My friend Frances Colquhoun, who has died aged 78, was a singer, actor, theatre director, artist and friend of Soviet dissidents. One of the high points of her career was the creation in 1981, with her husband, Patrick, of One Word of Truth, a film dramatisation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1970 Nobel prize lecture.
Frances was born in Edinburgh to a teenage mother. She was adopted by Archie Cameron, an economist and consultant for British Rail, and his wife, Dorothy, both adherents of the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) spiritual movement. Frances went to the Friends’ school in Saffron Walden, Essex.
Her thespian talents emerged as a teenager in the 1950s, through theatre productions at a centre for postwar reconciliation in Caux, Switzerland, run by MRA. In the summer of 1960 she helped produce 14 plays there in one season. She sang a mesmerising solo, Have You a Place for Me Up There?, in the musical Space Is So Startling, which premiered in Japan and toured the US, Europe and India between 1962 and 1964.
While in India, Frances met Patrick Colquhoun, who was operating the spotlight. Frances directed the musical Anything to Declare? which toured Europe, Asia and Australasia between 1969 and 1971, with a cast of around 100. After the completion of the tour, she and Patrick married, and they settled in Cambridge.
After reading Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture, she saw its potential for visual dramatisation. In 1980 she and Patrick created Anglo-Nordic Productions Trust to make the initial slide tape production into the film One Word of Truth, narrated by Tom Courtenay. Through this, Frances and Patrick became Solzhenitsyn’s trusted friends, and also met the poet Irina Ratushinskaya and the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky.
Frances directed two plays by the Czech playwright Jara Moserová, entitled Such a Nice Boy and A Letter to Wollongong. Anglo-Nordic shot the latter as a film on location in Prague. Following the collapse of the Ceauşescu regime in Romania in 1989, Patrick founded the charity Medical Support in Romania. For 25 years Frances hosted a stream of Romanian doctors and nurses in their Cambridge home. She was also an accomplished painter in oils, acrylic, pastels and watercolour, and in her later years served on the committee of the Cambridge Drawing Society.
She is survived by Patrick and by their two daughters, Anna and Rhona.
• This article was amended on 16 August 2017. Frances Colquhoun was 78 when she died, not 79.
