Hazel O'Connor

The daughter of a sailor from Galway who settled in England to work in a car plant, she went to Coventry Art College after leaving School. O'Connor originally shot to fame as an actress, playing the role of Kate in the critically acclaimed fi

The daughter of a sailor from Galway who settled in England to work in a car plant, she went to Coventry Art College after leaving School. O'Connor originally shot to fame as an actress, playing the role of Kate in the critically acclaimed film Breaking Glass in 1980, and its accompanying soundtrack.

The years before she appeared in the film Breaking Glass were eventful to say the least - see O'Connor's autobiography "Hazel O'Connor Uncovered Plus", Proteus Publishing Ltd., 1981, ISBN 0-906071-81-X, for full details. As she wrote in the introduction note of the programme for a gig at "At My Place" in Santa Monica, Los Angeles in 1989 - "I ran away from my home in Coventry when I was 16.....made and sold clothes in Amsterdam, picked grapes in France, joined a dance troupe that went to Tokyo then onto Beirut (escaping the start of the civil war by one month!) travelled West Africa, crossed the Sahara, sang with a dreadful singing trio for the U.S. troops in Germany and came home to "settle down". Through all this experience of life and the world I realized that singing always cheered me up. I decided to be a singer. Through strange turns of fate I ended up in a film called Breaking Glass I also ended up writing all the songs for the movie".