Kay Mellor OBE was an actress, screenwriter, and director from England.

She was noted for co-creating the British children’s drama Children’s Ward for CITV and for developing the ITV British drama Fat Friends.

Kay Mellor
Kay Mellor

In the 1980s, she began working as a writer for Granada Television, writing for the soap series Coronation Street. Mellor also penned a number of episodes for the Channel 4 soap Brookside in 1989.

Before co-creating the long-running children’s drama Children’s Ward with her Coronation Street colleague Paul Abbott in 1988, she wrote for the anthology drama series Dramarama.

At the 1997 BAFTA Awards, the series won Best Children’s Drama.  She also produced and starred in three series of the family sitcom Just Us, which aired from 1990 to 1993. (1990-1994).

Another of her dramas, The Chase, premiered on BBC One in July 2006.

She wrote and directed A Passionate Woman, a two-part drama based on her 1992 theatrical play that aired on BBC One in April 2010.

Her mother’s experience of having a passionate affair with a man while unhappily married to Mellor’s father inspired the play.

Her mother had kept the affair hidden for over thirty years before informing Mellor.

Kay Mellor Career Records & Awards

Kay Mellor won a BAFTA Award and two Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Awards.

Mellor was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2009, and she received the Writers Guild Award for Outstanding Contribution to Writing in 2014.

Mellor was named a Fellow of the Royal Television Society in 2016 and received Broadcast’s Special Recognition Award in February 2020.

Mellor earned the Sundance Film Festival’s Audience Award in 1998.

She wrote and directed the feature film Fanny and Elvis, starring Ray Winstone, which received the Audience Prize at the Dinard British Film Festival in 1999, as well as the one-off play Some Kind of Life, which was nominated for a BAFTA and won the Prix Niki Award.