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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Pioneering playwright and writer on spirituality
Patricia Joudry passed away quietly in Powell River, B.C. on October 28, 2000,
ten days after her 79th birthday.</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Joudry was the first Canadian playwright, already
in the 1950s and early 1960s, to have her work produced on radio, television and
the stage in Canada, the U.S. and England. In 1957 she shared the Woman of the
Year Award with Gabrielle Roy as Canada's outstanding woman in literature and
art. In the 1990s, her spiritual study Twin Souls, co-authored with Maurie
Pressman, was published in Canada, the U.S., England, Australia, Bulgaria, the
Netherlands and Brazil.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Patricia Joudry was born in Spirit River, Alberta,
on October 18, 1921 and began acting with Dorothy Davis' Children's Theatre in
Montreal at the age of 15. She sold her first radio play (for $50) to the CBC
before she was 19. In Toronto she wrote and starred (at $75 a week) in the CBC
radio series "Penny's Diary" broadcast nationally from 1940 to 1943. The popular
situation comedy about a teen-age girl and her family won Joudry a seven-year
contract (at a starting salary of $25,000 a year) in 1945 to co-author
"The Aldrich Family" in New York. The series was the highest paid radio comedy
program in North America. Joudry was just twenty-four years old. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>After four years with "The Aldrich Family," Joudry
returned to Canada in order to pursue more serious dramatic writing for CBC
radio and television. Andrew Allan and Esse Ljung produced six of her one-hour
radio dramas on the CBC Stage series from 1951 to 1956. She also had four
television dramas produced on the CBC from 1953 to 1957. When Andrew Allan first
produced Joudry's drama <EM>Teach Me How to Cry</EM> as a sixty minute radio
play on CBC Stage April 19, 1953, Joudry herself and Don Harron played the two
young lovers. Henry Kaplan's October 13, 1953 CBC Theatre television version
starred Toby Robins, Neil Vipond, Kate Reid, John Drainie, Murray Davis, and
Eric House.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>By 1954 Joudry had written over 250 radio scripts
but found no professional Canadian theatres interested in her work. The Crest
Theatre in Toronto turned down <EM>Teach Me How to Cry</EM>, her most successful
drama, subsequently staged off-Broadway in New York in 1955. Brooks Atkinson
praised the play in the <EM>New York Times</EM> and Universal-International
Studios bought movie rights for $25,000.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Joudry was divorced from her first husband Delmar
Dinsdale in 1952. Assisted by her second husband, the photographer John Steele,
as producer, she attempted to finance the staging of her plays in Toronto but
was unsuccessful and moved to England in 1957. There Steele produced a
successful five-week run of <EM>Teach Me How to Cry</EM>, with an all-Canadian
cast directed by Leon Major, in 1958, the first all-Canadian production to play
the London West End. In England, Joudry wrote the drama <EM>Semi-Detached
</EM>about the prejudice of an English-Canadian household in Montreal against a
French-Canadian family living in an adjoining home. The play was again rejected
by the Crest Theatre and Gratien Gelinas' Comedie-Canadienne in Montreal but was
bought by Broadway producer Phillip Rose in 1959. Warner Brothers purchased film
rights for $100,000. After a month-long tour, <EM>Semi-Detached </EM>closed
after a few performances on Broadway in March of 1960. Brooks Atkinson wrote in
the <EM>New York Times </EM>that in America "our racial prejudices have
different faces."</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Unable to make a consistent living from her
playwriting, Joudry and her five daughters often struggled with dire poverty in
England in the 1960s. With John Steele, she transformed a dilapidated fourteenth
century English farmhouse in the Cotswold Hills of England into an alternative
"free" school, constantly battling creditors and the conformist nature of
compulsory public school education. For a decade her home Shornhill also became
a spiritual centre where Joudry explored eastern religions, radionics,
spiritualism and transcendental meditation. During this period she wrote dozens
of experimental and metaphysical plays "transmitted" to her from the beyond by
authors such as George Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare, Chekhov, O'Neill, Oscar Wilde,
James Barrie and Willa Cather.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Joudry returned to Canada in 1973 after creditors
finally closed down Shornhill. Tundra Books published two autobiographical
accounts about her experiences in England, <EM>And the Children Played </EM>and
<EM>Spirit River to Angel's Roost: Religions I Have Loved and Left</EM>.
Joudry's artistic and spiritual search is also reflected in her fiction.
McClelland and Stewart published <EM>The Dweller on the Threshold </EM>in 1973
and her three-generation Prairie novel, <EM>The Selena Tree </EM>in 1980.
Joudry's finest realistic novel, <EM>The Selena Tree </EM>portrays the tragic
struggle for survival, realized only two generations later, by an artist in a
small Prairie frontier town in the early 1900s.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>By the time she returned to Canada, Joudry's style
of comic writing and spiritual themes failed to interest the newly emerging
Canadian professional theatres of the 1970s and 1980s. Her comedy <EM>A Very
Modest Orgy</EM>, produced by 25th Street Theatre in Saskatoon in 1981, was her
first stage play to receive a production in Canada in twenty-four years. Shortly
before her death, Joudry was gratified to see the republication of <EM>Twin
Souls </EM>by Hazelden in the U.S. Her vast reincarnation novel <EM>The
Continuing City</EM>, in which four pairs of separated lovers search for each
other over eons of time, and her recently completed autobiography <EM>My Life as
Patricia Joudry</EM> are as yet unpublished. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Joudry's ashes were scattered by her daughter
Rafaele on the seashore of her writing cabin overlooking the ocean near Powell
River. In addition to Rafaele, she is survived by her four other daughters Gay,
Sherry, Stefania, and Felicity. </FONT></DIV>
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