Liane Aukin, who has died aged 80, is probably most widely remembered for casting and directing Alan Howard in War Music, Christopher Logue’s retelling of the Iliad in modern dramatic speech. This began in 1981 as a radio project before moving to the Almeida theatre, then on a British Council tour to Athens, and leading to a sequel, Kings – at every phase produced and directed by Aukin, culminating in the appearance of Kings at the National Theatre 10 years later.
Also a writer, actor and, in later life, a psychotherapist, Aukin was a lifelong supporter of women’s rights. This took various forms, including the writing of a musical, Silver Lady (Birmingham Rep, 1984), about Ivy Benson’s all-girl band; co-editing the Greenham Common magazine, The Greenham Factor; producing a season of plays by women at the Leicester Haymarket, in the 1960s; and publishing research on Florence Nightingale.
Of central importance was her attachment to a network of female colleagues who offered support to theatrical newcomers. One of these was Timberlake Wertenbaker, whose play Case to Answer (1980) had been accepted for the Soho Poly by Verity Bargate. Bargate proposed Aukin as its director. Meeting her, Wertenbaker says, “was like entering a brightly lit room, full of surprising things”, going on to say that she worked with actors “as if she directed from the inside out”. On another occasion Wertenbaker remembers her sitting at the piano and playing a Bach Partita from memory.
Born in London, Liane was the first child of Jewish immigrant parents: her father, Charles Aukin, was a solicitor and her mother, Regina (nee Unger), a gifted musician from whom she inherited the keyboard prowess that most distinguished her at St Paul’s girls’ school, Hammersmith. She also wanted to act, and at 16 she joined the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she overlapped with the generation of Peter O’Toole and Albert Finney. On leaving, she found work in theatres all over the country including London, where she played the “cold, fat and greedy” French queen in John Arden’s Left-Handed Liberty at the Mermaid.
Her marriage to the director Robin Midgley in the late 1960s lasted six years, after which she diversified into film and television, including featured roles in Terence Fisher’s The Phantom of the Opera (1962), John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), then, in 1976, the role of Aelia in the BBC’s acclaimed adaptation of I, Claudius.
However, as she paradoxically remarked to a friend around this time, “acting is too passive”. By the end of the decade she had moved into radio and television, where she had the scope to follow her other creative drives. She began with a series of radio plays that won Society of Authors awards in 1980 and 1981. By choice she never took a staff job, but thrived on freelance contract work, which included writing numerous episodes of EastEnders and one of Minder, adapting Beowulf for Nancy Meckler’s Freehold Theatre Company, and picking up a Writers’ Guild award for her adaptation of Zinovy Zinik’s The Mushroom Picker. As a producer, she fought for her writers, male or female, as in the case of Mike Leigh’s radio play, Too Much of a Good Thing (1979), for which she negotiated an unheard of three-week rehearsal period, on location and in costume.
When, in later life, she changed career again and qualified as a psychotherapist, this was not a bid for security. As Wertenbaker said: “It was something she wanted to do. She followed her interest.” She began a successful private practice and continued it for the rest of her life, together with running therapeutic writing groups at the Willesden Centre for Psychological Treatment, and playing the piano until the end.
“It’s bloody boring getting old,” she said in a late email to a friend; “but keep singing away, it’s the best way to forget the things we don’t enjoy.”
She is survived by her sons Ben and Nick, five grandchildren and her brother David.
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