Jean Higgs

Jean Higgs was born Jean Florence Taylor in Sale, Australia. Her parents were Alice and William (a butcher). She grew up in a small rural community. She worked as an infant teacher initially and commenced acting in amateur theatre there. When she moved to Melbourne Australia in the 1960s, she began working with semi-professional groups such as the Ken Woodward players in Kew. During the early 1960s she played the role of Mrs Whelan in the first movie directed by Phillip Adams "Jack and Jill: a postscript", which won the inaugural Australian Film Institute award for Best Picture in the fledgling days of the Australian film industry. This was her only professional role, but she continued to act and direct amateur theatre in Victoria and Queensland, despite being legally blind in her later years. She particularly promoted Australian playwrights, staging first amateur performances of new Australian plays such as The Hope by Harry Reed. She was a founding and lifetime member of the Sale Theatre Company with her husband Alan Higgs. She died in 1993 aged 71 after a short struggle with kidney cancer.