Judy Nunn

Judith Anne Nunn (AM) (born 1945 in Perth, Western Australia), (also published under the pen name of Judy Bernard-Waite), is an Australian fiction author, former theatre and television actress and radio and television screenwriter. Nunn was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2015 Australia Day Honours for her service to the performing arts as a scriptwriter and actor of stage and screen, and to literature as an author.

Early stage and TV career

After many years as a leading stage actress, starting in 1964 her breakout television role was as the scheming bisexual reporter Vicky Stafford in the risque soap opera The Box. Her character became a popular cult figure in the series. Nunn continued in the role for the show's entire 1974–77 run. In 1979 she briefly played Joyce Martin in the Australian TV series Prisoner and after that had a lengthy spell as Dr. Irene Fisher in television serial Sons and Daughters from 1984 until 1986.

Home and Away

Her role as original character Ailsa Stewart in the soap opera Home and Away, from 1988 until the character was killed off in 2000 after decided to leave series to devote more time with novels, is probably Nunn's most famous role. In 2002 she returned in a guest role as a ghost that only her former on-screen husband, Alf Stewart, could see.

Nunn married her husband, actor and writer and former New Zealand police officer Bruce Venables, the same week in which she filmed her character Ailsa's marriage to Alf (Ray Meagher) in Home and Away in 1988. Formerly long-time residents of Bondi, New South Wales, Nunn and her husband now reside on the Central Coast, New South Wales.

Nunn is a screenwriter of radio and television and author. She has written scripts for programme's Neighbours and Possession. In the 1980s she decided to turn her hand to prose. The result was two adventure novels for children, Eye in the Storm and Eye in the City, which remain popular in Australia and Europe. Embarking on adult fiction in the early 1990s, Judy's three novels, The Glitter Game, Centre Stage and Araluen, set respectively in the worlds of television, theatre and film, became bestsellers. A specialist in Australian period fiction, other books she has written include Kal, Beneath the Southern Cross, Territory, Pacific, Heritage, Floodtide, Maralinga, Tiger Menin 2011, Elianne in 2013 and Spirits of the Ghan in 2015.