaughlin | Jenny Funnell | BBC Radio 4 | ||
| The Spur | Shaun MacLaughlin | Christian Rodska, Anthony Jackson, Vincent Brimble and Anne Morrish | BBC Radio 4 Monday Play | ||
| Lobby Talk [16] | Shaun MacLaughlin | Andrew Sachs, Stephen Thorne, Steve Hodson, Christian Rodska, Kim Wall, June Barrie, William Eedle, Danny Schiller, Meg Davies, Jonathan Nibbs and Kate Lynn-Evans | BBC Radio 4 | ||
| The Little Walls[17] | Ned Chaillet | Alex Jennings, Roger Lloyd-Pack, Kate Bufferey, Vivian Pickles, Norman Jones, Helen Cooper, Terence Edmond, Timothy Morand, Eric Allen, Ronald Herdman, Siriol Jenkins, Cassie MacFarlane, Neil Roberts, David Sinclair, Matthew Sim and Auriol Smith | Winston Graham's novel was the first winner of the Crime Writers' Association Crossed Red Herring award for best crime novel of the year | BBC Radio 4Saturday PlayGold and Silver Daggers Season | |
| Jacob's Folly | Penny Gold | Jennie Linden, Paola Dionisotti and John Church | BBC Radio 4 | ||
| Truth Confined | Shaun McLoughlin | David Learner, Charles Simpson, Melinda Walker and Kate Binchy | BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play | ||
| Twin Reaction – Part One: Look Again | Shaun MacLoughlin | Jenny Funnell, Carolyn Backhouse, Eric Allen, Cornelius Garrett, Lindsay Mack, Ian Sanders, Rachel Oldfield, Paul Nicholson, Janet Dale, Marilla Robson, Brian Gear and Jilly Bond | Three-part police drama | BBC Radio 4 | |
| Twin Reaction – Part Two: Come Follow | Shaun MacLoughlin | See Part One | BBC Radio 4 | ||
| Twin Reaction – Part Three: Double Trouble | Shaun MacLoughlin | See Part One | BBC Radio 4 | ||
| Zinar's Tower | Shaun MacLoughlin | Zia Mohyeddin and Karzan Krekar | BBC Radio 4Monday Play | ||
| Love Story[18] [19] | Ingri Damon, Mark Leake, Patrick Allen, Sheila Allen, John Guerrasio, David Brooks, William Dufris, Gerrard McDermott, Tracy-Ann Oberman and Christopher WrightHarpsichord: David Roblou | BBC Radio 4 Saturday Play[20] 90 Minutes | |||
| The Captain's Wife[21] | Ned Chaillet | Patricia Hodge | BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play | ||
| The New Look: Tailor's Tacks | Tanya Nash | Stephanie Wookey and Jennifer Hill | BBC Radio 4 | ||
| The New Look: Beeny's Camiknickers | Tanya Nash | Stephanie Wookey and Jennifer Hill | BBC Radio 4Afternoon Play | ||
| The New Look: Celluloid Lady | Tanya Nash | Stephanie Wookey and Jennifer Hill | Afternoon Play | ||
| Her Infinite Variety – Play One: Writing to Veronica | Ned Chaillet | Eleanor Moriarty | Five 15-minute plays inspired by Shakespeare's Women. | BBC Radio 4Woman's Hour Serial | |
| Her Infinite Variety –Play Two: Talking to my Shrink | Sarah Brown | Gavin Muir and Gemma Saunders | BBC Radio 4Woman's Hour Serial | ||
| Her Infinite Variety –Play Three: Diary of a Dutiful Daughter | Ned Chaillet | Anna Massey | BBC Radio 4Woman's Hour Serial | ||
| Her Infinite Variety –Play Four: And All That Jazz | Ned Chaillet | Bette Bourne | BBC Radio 4Woman's Hour Serial | ||
| Her Infinite Variety –Play Five: Dirty Linen | Ned Chaillet | Elizabeth Bell and Oliver Cotton | BBC Radio 4Woman's Hour Serial | ||
| Private Papers[22] [23] | Tanya Nash | Angela Pleasence, Nichola McAuliffe, Simon Armstrong and Jenny Funnell | BBC Radio 4Woman's Hour Serial | ||
| Small Parts[24] | Ned Chaillet | Patricia Hodge | The second play written for Patricia Hodge about Mattie. | BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play | |
| Young Victoria[25] | Cherry Cookson | Imogen Stubbs, Anna Massey, Adrian Lukis and Christopher Cazenove | Ten-part serial about the early life of Queen Victoria, based on her letters and diaries. | BBC Radio 4Woman's Hour Serial | |
| Money for Old Rope | Gilly Adams | Di Botcher, Aled Pugh and Jennifer Vaughan | BBC Radio 4Afternoon Play | ||
| The Marseilles Trilogy: Marius[26] | Ned Chaillet | Richard Johnson, Simon Scardifield, Monica Dolan and Andrew Sachs | BBC Radio 4 The Saturday Play | ||
| The Marseilles Trilogy: Fanny | Ned Chaillet | Monica Dolan, Richard Johnson, Andrew Sachs and Simon Scardifield | BBC Radio 4 The Saturday Play | ||
| The Marseilles Trilogy: César | Ned Chaillet | Richard Johnson, Simon Scardifield, Monica Dolan, Andrew Sachs, Tam Williams, Steve Hodson, Stephen Thorne, Struan Rodger, Phillip Joseph and Sean Baker | BBC Radio 4 The Saturday Play | ||
| Blind | Gilly Adams | Mali Harries and Jennifer Hill | BBC Radio 4Afternoon Play | ||
| Dead-Heading the Roses[27] [28] [29] | Ned Chaillet | Jill Balcon, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cheryl Campbell, Graham Crowden and William Hootkins | BBC Radio 4Afternoon Play | ||
| Mattie and Bluebottle | Alison Hindell[30] | Mali Harries, Mared Swain and Matthew Gravelle | The fifth and final play about Mattie Jones growing up in Wales. | BBC Radio 4Afternoon Play | |
| – | The L-Shaped Room[31] [32] | Alison Hindell | Lynne Seymour, Trevor Laird, John McAndrew, Bill Wallis and John Rowe | Ten-part serial | BBC Radio 4Woman's Hour Serial |
| Skin | Ned Chaillet | Patricia Hodge | BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play | ||
| The Backward Shadow | Alison Hindell | Siriol Jenkins, Rachel Atkins, Simon Ludders, Nickie Rainsford and John McAndrew | Ten-part sequel to The L-Shaped Room | BBC Radio 4Woman's Hour Serial | |
| Chocolate Frigates[33] | Tracey Neale | Todd Carty, Lindsey Coulson, Jamie Kenna and Nick Sayce | BBC Radio 4Afternoon Play | ||
| Shredder[34] | Jane Morgan | Gwen Taylor, Stephen Thorne, Avril Elgar, Helen Longworth, Nyasha Hatendi, Steve Hodson and Stephen Critchlow | BBC Radio 4Afternoon Play | ||
| Moving the Goalposts | Tracey Neale | Pam Ferris | BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Drama | ||
| , and | BBC Radio 4--> | ||||