Jane Arden was born in Wales in 1927 and left for London in her teens.
She trained at RADA and quickly began working as an actress and
playwright. It was there that she met her future husband,
Philip Saville, who is now perhaps most
known for his work
Boys from the Blackstuff (1982)
and
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986).
They had 2 children, Sebastian Saville
and Dominic Saville and one step- child,
Elizabeth Saville.
Jane Arden's plays include
The Thug (1959)
which starred Alan Bates,
The Party (1958) which was directed by
Charles Laughton and gave
Albert Finney his first role in the
theatre, Post Mortem (1999),
_The New Communion For Freaks, Prophets and Witches (1999)_,
Der Illusionist (1983) and Vagina
Rex and the Gas Oven (1969).
Jane Arden began tracing female oppression in 1966 when she wrote a
script for the film
The Logic Game (1965).
It was described as a "surrealist puzzle" attempting to locate the
isolation of women in the context of bourgeois marriage.
Arden's film career includes her original script and her performance in
Separation (1968), which featured the
song "Salad Days" by Procol Harum and was
directed by Jane Arden's collaborator
Jack Bond. In this film, women's'
exploitation was exposed as their personal dilemma began to take on a
political context.
Arden formed the feminist theatre group "Holocaust" and then wrote a
play with the same name. In 1972, she adapted and directed this for the
cinema as
The Other Side of the Underneath (1972).
Before her involvement with the Women's Liberation Movement, she
appeared on TV talk programmes like
Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life (1964)
as a speaker on women and politics. As an actress, she was best known
for her performance as "Inez" in a BBC-TV production of
Jean-Paul Sartre
Huis clos (1965), opposite
Harold Pinter as "Garcia".
Two more films, both co-directed with
Jack Bond, followed in the later
1970s, the experimental Vibration (1974), made in the USA in 1974, and
Anti-Clock (1979) which opened the
1979 London Film Festival. It was the fist film to use video techniques
in an experimental way. Her poetry books include "You Don't Know What
You Want, Do You?". Jane Arden committed suicide on Dec. 20, 1982 in
North Yorkshire and is buried in Darlington West Cemetary. She was 55
years old.
