Carla Lane
| Carla Lane OBE |
|
|---|---|
| Born | Roma Barrack 5 August 1928 West Derby, Liverpool, England |
| Died | 31 May 2016 (aged 87) Mossley Hill, Liverpool, England |
| Occupation | Screenwriter |
| Nationality | British |
| Period | 1969–2016 |
| Genre | Television |
| Notable works |
|
| Spouse | Eric Arthur Hollins (m. 1948; div. 1981) |
| Children | 2 |
Roma Barrack (5 August 1928 – 31 May 2016), known professionally as Carla Lane, OBE, was an English television writer responsible for several successful sitcoms, including The Liver Birds (co-creator, 1969–78), Butterflies (1978–83) and Bread (1986–91). Described as "the television writer who dared to make women funny", much of her work focused on strong women characters, including "frustrated housewives and working class matriarchs". In later years she became well known as an animal welfare advocate.
Lane was born in West Derby, Liverpool. Her father, Cardiff-born Gordon De Vince Barrack, served in the Merchant Navy. She attended a convent school and, aged seven, won a school poetry prize. Lane grew up in West Derby and Heswall. She left school aged 14, and worked in nursing. According to her autobiography, she married at 17 and had two sons by the age of 19, though official records indicate that she was 19 when she married.
In the 1960s, Lane wrote short stories and radio scripts. Her first successes came in collaboration with Myra Taylor, whom she had met at a writers' workshop in Liverpool. Lane and Taylor would often meet at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool city centre to write. She said that she used a pseudonym, "Carla Lane", because of her modesty about revealing that she was a writer.
With Taylor, she submitted some comedy sketch scripts to the BBC, where they were seen by the head of comedy Michael Mills. He encouraged them to write a half-hour script, which was broadcast as a pilot episode of The Liver Birds in April 1969. A short first series followed, to little acclaim, but Mills then declined to produce a second series, changing his mind when Lane and Taylor wrote a series of new scripts. The series became one of the most popular of the time, characterised by Lane's "ability to conjure laughs out of pathos and life's little tragedies", and, from 1973, Lane took sole responsibility for writing the scripts.
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