Jane Arden (born Norah Patricia Morris; 29 October 1927 – 20 December 1982) was a British film director, actress, singer/songwriter and poet, who gained note in the 1950s.

[1] Arden studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and began a career in the late 1940s on television and in film.

[2] She appeared in a television production of Romeo and Juliet in the late 1940s and starred in two British crime films: Black Memory (1947) directed by Oswald Mitchell – which provided South African-born actor Sid James with his first screen credit (billed as Sydney James) – and Richard M. Grey's A Gunman Has Escaped (1948).

Her comic television drama Curtains For Harry (1955) starring Bobby Howes and Sydney Tafler was shown on 20 October 1955 by the new ITV network,[4] featuring also the Carry On actress Joan Sims.

[6] In 1964, Arden appeared with Harold Pinter in In Camera, a television production of Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos directed by Saville.

[3] The Logic Game, directed by Saville, also starred the British actor David de Keyser, who worked with her again in the film Separation (1967).

[11] Arden's television work in the mid-1960s included appearances in Saville's Exit 19, Jack Russell's The Interior Decorator, and the satirical programme That Was the Week That Was hosted by David Frost.

[3] The play Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven (1969), starring Victor Spinetti, and Sheila Allen, was sold out for six weeks at London's Arts Lab.

In 1970, Arden formed the radical feminist theatre group Holocaust and wrote the play A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches, which would later be adapted for the screen as The Other Side of the Underneath (1972).

[20][21] In July 2008, Arden was among the topics discussed at the Conference of 1970s British Culture and Society held at the University of Portsmouth.

[citation needed] As a tribute to Arden, the experimental-music group Hwyl Nofio, fronted by Steve Parry from Pontypool, included the song "Anti-Clock" on their album Dark (2012).