Ruth Cracknell

Ruth Winifred Cracknell AM (6 July 1925 – 13 May 2002) was an Australian character and comic actress, comedienne and author, her career encompassing all genres including radio, theatre, television and film. She appeared in many dramatic as well as comedy roles throughout a career spanning some 56 years. In theatre she was well known for her Shakespeare roles. Cracknell was born in 1925 in Maitland, New South Wales to Charles and Winifred Cracknell. When she was four years old, the family moved to Sydney. She was educated at North Sydney Girls High School and, after graduating, worked at the Ku-ring-gai Council as a clerk. At 17 she was taken to the theatre by a friend. She immediately wanted to become an actress and joined the Modern Theatre Players drama school. Cracknell's first acting jobs were in radio. By 1946, she was performing five episodes of radio plays a week. She also performed on stage with the Sydney-based companies the Independent Theatre and the Mercury Theatre. In 1948, she joined the John Alden Company and had roles in King Lear, Measure for Measure and The Tempest. In 1952, at the age of 27, she left Australia to work in London for two years. Cracknell appeared in many TV serial productions, and made for TV films. One of her first roles was Reflections in Dark Glasses, a one-off drama broadcast in 1960 and the 1973 award-winning ABC-TV dramatisation of Ethel Turner's Australian children's classic Seven Little Australians. She was a hostess of children television series Play School in the mid to late 1960s. In the 1980s she guest starred in A Country Practice. Cracknell is best known for her role in the ABC television series Mother and Son. Written by Geoffrey Atherden, who previously had written The Aunty Jack Show, he based the series on the writer's own family experience. Mother and Son first screened on 16 January 1984; it continued for six seasons for over a decade and is often repeated. Cracknell played an elderly woman, Maggie Beare, who was slowly becoming senile. She was cared for by her long-suffering younger son Arthur (Garry McDonald), to whom she was often indifferent but on whom she was also dependent and whom she often cynically played off against her self-centred older son Robert (Henri Szeps) and daughter-in-law Liz (played by Judy Morris). Cracknell appeared in film productions including opposite Chips Rafferty in the 1958 classic Smiley Gets a Gun, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), The Night the Prowler (1978) and The Dismissal as Margaret Whitlam in 1983. Later in 1996, she starred opposite Toni Collette in Lilian's Story as Sydney eccentric Beatrice Miles. Cracknell married Eric Phillips on 25 June 1957 and they had three children, Anna, Jane and Jonathan. Unlike many women of the time, she did not retire, but continued to act. Cracknell died of a respiratory illness in a Sydney nursing home on 13 May 2002, aged 76, shortly after a visit from her children. She was buried at the Parish Church of Saint James in Sydney. Cracknell published two autobiographical books: A Biased Memoir in 1997 and Journey from Venice in 1999. She also wrote a children's book called The Ruth Cracknell Pocket Book of Australian Animals in 1994. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 1980 and named by the National Trust as one of the 100 Australia's Living National Treasures in 1998. In 2001, she became the first woman to be inducted into the Logies Hall of Fame.