Sarah Lawson(1955-2008)
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Sarah Lawson was born on the 7th of October, 1955, to Lt.-Col. Sir
William Edward Harry Lawson, 5th Baron Burnham and Anne Petherick. She
started out her career as a solicitor, working primarily with
Macfarlanes in London. After four years of this, in 1980 she moved on
to Curtis Brown, working as a writer's agent for a few years, but she
eventually settled on a career as a producer in 1982, when she was
appointed Vice President of Development at DL Taffner Ltd in Los
Angeles. Over the next decade or so, she was also Managing Director of
Anglia Television Entertainment, and then of her own company Lawson
Productions, through which she created several television projects and
a film: "The Dawning", with Anthony Hopkins, Jean Simmons, Trevor
Howard and a then virtually unknown Hugh Grant and Rebecca Pidgeon.
Having been married to Michael Grade for several years, she remarried
David Maher, an Irishman, and from 1998 she took a hiatus from
producing choosing to raise a family and to renovate the historic
property Ardbraccan in Ireland; however, she did remain the executive
producer of a BBC radio show ("Baldi"), and frequently consulted other
industry members on various projects. Her main work focus up until 2008
had been getting the project "Grace O'Malley" (along with Anne
Chambers, a biographer of the famous Irish pirate) up off the ground;
in 2008 it was commissioned by RTÉ. Sadly, Sarah never got to see the
project completed. Sarah died on November 8th, 2008, after many years
of courageously battling cancer. She left behind her her husband and
two children, and to many, the memory of an ambitious, patient, kind,
generous, loving, brave and beautiful woman.
