Colleen Clifford (17 November 1898 – 7 April 1996), born as Irene Margaret Blackford, was a British-born performer, who worked in her native England as well as New Zealand and, later in her career, Australia.
She was also a theatre founder, director and producer, coloratura soprano, dancer, comedian and classical pianist who was a specialist in voice production, drama and music.
She worked across stage and screen with stars including Laurence Olivier, Noël Coward and Bette Davis, and trained many Australian actors such as Judy Nunn, Paula Duncan and Melissa George.
She emigrated to Australia in 1954, and from 1955 became a highly recognisable character actress of stage, television and films, from the early 1970s in soap operas, series, mini-series, telemovies and theatrical features, often portraying eccentric elderly women.
[1] Clifford although based in London, lived in various parts of England including Farnham, Stropeshire, Surrey, Kensington and Cornwall, as well as New Zealand during her childhood, where her father worked as a cadet on a stock station in Masterton, before purchasing a run in Taranaki.
She studied classical piano in Belgium at the Brussels Conservatoire, before receiving a scholarship to the Royal Academy in London, but stating musical theatre was favoured more, she curtailed a musical career, to become active in British theatre as a stage performer for almost thirty years, starting with a production of Hubert Henry Davies, The Mollusc.
These included stage productions of Annie Get Your Gun (1959), starring Leone Martin Smith in the title role, Oklahoma (1961) and South Pacific (1962) at His Majesty's Theatre, Perth.
She took a three-year absence to return to the theatre full-time but, then in 1981, began playing the guest role of Miss Bird on A Country Practice.