Midge Mackenzie

Midge MacKenzie (Born March 6, 1938 - died January 28, 2004, aged 65) was a London-born writer and filmmaker who first become notable for producing Robert Joffrey's multimedia ballet Astarte with the Joffrey Ballet, and with Women Talking, a documentary with interviews of Kate Millett, Betty Friedan and other leading figures in the US women’s liberation movement.

After reading the work of psychoanalyst Ellis Miller, MacKenzie started exploring the meaning of her own childhood and from this came Prisoners of Childhood (1991) in which actors brought out themes of pain and damage from early years. She made the wonderful I Stand Here Ironing (1980) based on the Tillie Olsen stories, and later a trilogy of films looking at remote communities in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Saving Faces documented the patients whose faces had been reconstructed by surgeon Ian Hutchison, who is the chief executive of the charity Saving Faces. He recalls, ‘She followed us around absolutely silently and made a film that said so much.’

After many years refusing her request to interview him about his World-War Two documentaries, Hollywood film director John Huston finally agreed to MacKenzie interviewing him at his home in Mexico, which became John Huston War Stories, released in 1999, more than a decade after his death.

But perhaps MacKenzie's most notable work was the 6-part documentary-drama series for the BBC in 1974 called Shoulder to Shoulder, telling the story of the suffragettes’ struggle.^[1][2]

MacKenzie had a severely disabled son, Bunny,(real name Luke) by Frank Cvitanovich, born in 1967 and dying, aged 11, in 1978. She and Frank made a documentary about him called 'Bunny'.

References

• Saving Faces: The Facial Surgery Research Foundation