Ruth Cracknell
Born Ruth Winifred Cracknell
6 July 1925
Maitland, New South Wales, Australia
Died 13 May 2002 (aged 76)
Sydney, Australia
Ruth Winifred Cracknell AM (6 July 1925 – 13 May 2002) was an Australian character and comic actress and author, her career encompassing all genres including radio, theatre, television and film She appeared in many dramatic as well as comedy roles throughout a career spanning some 56 years.
Cracknell’s first acting jobs were in radio. By 1946, she was performing five episodes of radio plays a week. She also performed on stage with the Sydney based companies the Independent Theatre and the Mercury Theatre. In 1948, she joined the John Alden Company and had roles in King Lear, Measure for Measure and The Tempest. In 1952, at the age of 27, she left Australia to work in London for two years.
Cracknell appeared in many TV serial productions, and made for TV films, one of her first roles was Reflections in Dark Glasses a one=-ff drama broadcast in 1960 and the 1973 award-winning ABC-TV dramatisation of Ethel Turner’s Australian children’s classic Seven Little Australians. She was a hostess of children television series Play School in the mid to late 1960s. In the 1980s she guest starred in A Country Practice
Cracknell is most well known for her role in the ABC television series Mother and Son. Written by Geoffrey Atherden, who previously had written The Aunty Jack Show, he based the series on the writer’s own family experience, Mother and Son first screened on 16 January 1984; it continued for six seasons for over a decade and is often repeated. Cracknell played an elderly woman, Maggie Beare, who was slowly becoming senile. She was cared for by her long-suffering younger son Arthur (Garry McDonald), (who also appeared on The Aunty Jack Show) to whom she was often indifferent but on whom she was also dependent and whom she often cynically played off against her self-centred older son Robert (Henri Szeps) and daughter-in-law Liz (played by Judy Morris).
Cracknell died of a respiratory illness in a Sydney nursing home on 13 May 2002, aged 76, shortly after a visit from her children, Anna Jeffery, Jane Moore and Jonathan Phillips. She was also survived by seven grandchildren. Paul McDermott’s film The Scree, which was released in 2004, featured Cracknell’s narration.
In 2001, Cracknell was awarded the TV Week Logie Hall of Fame for her services to Australian television. Her appearance at the ceremony was the last before her death. She was the first Logie Hall of Fame recipient who has appeared on a TV show which also won the Logie Hall of Fame (Play School, awarded in 2006), the second being Noni Hazelhurst (having been inducted in 2016).
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