Barbara Ewing

Barbara Ewing is a New Zealand-born actor, novelist, playwright, and memoirist whose work spans stage, screen, and historical fiction. One Minute Crying Time recalls her childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood in New Zealand before she left for Britain in 1962. Drawing on diaries kept between the ages of twelve and twenty-three, the memoir examines family life, education, first love, racial prejudice, memory, and the ambitions that led her toward acting. Its title comes from the language of costly international telephone calls, when an operator might quietly allow distressed callers an extra minute after their allotted time ended. Ewing studied English and Māori for her degree, then won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She built a long acting career while also publishing novels, including The Fraud and The Petticoat Men. The memoir connects those public accomplishments to the formative relationships and contradictions of her New Zealand youth.