Jenny Runacre

Jenny Runacre is an actress and theater director who was born in Cape Town in 1946 and grew up in London, where she attended the Actors' Workshop and trained in the Stanislavski System. A fellow student, Tom Busby, brought her to an American production casting English actresses to play opposite John Cassavetes, and her audition won her the part of Mary Tynan in Husbands (1970), her first important film role. After a year in the London production of Oh! Calcutta!, she appeared in The Canterbury Tales, The Mackintosh Man (1973), The Final Programme (1973), The Passenger (1975) and The Duellists (1977), and she played Elizabeth I in Derek Jarman's Jubilee (1978). Her television work included Brideshead Revisited and Lovejoy. She also appeared in The Witches (1990) and The Edge of Love (2008), and she went on to direct Frozen in 2007, nominated for Best Direction at the LOST Theatre Festival, and Gullibility Factor at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe.