Tim and Colin interview Barbara March and Alan Scarfe. Listen on the player below.
Air date: May 24, 2017.
Part One:
Part Two:
Married in 1979 Barbara March and Alan Scarfe have had long and distinguished careers on stage and screen, from Stratford to Star Trek. Alan was associate director of the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, and the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, England. He also performed at Stratford for 8 years. He has played over 100 major roles across Europe, Canada, the UK and the US including King Lear, Othello, and Hamlet. On screen he’s appeared in, to name a few: Due South, Quantum Leap, NYPD Blue, The Outer Limits, Lethal Weapon and Star Trek: The Next Generation and Voyager. Start Trek fans while be more familiar with Barbara, though, as she played the recurring role of the Klingon, Lursa, one of the Duras sisters, from the House of Duras, who appeared in The Next Generation, Deep Space 9 and in the first feature film of the Next Generation franchise, Star Trek: Generations. She’s also a stage actor who’s preformed at the Stratford Festival as well as many in other festivals and in theatres around the world. She’s embodied roles such as Isabella in Measure for Measure, Desdemona in Othello
and Titania in Midsummer Nights Dream and played Lady Macbeth several times. Barbara also penned the book The Copper People. Writing is a talent that she also shares with Alan who authored The Revelation of Jack the Ripper and The Vampires of Juarez. All books are published through Smart House Books.
When asked where she would like to spend her 25th wedding anniversary the actress answered without hesitation, “Italy!” After exploring the country she and her husband bought a house in a small hilltop town near the sea. But the villagers, who called themselves ‘the copper people’, were no ordinary Italians. They were the descendants of an ancient tribe who bore a dark and painful secret. “It is the most beautiful setting of anywhere I have been. It is as though time has stood still on this mountain,” the professor remarked and, pointing to all the people sitting in the piazza, added, “They are all related you know … like the roots of a tree.” Barbara March is a painter, actress, author, wife and mother but she is best known for her role as Lursa of the House of Duras on Star Trek.
An eccentric English journalist is in El Paso. One morning at dawn he wades across the Rio Grande while filming a white Siberian tiger that has come to the river to drink. He is kidnapped in Juarez by the tiger’s owner, a drug lord who forces him to impersonate a mysterious go-between in exchange for his life.
“Fast-moving, eloquent, funny and at the same time profoundly violent and distressing . . irony saves it from insupportable sadness and instead creates a fresh and captivating story. Another terrific novel from Alan Scarfe.”
– Susanna Raule, Cut-up
“Scarfe’s vampires are nothing like the classic literary and cinematic archetypes. They are neither romantic nor troubled spirits. They are pitiless, arrogant and vulgar, without immortality and unafraid of the sun.”
– Vito Tripi, Word Shelter