(1953-2016) – Comedian and Actress

Victoria Wood was born in Prestwich in Lancashire in 1953. Her father bought her a piano for her fifteenth birthday and she joined the Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop the same year. She went on to study Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, and whilst still an undergraduate, she appeared on the talent show New Faces. A comedian, actress, lyricist,, singer, composer, pianist, screenwriter, producer and director, Wood’s talents were endless. She wrote and starred in dozens of sketches, plays, musicals, films and sitcoms over several decades and her live comedy act was interspersed with her own compositions which she performed at the piano. 

‘If you behave normally, people treat you normally. It’s only when you act as if you’re someone special that they feel obliged to stand on ceremony.’

Lucy Hannah

Read more: https://www.stylist.co.uk/people/lucy-mangan/victoria-wood-tribute-celebration-women-in-comedy-confidence-courage-career-feminism-inspiration/147992

(1912-2014) – Actress and Dancer

Do you remember that cute old Indian woman who was in films like Bhaji on the Beach and Bend It Like Beckham? I was astounded to learn that she was eighty-one when she was in Bhaji on the Beach and ninety in Bend It Like Beckham. That’s when I wanted to know more about this energetic older woman with a lust for life. 

Zohra Mumtaz Sehgal (born Sahibzadi Zohra Mumtazullah Khan Begum) was born on 27 April 1912 and died on 10 July 2014. She was an Indian actress, dancer and choreographer, who started in a contemporary dance troupe and then began acting in the 1940s. She appeared in several British films, television shows and Bollywood productions in a career that spanned over six decades. These include Neecha Nagar, The Mystic Masseur (2001), Dil Se.. (1998) and the TV serials The Jewel in the Crown (1984), Tandoori Nights (1985–87) and Amma and Family (1996). At the age of 90, she played the central character in the 2002 film Chalo Ishq Ladaaye. Considered the doyenne of Indian theatre, she acted with the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) and Prithviraj Kapoor’s Prithvi Theatre for fourteen years and won numerous awards.

Sharmilla Beezmohun

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zohra_Sehgal

June Ingrid Givanni was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and grew up in the UK. She was co-ordinator of the Greater London Council’s Third Eye Film Festival in 1983, and during the 1980s was active in working for the creation of specialist distribution circuits for the work of black and Third World filmmakers. She created and was responsible for managing the African Caribbean Unit at the British Film Institute, and compiled the first comprehensive directory of black and Asian films in the UK, as well as starting, with Gaylene Gould, the BFI’s Black Film Bulletin (1993–96). Givanni has worked with various international film festivals, guest-curating African and African diaspora films eg at the Sao Paulo Short Film Festival, Brazil, the Kerala International Film Festival, India, Images Caraibes, Martinique and Creteil Film Festival, Paris. Givanni has served on film juries at African film festivals such as FESPACO (from 1985), Zanzibar Festival of the Dhow Countries, the All Africa Film Awards in South Africa and others. Her publications include the edited volumes Remote Control: Dilemmas of Black Intervention in British Film and TV (1996) and Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image (2001). She runs the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) in London, a personal collection of films, ephemera, manuscripts, publications, audio, photography, posters documenting pan-African cinema. In 2018 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by SOAS, University of London. 

June’s pioneering work and continued commitment to ensure that her film archives get out into the wider world are a real example of how to make women’s work visible.

Sharmilla Beezmohun

Read more: http://www.junegivannifilmarchive.com/

Back to 50 Inspirational Women

(1965 on) – Actress

Viola Davis is an American actress and producer. The recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award and two Tony Awards, she is the only African-American to achieve the triple crown of acting. She released a memoir in April 2022, Finding Me, described by Bernardine Evaristo as ‘a mind-blowing and emotionally honest tale of survival against all odds’. At the age of fifty-six, she starred in The Woman King, a historical epic inspired by the true events that happened in the Kingdom of Dahomey, one of the most powerful states of Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for which she endured nine months of warrior and weapons training. 

Sarah Sanders

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_Davis

On Oprah’s Book Club discussing her memoir: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc8JV4GRvxY

(1906-1985) – Actress

Born in Kansas, USA, Mary Louise Brooks was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s, regarded as an icon of the Jazz Age and flapper culture, in part due to the bob hairstyle that she helped to popularize during the prime of her career. At the age of fifteen, Brooks began her career as a dancer. As a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York, she came to the attention of Paramount Pictures producer Walter Wanger, and was signed to a five-year contract with the studio. She appeared in supporting roles in various Paramount films before taking the heroine’s role in Beggars of Life (1928). Brooks went to Germany in 1929 and starred in three feature films which launched her to international stardom: Pandora’s Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Miss Europe (1930). By 1938, she had starred in seventeen silent films and eight sound films. After retiring from acting, she fell upon financial hardship and struggled with alcoholism. Following the rediscovery of her films by cinephiles in the 1950s, Brooks began writing articles about her film career; her insightful essays drew considerable acclaim. She published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982.

A beautiful woman from the silent movie era. I copied her iconic look in my teens and loved her elegance and style. 

Lucy Davies

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Brooks

(1963 on) – Survivalist, Entrepreneur and Television Personality

Born in Chicago, USA, Sue Aikens is a popular TV personality, producer and entrepreneur. She is the lead cast member of Life Below Zero (2013 on), a National Geographic Channel documentary TV show that captures her life in the wild. She moved to Alaska with her mother at around the age of twelve. Aikens has a huge fan base across the globe, drawn to her adventurous spirit. Her extraordinary survival skills, perseverance, determination and courage, displayed in the Alaskan jungle, inspire many. She has faced attacks by wild animals and the harshest weather conditions, none of which has deterred her from her adventurous pursuits. She also runs Kavik River Camp.

I am obsessed with this show and Sue is my favourite character. She is a true eccentric living off grid on her own in the arctic circle. Her courage, bravery and crazy lifestyle is really fascinating. 

Lucy Davies

Read more: https://www.looper.com/483288/what-you-didnt-know-about-life-below-zero-star-sue-aikens/

Healthcare Activist

Winnie Ssanyu Sseruma is a freelance international development consultant based in London, working mainly on access to healthcare, focusing on black communities in the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa. Winnie has twenty years’ experience as an HIV treatment activist, highlighting the impact of HIV on women and people living with HIV. Winnie served for two years on the Terrence Higgins Trust advisory board. She has also led organisations such as the African Health Policy Network (AHPN). She started FFENA, a group of black HIV-positive men and women in the UK, actively engaging, researching, reviewing and advocating on policy issues impacting the lives of people living with HIV in the UK and across the world. Winnie was born in the UK, grew up in Uganda and went to University in the USA where she earned a Sociology degree. She has been living with HIV for years.

Sarah Sanders

Read more: https://www.aidsmap.com/videos/winnie-ssanyu-sseruma-ageing-hiv-grows-project

(1919-2019) – Yoga Practitioner

V. Nanammal was born in 1920 into an agricultural family in Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, India. At the age of eight, she learned yoga from her father, eventually mastering more than fifty asanas. She became India’s oldest yoga practitioner and teacher, and by the end of her life had taught more than a million people (100 students a day). She won many awards, including the Padma Shri. Nanammal was ninety-nine when she died and was still practicing yoga every day. She was known by her simple pink saree which she practised in, and she wore it on YouTube in her last few years.  At the age of seventy-six, she accompanied her grandchildren to a yoga competition, where she saw a judge wrongly disqualify a participant. 

‘I disagreed with the decision and went on stage to voice my opinion, only to be insulted by the judges as an old woman who did not know anything,’ she said. ‘I performed ten different yoga asanas including the peacock and the headstand, right there on stage and received a standing ovation.’

Lucy Hannah

Read more: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-50194850

(1940 on) – Social Services Council Worker

Full disclosure here, Rena Khublall is a distant relative of mine. She’s someone I’ve known ever since I can remember. But it was only when I took author and historian Colin Grant to meet my Rena and her husband, David Khublall, for his book Homecoming that I fully heard her life story and her deep-seated politics of racial equality.

Born in the then-named British Guiana, Rena and David, like many tens of thousands of others, came from the Caribbean in the 1960s to try their luck in London, separating from their three eldest children for five years in the process – a heart-breaking decision taken by so many parents. They built their lives in west London, but Rena remembers the racism and the fightback, particularly from the Jamaicans. She’s an unassuming, quiet woman whose life experience and work as a council and social services worker have given her real fortitude and an understanding of the need for solidarity and tolerance. 

Sharmilla Beezmohun

Read more: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/the-story-of-windrush/

Photograph C/o Christian Cassiel/English Heritage – Rena with her husband David

(1929-2022) – Teacher

SMH was ninety-three when she died in August 2022. She lived as part of the Dominican Sisters of St. Siena in Stone, Staffordshire. Headmistress of my girls’ school, she was a leading light in the local Geographical Society and ran the chess and cycling proficiency clubs in two schools, as well as being a sub-prioress. She dedicated her life to the education of girls at a time when many were simply being prepared to be wives and mothers, and she was adored by the ‘naughty’ girls who felt seen and understood by her. She was still teaching in her nineties and, even then, always had a look of mischievousness about her, as if she were used to being underestimated but, in fact, knew the world very well – she was extremely well-travelled. The most unlikely thing about her was her love of motorbikes. She had a moped which she’d ride around on (too fast), dressed in black leather, from which she would emerge in full habit – her obituary described her as emerging from it like a butterfly from its chrysalis. When it was warmer, she’d ride around with her veil flapping behind her in the wind (probably dangerous). She was one of the few high-achieving women I knew growing up and taught us that we didn’t have to be defined by the expectations of others. 

Sarah Sanders

Read more: https://www.stonedominicans.org/news/276-sister-mary-henry-yeaman-o-p-obituary