Helen has over 25 years of professional coaching behind her, ensuring a mature, respectful, and friendly dynamic in busy on-set environments. Her 40 years of acting on stage and screen ensure an innate understanding of actors’ challenges with a triple-headed coverage of acting, accent, and voice demands. Helen’s service is tailored to each production’s requirements whilst always aiming to become a valuable collegiate resource for director and producer, supporting them as well as the artists when invited. She embraces the ensemble whilst maintaining a discreet but ready presence.

Helen works to the brief supplied by the producer and director, and her services customarily comprise assistance at audition stage; a rehearsal presence (as informed observer/responder/line-reader); response to the actors’ requests for guidance; off-set preparation; on-set coverage of scenes; provision of off-screen lines for absent actors, and more. She is skilled at coaching many accents from the UK and Europe, and in recent years has covered US accents due to increased demand. Acting coaching, particularly of young artists, is a favourite activity.

Helen’s 30 years as a published playwright have given her a keen perspective on script analysis and interpretation; she is currently adapting her play (The Persuasion of Jane Austen) and her first novel, The Wishing Well (from her successful play of the same name, co-authored with Michael Futcher) for the screen.

Helen is passionate to tell great stories on stage and screen and enthusiastically teams with seasoned and emerging people. She brings a lightness and warmth to her interactions, and recognises that each production team, cast, and crew is unique and that her approach will adapt and evolve with every project.

Notable productions include Nautilus (Michael Matthews, Ben Lucas, Isabelle Sieb); Interceptor (Matthew Reilly); The Portable Door (Jeffery Walker); Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (actor and Voice Captain); Dog Days of Christmas (Tori Garrett); L’Appartement (Johanna Murray-Smith); Dora and the Lost City of Gold (James Bobin); The Family Law (Jonathon Brough) Grace Beside Me (Beck Cole, various); Swinging Safari (Stephan Elliott); Mental (PJ Hogan); Slide (Shawn Seet, Tori Garrett, Garth Maxwell); The Memory of Water (actor/accents, Leticia Caceres) Narnia, Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Michael Apted); Peter Pan (PJ Hogan).

Helen trained at the prestigious Mountview Theatre School, in London, and has since called Brisbane home for 30 years.