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The Newlyn-based author Judith Cook who died yesterday,
aged 70, will not only be greatly missed by those close to her but by
the community at large and, of course, by her many readers.
Sadly, she was due to join a group of her fellow crime writers in a discussion
"Murder in Mind" at the Daphne du Maurier Festival in Fowey
on the day she died. A multi-talented lady, an investigative journalist
and playwright as well as author, who had lived and worked in Cornwall
for the past 44 years, for several years she was a regular contributor
to The Guardian, and it was a series of profiles which she wrote for that
paper which provided the material for her first published book on famous
theatre directors.
In the 1970s she was a political journalist in the House of Commons,
and in the 1980s was given the Campaigning Journalist Award for the work
she had done on the effects of pesticides on people and the environment.
A part-time lecturer in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre at Exeter University,
she had worked in the professional theatre for the past 18 years.
In the early 1990s she was the Arts Council resident dramatist at the
Theatre Royal, Plymouth. and four years ago her adaptation of Anthony
Trollope's The Barchester Chronicles was staged at the Chichester Festival
Theatre.
On the local theatre scene, as a founder member of the Rose Theatre Company
she directed a series of productions in Penlee Park Open Air Theatre;
among them her own adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn, and
two years ago an enjoyable version of Tom Jones, while many will also
still remember her production of The Lady's Not For Burning in St Mary's
Church Festival.
A writer for whom outsiders, rebels, people willing to stand up against
authority and be counted, always had special appeal, undoubtedly Judith
Cook's best known book in her adopted Cornwall was To Brave Every Danger,
a compelling account of the incredible adventures of the Cornish girl
Mary Bryant published a decade ago. Her most controversial book, however,
was the one she wrote concerning the mysterious death of the anti-nuclear
campaigner Hilda Murrell, which she later adapted as the stage play Unlawful
Killing, performed at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London.
The author of acclaimed biographies of Daphne du Maurier, J B Priestley,
and of the Elizabethan self-made doctor Dr Simon Forman, her latest book
The Pirate Queen, which tells of the Irish pirate Grace O'Malley, was
published earlier this year. A member of the Crime Writers Association,
whose reputation as a writer of whodunits had soared in recent years,
her next crime novel, Keeper's Gold is due to be published later this
year.
Outspoken, one who was never afraid to voice her opinions about either
local or national political or social issues, to praise as well as criticise,
last summer after recovering from a serious illness, for example, she
was quick to express her gratitude for the excellent treatment she had
received from the National Health Service.
Only last Saturday Judith Cook married her partner of some 27 years,
fellow writer Martin Green.
Sadly, we can now only imagine what she might have said about the irony
of the sudden sad event which has robbed her husband, family and friends,
not to say the whole of Penwith, of such a creative person - a writer
extraordinaire if ever there was one.
article copyright © THE CORNISHMAN
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