Moira Winslow

Moira Winslow (b. Broughty Ferry, Dundee, 29/12/1931 - d. England, 05/03/2015) was an actress, drama teacher and road safety activist.

Biography

English-born actress Moira Christian Gray married South African cricketer Paul Winslow when, in 1955, he came to England with Jack Cheetham’s team. She had studied at the Central School of Dramatic Art in London and at the time she was touring with the all-women play Women of Twilight, by Sylvia Rayman. After their marriage they first moved to what was then Rhodesia, where she worked for RTV and had her own radio programme, Home at 11 with Moira Winslow. In 1964 the couple moved to Durban, where she taught speech and drama at St. Mary’s Diocesan School for Girls in Kloof and afterwards at St. Mary’s in Waverley, Johannesburg. This was followed by a position as lecturer at the School of Dramatic Art at the University of the Witwatersrand.

At that time she was approached by Douglas Bristow, the original producer of the SABC’s first English-language soap opera The Villagers (1976-78) to take the role of Nel Clay, the disliked anti-Afrikaans wife of the deputy mine manager of Village Reef. Actor Dale Cutts played her equally disagreeable husband. She also acted in the films 40 Days (Franz Marx/1979), The Demon (Percival Rubens/1981) and Running Riot (Koos Roets/2006), while on stage she appeared in The Killing of Sister George (1979) at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town. She also presented a late night revue entitled The Winslow Girl at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 1980.

However, she became especially well known as the outspoken founder and chairperson of the Drive Alive campaign. This was launched in 1989 after her daughter, her son and two grandchildren were killed in a horrific car accident. Her husband died in 2011 and ill health forced her to move to England to live with a surviving daughter, Lesley. When she left, both the Automobile Association and the Minister of Transport paid tribute to her for her contribution to the promotion of road safety in South Africa. Her and Paul's story is told in the documentary No Time for Goodbyes (Darryl Els/2009). (FO)