Actor
At the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, 1968 -70, Yvette was living a carefree existence as a young liberated woman! She had many leads in plays, devised a creative anti-war project about Picasso's Guernica and produced her first extracurricular show: Love is a Four letter Word. Yvette was also a solo dancer on the Welsh version of Top Of The Pops! The Beatles were the soundtrack to her time in Wales… Yvette was campaigning too - by taking direct action against the racist Enoch Powell MP - whilst he was visiting Cardiff stirring up anti-immigration sentiment.
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She got her first Equity contract job with a cheapskate children's school touring company, walking out when the decrepit van door blew off on the motorway, almost ejecting one of the company.
Yvette played Camilla in the West End production of I, Claudius, staring David Warner in John Mortimer’s adaptation of Robert Graves’s fantastic novels I, Claudius & Claudius the God. The play was directed by Tony Richardson, an Oscar winning theatre and film director/producer. In between theatre roles in Wind in the Willows in Chichester, at Oxford Playhouse for a production of Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard, and others, Yvette was cast in four TV series and one film. By 1974 Yvette moved to Bolton to join their Theatre In Education company, part of a movement of immersive theatre for children. She was in several historically relevant, improvised projects in schools for a year.
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In October 1976 Yvette enrolled on a social science degree course at Kingston Polytechnic, Surrey. One day, by complete chance, she met two guys in a lift at the Poly, who turned out to be engineers running a TV studio! But it was rarely used. There she made her first documentary to augment her final degree dissertation, which was about Ideology and the Media. The film was entitled Objectivity in the News – Fact or Fallacy? In 1979 Yvette achieved the first ever First Class Honours degree in ten years of the Kingston Polytechnic social science course.
And that’s how her next career started, via a purely serendipitous encounter in a lift...
And that’s how her next career started, via a purely serendipitous encounter in a lift...