Barbara Ewing

Barbara Ewing (born 14 January 1939)[1] is a UK-based actress, playwright and novelist.

Early life

Born in Carterton, New Zealand,[2]Ewing graduated from Victoria University of Wellington with a BA in English and Maori before moving to Britain in 1962 to train as an actress at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) in London. She graduated in 1965.[3]

Career

Actor

She made her television debut in A Choice of Kings (1966), soon followed by her film debut in the horror film Torture Garden (1967) for Amicus Productions, then Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) with Christopher Lee for Hammer Films.[4] Both movies were directed by Freddie Francis. Her other films included The Reckoning (1969), Eye of the Needle (1981), the Children's Film Foundation production Haunters of the Deep (1984) and When the Whales Came (1989).

The television role for which she is best known is that of Agnes Fairchild in the Granada Television comedy series Brass, alongside Timothy West (1983–90). In 1986, she played Treen Dudgeon in the short-lived BBC series Comrade Dad, alongside George Cole and Doris Hare. She co-starred in the BBC's 1975 edition of A Ghost Story for Christmas, titled The Ash Tree, playing Anne Mothersole, who was tried as a witch and in 1978 she had appeared in an episode of Euston Films' The Sweeney (S4-E7 'Bait').

Her 1989 one-woman show, Alexandra Kollontai, about the only woman in Lenin's cabinet in 1917 was a great hit in London, and at the Edinburgh and Sydney Festivals.

More recent TV appearances have included episodes of Casualty, Doctors and Holby City on the BBC, and The Bill and Peak Practice on ITV, as well as appearances in various adaptations of Ruth Rendell mysteries.

Writer

Ewing has written nine novels to date:

  • Strangers (1978)
  • The Actresses (1997)[5]
  • A Dangerous Vine (1999)
  • The Trespass (2002)
  • Rosetta (2005)
  • The Mesmerist (2007)
  • The Fraud (2009)
  • The Circus of Ghosts (2011)
  • The Petticoat Men (2014)

On 17 February 2015, it was announced that Ewing's The Petticoat Men had made the longlist for the prestigious Ngaio Marsh Award, a crime fiction award in her home country of New Zealand.[6]

In 2020, Ewing's memoir One Minute Crying Time was published.[7] Covering her childhood, adolescence and early-adulthood in New Zealand, the book takes the reader up to 1962 when she left for the UK, and draws from diary and later journal entries Ewing kept from the ages of 12 to 23.[8]

References
  1. Ewing 2020, pp. 8 and 35.
  2. Ewing 2020, p. 20.
  3. "Graduate Profile - Barbara Ewing" rada.ac.uk. Retrieved 30 August 2020.
  4. Cotter, Robert Michael “Bobb” (10 January 2014). The Women of Hammer Horror: A Biographical Dictionary and Filmography. McFarland and Co. ISBN 9781476602011 – via Google Books.
  5. Christian, Dionne (11 March 2018). "Barbara Ewing on the perils actresses face". NZ Herald. Retrieved 5 September 2020.
  6. "Longlist for the 2015 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel: And Then There Were Nine". Booksellers New Zealand. 18 February 2015. Archived from the original on 24 June 2016. Retrieved 18 June 2016.
  7. "One Minute Crying Time by Barbara Ewing".masseypress.ac.nz. Retrieved 4 September 2020.
  8. Dass, Kiran (9 May 2020). "Actress and writer Barbara Ewing reveals why writing her own story was so tough". NZ Herald. Retrieved 5 September 2020

Sources
  • Ewing, Barbara (2020). One Minute Crying Time. Albany, Auckland: Massey University Press. ISBN 978-0-9951229-5-6
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