Fonds MsC-53 - Patricia Joan Ludwick fonds

Patricia Joan Ludwick—or Patsy, to her friends and family—was an actor, playwright and poet. Born in Vancouver in 1947, the eldest of seven children, she grew up in various small towns on Vancouver Island. As a teenager, she discovered a passion for acting when she landed her first role in a community theatre production of Arthur Miller’s "The Crucible." In 1966 she moved to the United Kingdom, where until 1969 she attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts.

Returning to Canada, Ludwick spent the next decade working as an actor in professional theatre in various locales across Nova Scotia and Ontario. Although she performed in a variety of plays, her choice of roles exhibited a penchant for original Canadian pieces. This was intentional, as early in her acting career Ludwick realized that “if a strong base of audience support were to be created for live theatre in Canada, it would be necessary to give the public plays that related directly to their experience of life in this country.” In this vein, perhaps her most notable work was as Mrs. Donnelly in James Reaney’s "The Donnellys Trilogy," mounted by the NDWT and Tarragon theatre companies from 1973 to 1975.

In 1979 Ludwick moved to Vancouver, where she began writing her own plays. The first of these, "Alone," was staged by the New Play Centre in 1983. Although Ludwick continued to act (often performing in her own work), writing became her primary focus, and she wrote many pieces throughout the 1980s and 1990s which were performed mainly in festivals. Ludwick was a founding member of the Women in View Festival, which was conceived in 1986 in order to showcase women’s work in theatre.

In 1989 Ludwick moved to Gabriola Island. There she purchased a half-acre plot of undeveloped land and, drawing from the knowledge base of the local community, learned the skills to build her own house. Gabriola Island would remain her beloved home for the rest of her life.

Ludwick continued to create art into the 1990s and 2000s. In addition to writing for and performing in live theatre, she also wrote radio plays, television screenplays, and poetry, and prose, and contributed review work and personal essays for theatrical journals. She worked variously as a script doctor, editor, and librarian, and taught creative writing at such institutions as the University of British Columbia and Malaspina College (now Vancouver Island University).

Ludwick was an active member of her community on Gabriola. A lover of nature and animals, she fostered many cats through Cats Alive, a local animal welfare organization. She also helped to found the Gabriola Tool Library. And she contributed to her local arts scene: she started a womens’ writers group, mounted performances and created art installations, and wrote poetry inspired by Gabriola’s natural environment. These poems, many of them originally written as gifts to friends, were ultimately compiled into a self-published volume, "A Sense of Place: Seasons on Gabriola," shortly before her death.

In 2019 Ludwick was diagnosed with ALS. Choosing an assisted death, she died on May 15th, 2021 in the comfort of her home, supported by her friends and neighbours.