Juliet Ace


Ann Juliet Ace 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, which won the Golden Spire Award for Best Dramatic Television Feature at the 1998 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Early life and teaching

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, 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, 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.

Stage and radio

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
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 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 ', 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, is a testament to experience.
Her other radio plays include ', Small Parts, Dead-Heading the Roses, Skin and Chocolate Frigates. Her dramatisations for radio include Love Story, , and Lynne Reid Banks's The L-Shaped Room.
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. As described by the publisher: "The plays are particularly suitable for GCSE course work. Each play is accompanied by a short preamble, and there is a follow-up section consisting of biographical notes on the playwrights and ideas for discussion, improvisation and follow-up work. Each play has been specially written for the series."
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." 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] 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 in March 2020, with the Welsh actor Pam Ferris taking the role of Mattie

Public appreciation

Juliet Ace lives in London. 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.
Ace was part of an answer in a Trivial Pursuit Quiz Machine in a pub in Southend, Essex: Question. What links Ace, Bravo and Mills? Answer: they were all Juliet.

Radio plays

Notes:

Further radio, audio and stage work

Twelve episodes for the expatriate BBC soap, beginning with Episode 13 shown on 3 August 1992

Films for television