To Be a Woman

The Life of Jill Craigie

By: Carl Rollyson

Narrated by: Helen Lloyd

Jill Craigie - filmmaker, writer, pioneering feminist, and devoted wife to former Labour leader Michael Foot - led an extraordinary life. Strikingly attractive, fiercely independent, and politically radical, Craigie established a reputation as a filmmaker with her 1944 film Out of Chaos, becoming the first female director to gain national attention.

Talented and versatile, she wrote several film scripts, numerous articles, radio plays, and successful columns, but she always struggled as a woman and a socialist in a male-dominated, conservative industry. Her 50-year marriage to Michael Foot, the love of her life, involved her in politics at the highest level. The couple's mutual interest in literature and the arts made their Hampstead house a meeting place for artists, writers, actors, and politicians alike.

Carl Rollyson has created an intimate and honest portrait of this charismatic figure, who never ceased to push the boundaries of what it meant to be a 20th-century woman.

©2004 Carl Rollyson (P)2015 Carl Rollyson