Helen Slayton-Hughes

Helen's family includes a lot of performers. Peter Dinklage is her first cousin once removed. Her mother, Helen Peer (m. Slayton), and aunts Florence Peer (m. Dinklage) and Edna Peer (m. Cardinell) all used the last name "Pierre" when they sang in George M. Cohan musicals before marrying and settling down. Her brother Richard spent his entire career with Ringling Brothers Circus, including three years as the top-hatted Ringmaster. He married a beautiful elephant-riding, trapeze-climbing chorus girl, and they brought up their three children on the circus train as well as in a trailer. Her brother Ralph established and ran the Herkimer, New York Children's Theater, directing dozens of plays.Helen has a Bachelor's degree in Drama from Syracuse University, and a Master's in Communications from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. At Syracuse her acting buddies included Jerry Stiller and Peter Falk as well as the great dancer Paul Taylor.She had spent about forty years acting on stage (community theater, non-union and Equity waiver) in over two hundred plays and musicals when, at Berkeley Stage in the Bay Area, she was cast in a recurring guest star role on "Nash Bridges" and discovered she could actually make money as an actor! So she moved to Los Angeles at the age of 70 to try to make some more.She has four children and six grandchildren, all quite wonderful.Between acting jobs, she writes. In December 2015 she and her composer-collaborator, Dana Lewis Howell, had their new one-act opera "Rachel, the Innkeeper's Daughter" produced at St. John Eudes School, Chatsworth, with eleven-piece orchestra. They have been working together for the past four years on a musical adaptation of the Gene Stratton Porter novel "Girl of the Limberlost", (In 2015 Helen also wrote a feature film script (non-musical) adapted from the same book) and in 2016 she is developing her short film "Homage to Erik Satie's Laundress" which she hopes to distribute to all Satie aficionados. Hide