- Born: in England
- Occupation: Actor
- Active: '70s-'80s
- Major Genres: Drama, Comedy
- Career Highlights: Ascendancy, The Mermaid Frolics
- First Major Screen Credit: The Mermaid Frolics (1977)
Biography
Although she's only appeared in three movies in the course of her 35-year career, Julie Covington has been a top-stage and television star in England and even managed to scale the upper regions of the pop charts during the second half of the '70s. Covington was born in London in 1947, and although she did do a little acting in school (in works such as Giradoux's Elektra), she had no strong inclination toward a career as a performer; rather, Covington intended to become an educator, attending the teachers' training college at Cambridge University, where she joined the Footlights, a student theatrical troupe. It was there that she first started to act and sing to material authored by Peter Atkin and Clive James. In 1967, Covington made her television debut on The David Frost Show, appearing with Atkin. She performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1967 and 1968, doing Shakespeare and singing jazz.It was her performance in the Brecht/Weill opera Mahagonny at the 1968 festival that brought Covington to the attention of producers, agents, and the public, earning her the first Fringe Best Actress award ever given. She appeared in a pilot episode for the BBC series Twice a Fortnight with Terry Jones and Michael Palin. In December of that same year, she made her first appearances in North America, playing Peaseblossom in A Midsummer Night's Dream on the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company's tour. Covington made her professional stage debut in 1972 in the original London production of Godspell, which she followed with an appearance on the cast album yielding the hit British single "Day by Day". She also made her screen debut that year in Barry Humphries' Australian-made The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, in the role of Blanche. She followed Godspell with an engagement on the BBC reading children's stories.
Making a leap into a wholly different realm of popular culture, Covington next showed up on-stage in the original 1973 Royal's Court stage version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, creating the role of Janet. That same year she portrayed Charmian in Tony Richardson's stage production of Antony and Cleopatra, and she subsequently worked with director Sam Wanamaker at the Globe Theatre. She was Spirit of the Rainbow in Peter Hall's The Tempest (1974) and Dotty in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers (1976). In 1976, she won the London Theatre Critics' award as Most Promising New Actress. Her fame would soon extend far beyond the theater world, however, when she was cast as Dee in Howard Schuman and Andy Mackay's Thames Television series Rock Follies, co-starring with Rula Lenska. The series was picked up by American television and was a huge hit around the world, yielding an internationally released album; it was all sufficiently popular enough to yield a sequel series, Rock Follies of 1977. Covington also showed up in The Mermaid Frolics, a 1977 benefit performance (and resulting documentary film) for Amnesty International that was the predecessor to the various Secret Policemen's Balls of the years that followed. That same year, as Rock Follies was capturing the attention of television viewers -- and getting her nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts as Best Actress -- Covington was selected to do the role of Eva Peron on the original studio album of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita, and the single of her rendition of "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" topped the U.K. charts. She followed it up in 1977 with the hit single "Only Women Bleed", a cover of the Alice Cooper song. Around this time, Covington also sang and acted on Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, which is usually identified (mistakenly) as a "cast" album.
After 1978, apart from working on a production of Guys and Dolls that yielded a cast album, Covington had abandoned recording in favor of theatrical and television work. In 1983, she made the most important big-screen appearance of her career to date, starring in Ascendancy (1983), Edward Bennett's symbolic drama of the British/Irish situation, which won the Golden Bear Award at the 1983 Berlin Film Festival. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
