English actor and author, Emily Woof has recently received a doctorate. Her PHD is in Dance and Novel Writing, perhaps not surprising given her exploits in the arts and in the world of creative writing.
The actress is best known for her roles in film and television, such as her role as Mandy in Full Monty. She also played Nancy in Oliver Twist.
Emily Woof graduated as a part of ongoing ceremonies on the 15th of July
Woof attended Heaton Comprehensive School prior to her starting at Oxford University, having been a member of St Catherine’s College. There, she obtained a degree in English, and began her foray into writing and performing.
Afterwards, she trained in physical theatre with Philippe Gaulier and Monika Pagneux in Paris. She then featured in a trilogy of self-written one women plays: Sex, Sex 2, Sex 3. Then, she found mainstream success in 1997 with hit film, The Full Monty, although her big-screen beginning was with The Woodlanders.
A casting director discovered her when she was playing Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, and the rest was history.
Emily Woof boasts Lancastrian connections, in spite of her upbringing in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Her grandfather was a tenant farmer and farm manager at the former Royal Albert Hospital farm in Lancaster. Her father, Dr Robert Woof, was an alumni of Lancaster Royal Grammar school.
Dr Robert Woof kept these connections to the North West through his management of the Wordsworth Trust. This entailed looking after Dove Cottage and running the attraction, Wordsworth Grasmere, as it is known nowadays.
Her work has won several awards, including Fringe Firsts at Edinburgh. She has featured in several television roles, such as in Middlemarch and Killer Net. She even had an appearance in Coronation Street in 2016. This was in the form of a detective investigating the suspicious death of Callum Logan.
She has published two novels, The Whole Wide Beauty (2010) and The Lightning Tree (2015). In addition to this, she continually writes for film, radio and theatre.
Woof held a fascination with the connection between text and movement, combining her two creative practices. She asked herself “can I dance a novel?”, considering this question “a bit mad”, but investigating it nonetheless.
Gaining a full scholarship, she worked and studied at the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts. She says that eighty per cent of PHD is a novel that she actually danced, while twenty percent took on the format of a dissertation.
She had gained funding from the Northwest Research Council, investigating how dance could not only be part of a novel, but be used to create a novel, too.
Emily Woof stated that it was an easy choice to study at Lancaster University, due to her strong familial connections to the North-West.
Featured image via Lancaster University website.
