Leslee Udwin

Leslee Udwin was born in 1957 in Savyon

Udwin was born in 1957 in Savyon, Israel, to a Jewish family with roots in England, Germany and Lithuania. As a child she moved with her family to South Africa, where they lived for 10 years. Her parents were religious, but as a teenager she rebelled against Judaism.

She began acting at the Space Theatre in Cape Town, an integrated theater. She did not want to work in whites-only theaters, so she moved to London. There she acted with the Royal Court, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and appeared on BBC television, including the soap opera Eldorado.

In 1989 she won a precedent-setting case in the High Court of England against landlord Nicholas van Hoogstraten, who had harassed her and other tenants. The story became the TV drama Sitting Target, in which she starred. That year she founded her production company, Assassin Films.

She co-produced Who Bombed Birmingham? in 1990, about the Birmingham Six. Her film East is East (1999) won the BAFTA Alexander Korda Award for British Film. She also produced West is West (2010) and the documentary India's Daughter (2015).

Her work on India's Daughter led her to found Think Equal in 2015, an education program teaching social and emotional skills to young children. She received the Anna Lindh Human Rights Prize in 2015 and a UN Women for Peace award in 2019.