Career
Born Noreen Jean Craigie to a Russian mother and a Scottish father in Fulham, London, Jill Craigie started her career in film as an actress. She became politicised because of the events of the 1930s and she turned to filmmaking. After directing five films and writing two others, Craigie retired from the film business for almost forty years, returning to make a single film for British Broadcasting Corporation television
Craigie was one of the scriptwriters of Trouble in Store, Norman Wisdom"s film debut, which screened in December 1953.
The film broke box office records at 51 out of the 67 London cinemas in which it played. After writing the first draft of the script, Craigie reportedly asked that her name be removed from the credits after learning of Wisdom"s participation.
In latter years Craigie became an authority on the suffragette movement, holding a large collection of feminist literature in Britain, with pamphlets dating back to John Stuart Mill. They lived in a flat in Hampstead, north London, and in a cottage in Ebbw Vale, South Wales.
In 1998, a biography of the late Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler by David Cesarani alleged Koestler had been a serial rapist and that Craigie had been one of his victims in 1951.
Craigie confirmed the allegations. In his biography Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual (2009), Michael Scammell countered that Craigie was the only woman to go on record that she had been raped by Koestler, and had revealed this at a dinner party over fifty years after the alleged incident. Claims that Koestler had been violent were only added by Craigie later.
Craigie died in 1999 of heart failure at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, London.
The archives of Jill Craigie are held at The Women"s Library at the Library of the London School of Economics, ref 7JCC.