Jane Arden

Actor · Director · Writer

Pontypool, Wales, UK

October 29, 1927

Biography

Jane Arden (29 October 1927 – 20 December 1982) was a Welsh film director, actress, screenwriter, playwright, songwriter, and poet. Arden was born Norah Patricia Morris at 47 Twmpath Road, Pontypool, Monmouthshire.[1] She studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, England, and began her career in the late 1940s on television and in the cinema. She appeared in a television production of Romeo and Juliet in the late 1940s, and then starred in two British crime films: Black Memory (1947) directed by Oswald Mitchell – which provided South African-born actor Sid James with his first screen credit (billed as Sydney James) – and Richard M. Grey's A Gunman Has Escaped (1948). There are copies of both films in the BFI National Archive, but the copy of A Gunman Has Escaped is incomplete.