Hazel Adair

Hazel Adair (born Hazel Joyce Willett, 9 July 1920 – 22 November 2015) 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.

Born in 1920 at Darjeeling, British India, her British family soon returned to England and her parents divorced when she was two. Her mother later remarried. She herself wed a rancher, Gordon Mackenzie in 1940. The couple had one child, and divorced in 1949.

Adopting 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), 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 Ronald Marriott, her second husband – to whom she was married from 1950 until his death in 1972, and with whom she had five children – she wrote Stranger from Space (1952), an episodic serial for the Whirligig children's television series.

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, which ran for eight months during 1955 and 1956, five days a week in a 15-minute slot.

Adair 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.

Adair recalled a working lunch with ATV head Lew Grade in August 1964 in which he requested the creation of a daily soap opera to be built around Noele Gordon, then in her mid-40s and under contract, to run from the following October. Adair and Ling quickly came up with the format, based around a widow, Meg Richardson, and her motel business. Despite limited production values, it became a hit, although a secondary storyline around the village shop of Richardson's sister was soon eliminated. Initially only screened in the Midland ATV franchise area from November, it was eventually taken up by the entire ITV network, and continued (in its original run) until 1988, although Adair's direct involvement lasted only until the mid-1970s.

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