She wrote the screenplay for Cameleon,[1] which won the Golden Spire Award for Best Dramatic Television Feature at the 1998 San Francisco International Film Festival.
After her marriage to Richard Alexander in 1966 she moved to Dartmouth, Devon, where her husband worked as a civilian lecturer at the Britannia Royal Naval College.
An older Mattie, liberated by writing and performed by Patricia Hodge in four plays, starting with The Captain's Wife, and concluding with Upside Down in the Roasting Tin,[7] is a testament to experience.
In October, 2013, Ace was diagnosed with terminal cancer – her radio plays The Captain’s Wife and Skin had reflected on earlier bouts with the disease – and was given a fifty-fifty chance of surviving until Christmas that year.
Moving the Goalposts, despite the gloomy prognosis of Ace's doctors, gave her character Mattie a new lease of life, charting the frustrations, comedy and medical implausibility of her intellectual and physical survival beyond the predictions of concerned consultants.
Jude Kelly, who chaired the discussion as one her last acts as departing Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre, gave warm praise to the honesty and resilience of Ace's writing, citing her recognition of its truth through her own experience with a family member.
Moving the Goalposts saw further life in a BBC broadcast[10] in March 2020, with the Welsh actor Pam Ferris taking the role of Mattie Juliet Ace lives in London.