Hazel Adair (screenwriter)
Hazel Adair | |
---|---|
Born | Hazel Joyce Willett 9 July 1920 British India |
Died | 22 November 2015 England, UK | (aged 95)
Pen name | Hazel Adair Claire Nicol |
Occupation |
|
Language | English language |
Nationality | British |
Spouse | Gordon Mackenzie (1940–1949) Ronald Marriott (1950–1972) |
Children | 6 |
Hazel Joyce Marriott (née Willett; 9 July 1920 – 22 November 2015), known professionally as Hazel Adair, was a British actress turned screenwriter and creator of soap operas for radio and television. She is best known for co-creating Crossroads with Peter Ling.
Early life and career
Hazel Joyce Willett was born in 1920 at Darjeeling, British India,[1] daughter of Ada "Alma" (Rhames) and Edward Willett, an engineer who worked in Calcutta. At 9 months old, her English family returned to England, where her parents divorced in 1923 when she was two years old. Her mother later remarried Edward Hamblin, and she adopted his surname. In 1940, Hazel wed Gordon Mackenzie, a rancher from Brazil. The couple had one son Colin, after WWII her husband returned to Brazil and they divorced in 1949. In 1950, Hazel remarried Ronald Marriott, an actor-writer, who died in 1972, and with whom she had 5 children.[2]
Using Adair as her stage name, she began her career as an actress with parts in the film My Brother Jonathan (1948) and the BBC television drama Lady Precious Stream (1950),[3] originally a stage play by the British Chinese writer Hsiung Shih-I.
She then turned her attention to writing scripts for radio and television. Together with her second husband, Ronald Marriott, she wrote Stranger from Space (1951-52), an episodic serial for the Whirligig children's television series.[4][5]
With Jonquil Antony (later Peter Ling), she wrote scripts for the radio soap opera Mrs Dale's Diary, and with Antony co-created ITV's first soap, Sixpenny Corner,[2] which ran for eight months during 1955 and 1956, five days a week in a 15-minute slot.[3][6]
Soap operas
She formed a professional relationship with Peter Ling. The partnership created Compact (1962–5), based on her experiences working for Woman's Own, and the long-running Crossroads series.[7]
She recalled a working lunch with
With Ling, she wrote for programmes such as
Her other work, Compact, featured the first black actor to appear regularly (Horace James between August and October 1964)[9] and the earliest unmarried mother in a soap, while Crossroads had the first black family to be included in the regular cast of a British soap.[10]
Other work
She had an intermittent career in the film industry. She wrote the script for Life in Emergency Ward 10 (1958), a spin-off film for which she was credited with the series' creator Tessa Diamond, and the Bob Monkhouse movie Dentist on the Job (1961)[11] (with Hugh Woodhouse). In the 1970s she formed Pyramid Films with the broadcaster on wrestling, Kent Walton, with both adopting a joint pen name as the writers of the scripts.[2] The company ventured into producing erotic films such as Virgin Witch (1971) and Game for Vultures (1979) and sex comedies such as Clinic Exclusive (1971) and Keep It Up Downstairs (1976).[12]
She drew on her experiences as an ambulance driver during
Death
She died on 22 November 2015, at the age of 95. She was survived by her six children, 11 grandchildren and 8 great-grandchildren.[13]
References
Notes
- ^ The Crossroads Cookbook, National Library of Australia, retrieved 22 February 2013
- ^ a b c d "Hazel Adair, scriptwriter - obituary". The Telegraph. 26 November 2015. Retrieved 17 August 2021.
- ^ a b c d Hayward, Anthony (23 November 2015). "Hazel Adair obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 November 2015.
- ^ a b "Hazel Adair". The Times. London. 25 November 2015. Retrieved 28 November 2015. (subscription required)
- ^ "Missing or incomplete episodes for programme Whirligig", lostshows.com, Kaleidoscope, retrieved 28 November 2015
- ^ "Missing or incomplete episodes for programme Sixpenny Corner". lostshows.com. Kaleidoscope. Retrieved 27 November 2015.
- ^ Currie (2004), p. 57
- ^ Brown, Mark (20 November 2015). "TV archive discovers couple who beat Kirk and Uhura to first interracial kiss". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 20 November 2015.
- ^ Bourne (2005), p. 174
- ^ Bourne (2005), p. 176
- ^ Fiddy, Dick (27 November 2015). "Hazel Adair: Prolific writer on Emergency - Ward 10 and co-creator of Crossroads". The Independent. Archived from the original on 9 May 2022. Retrieved 28 November 2015.
- ^ Harper (2000), p. 162
- ^ "Crossroads creator Hazel Adair dies aged 95". BBC News. 23 November 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015.
Bibliography
- ISBN 978-0-8264-7898-6
- Currie, Tony (2004), Concise History of British Television:1930–2000, Kelly Publications, ISBN 978-1-9030-5317-1
- Harper, Sue (2000), Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, Continuum International Publishing Group, ISBN 978-1-4411-3498-1
External links
- Hazel Adair at IMDb
- Hazel Adair at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database