Ann Juliet Ace (born 27 June 1938) is a dramatist and playwright who wrote for EastEnders and The District Nurse. She has contributed many original scripts and dramatisations to BBC Radio drama, including The Archers. Her screenplay for the Welsh film Cameleon saw the movie win the Golden Spire Award for Best Dramatic Television Feature at the 1998 San Francisco International Film Festival.Juliet Ace was the third daughter of Charles and Glenys Ace, born and brought up 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 inoporated into the University of Warwick), where she specialised in Drama and Art, and then trained at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama.She taught for three years in St Mary Cray before joining a children’s theatre and then working in The Grand Theatre, Swansea for two seasons, in weekly repertory. In 1964, she began to work in Special Education, working with children with special needs.After her marriage to Richard Alexander in 1966 she moved to Dartmouth in Devon where her husband worked as a civilian lecturer in 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, now a theatre director and drama teacher. At the same time, Juliet continued working with special needs, privately and in local schools, and directed and acted with local drama groups.She 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 of this workshop 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 AwardRadio led to 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 more-troubled 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 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, is a testament to experience.Juliet Ace lives in London.In September 2014 she was made a Fellow of the renamed Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance, in a ceremony which also made Katie Mitchell and Jenny Sealey Honorary Fellows.Her dramatisations for radio include Love Story, The Marseilles Trilogy, and Lynne Reid Banks's The L-Shaped Room.Her radio plays include Her Infinite Variety, Small Parts, Dead-Heading the Roses, Skin and Chocolate Frigates.
$400,000
