Background
McAndrew was born in Huddersfield, West Riding of Yorkshire, and later moved to Ossett and then Leeds.
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Deborah McAndrew
Edit ProfileEducation
She studied drama at the University of Manchester and a Postgraduate Certificate in Education in Drama and Special Education at Bretton Hall College of Education.
Career
She had two younger sisters. She had always wanted to write plays. The family regularly holidayed with another family with four children, giving her a cast of seven.
McAndrew joined the cast of the long-lived Granada television soap Coronation Street for four years across two periods in the 1990s, playing young designer Angie Freeman.
She has appeared in theatre, radio and television including the British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4 detective series Stone. She first joined Northern Broadsides as an actor in 1995.
In 2004 McAndrew adapted Leopold Lewis"s 1871 play The Bells for Northern Broadsides. Since then her adaptations have included Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector and Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide, under the new title The Grand Gesture.
Her first original script was Vacuum (2006, set in a vacuum cleaner repair shop and performed by Northern Broadsides).
She wrote Flamingoland, about a woman with breast cancer, in 2008, for the New Vic Theatre, and in 2013 she wrote Ugly Duck, set among the Staffordshire pottery trade, for the Claybody Theatre Company which she co-founded in that area. Secretariat in Saddleworth at the start of World War I, it features the village"s traditional rushbearing procession and morris dancing. McAndrew has written several plays for the Mikron Theatre Company, a touring company which in summer travels by canal boat.
These include Losing the Plot (2012, set amongst allotment gardeners), Beyond the Veil (2013, allotments again, beekeeping and murder), Till the Cows Come Home (2014, on icecream making), and One of Each (2015, concerning fish and chips).
Achievements
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She is also co-founder and Creative Director of the Stoke-on-Trent-based Claybody Theatre Company, and a visiting lecturer in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Staffordshire University. Her 2014 play An August Bank Holiday Lark, a Northern Broadsides co-production with the New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, won that year"s United Kingdom Best New Play award from the United Kingdom Theatre awards for regional theatre.
