Queenie Ashton

Ethel Muriel Ashton was born in London, England on 11 November 1903. She was an accomplished ballet dancer, and specialist in voice production and drama, who started performing when she was fourteen. She appeared in musical comedy on the London stage (even appearing with playwright Noël Coward), and performed for Dame Nellie Melba in 1927 while travelling to Australia through the Suez Canal.[3]

In the 1930s she appeared in radio musical comedy opposite Dick Bentley in Oh! Quaite. She played Budge's mother in "Budge's Gang", a segment of the ABC Children's Session (ca. 1941–45 and it was so popular it was made into a comic book). Most notably, she played the wife of Dr. Gordon[3] and the long-running role of Granny Bishop (a character many years her senior) in the radio serial Blue Hills, for the entire 27 years of the serial's run (1949–1976 – hers were the very first and last spoken parts). She also played this role on Australia's first television serial Autumn Affair. In 1957 she appeared in a one-off television play called Tomorrow's Child. Other television roles included Division 4, Certain Women (as "Dolly Lucas"), The Restless Years (as "Jessica Metcalf"), and Mother and Son. She was a semi-regular cast member of A Country Practice (as "Lillian Coote") and G.P. (as "Mrs Sculthorpe")[4] Film roles included Mama's Gone A-Hunting, opposite Judy Morris in 1977 and The Year My Voice Broke in 1987. She also appeared in many television commercials, most notably for Sara Lee. She was still performing in stage and cabaret plays and films in her nineties and was one of Australia's last great grand dames and one of the oldest entertainers still performing. She died on 23 October 1999, in the Sydney suburb of Carlingford, New South Wales at the age of 95, having had a successful 75-year career in the arts.

In 1931 she married Lionel Lawson (who died in 1950), violinist and later leader of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; they had a daughter, nurse Janet Lawson, in 1933 and a son, Tony Lawson, in 1935.[5] They divorced in 1940[1] and six years later she married theatrical agent Frederick John Cover, managing director of Central Casting.[3]

• Kid Boots with Leslie Henson at the Winter Garden, London (1926)[6]
• Sunny as "Sue Warren" at the Empire Theatre, Sydney (1927)[6]
• Rio Rita as "Carmen" at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne (1929)[7]
• Whoopee! at the Empire Theatre, Sydney (1929)[8]
• The Patsy (play by Barry Conners) as the nasty elder sister (1944)[9]
• Anna Christie for the John Alden Company with Leonard Thiele and Lyndall Barbour (1951)[10]
• A Victorian Marriage (1951 play by Warwick Fairfax)[11]

In 1950 she won the Macquarie Network's award for "best performance by an actress in a supporting role" (in "Edward, My Son").[12]

In 1980, she was appointed by her stage name Queenie Ashton a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her services to the performing arts.[13]

• Read more about Queenie Ashton, and listen to an oral history interview done with her on the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia's website.
• Visit the National Film and Sound Archive's Women in Early Radio collection for more information about the history of women in radio in Australia.
• Queenie Ashton at IMDb