Eastern Star

Guy Slater was born in December 1941 in Lahore (then India) the eldest of four sons of an Indian Civil Servant, descendant of a line of several generations of Slaters who had worked in the Civil Service (ICS), church and education in India; he was a typical child of Empire. At Independence in 1947 his father, Dick, joined the Foreign Office and went on to serve in Karachi, Lima, Moscow and Rangoon before becoming Ambassador to Cuba and then High Commissioner in Uganda from where Idi Amin notoriously expelled him. The boys’ background was therefore the usual diet of boarding school and absentee parents. Guy won a coveted British Petroleum Apprenticeship Award to go to Cambridge and a traditional career was in prospect. But at university he discovered the theatre and embarked on a very different journey. It began as an actor, then while out of work moved into writing TV plays which became for a while the central thread of his career. At the same time he began directing in the theatre and in 1974 took on his most ambitious project, the founding of a professional theatre company in what was then the new town development of Basingstoke. He ran the Horseshoe Theatre Company, mainly operating out of the Haymarket Theatre, for seven years and subsequently remained on the Board for many years while a succession of Artistic Directors developed the company. In 1981 he moved into TV as a Producer at the BBC where he made several long-running prime-time drama series. While working as a producer (and later, Executive Producer) he added TV directing to his quiver and for a while after he left the BBC worked as a freelance director in TV, returning to theatre from time to time. He tasted executive life as ＂Development Executive＂ at Anglia TV and then as Head of Drama at SelectTV (later Pearson) where he remained for two years before deciding that life behind a desk was not for him.

He had been invited to teach and direct as the Granada Professor at Davis College, University of California. This sparked a new interest and led to teaching at RADA, where he created the first three year Screen Acting course, and other Drama Academies in the UK as well as teaching/mentoring in Cuba, Spain and Pakistan. He still makes occasional forays into theatre and short films, still teaches and has embarked on yet another ambition: writing novels. ’I am proud to have made a living out of pretence rather than oil or diplomacy; I suppose that as a ＂jack-of-all-trades＂ I can be charged with never standing still long enough to be found out.’ He was married to Helen Ryan. They have two children, Daniel, an opera director, and Rebecca, a teacher. He has five grandchildren, Lily, Izzy, Sam, Jo-Jo and Amelie. He lives in London.