Jill Hyem

Jill Hyem (8 January 1937 – 5 June 2015) was a British radio and television writer and former actress.

Hyem was born in 1937 in Putney, the daughter of Hilda (née Gladwell) and Rex, a solicitor, and was raised in Devon and East Sheen.

Hyem attended Farlington School, a boarding school in West Sussex, from the age of ten, and studied at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. Early experience as an actress saw her perform at the Connaught Theatre Worthing, where one of her roles was as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, and in films such as The Trunk (1961) with Phil Carey. In 1962 she made her West End debut in Goodnight Mrs Puffin with Irene Handl.

On television, Hyem appeared in Richard the Lionheart (1962) with Dermot Walsh, Dixon of Dock Green (two episodes 1959 and 1960), Sergeant Cork (one episode, 1964), and as Peggy Briggs, the daughter of Jimmy Edwards and Beryl Reid, in the comedy series Bold as Brass (1964).

Playing various minor roles persuaded Hyem that she would do better as a writer and create more challenging parts for women.

Hyem's writing career began to develop when she became one of the principal writers on the radio soap opera The Dales (originally Mrs Dale's Diary). When that series was coming to an end, she was asked to devise a more contemporary replacement (with Alan Downer) and Waggoner's Walk was commissioned. The two writing partners stayed with the series over its 11-year run. She also wrote 30 radio plays including the lesbian love story Now She Laughs, Now She Cries, A Shape Like Piccadilly which tackled adult illiteracy, and the thriller Remember Me with Jill Balcon and Julian Glover which won the annual Giles Cooper award. Several of her radio plays became theatre productions including Equal Terms, Life Sentence and Thank You, which was renamed Post Mortems for the stage. Her original theatre plays include: Buzz, an adaptation of Lorna Doone, and in 2010, We'll Always Have Paris.

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