Helen Zenna Smith

Eva Grace Price was born on 28 August 1888 in Merewether, New South Wales, Australia, of British descen. Her father, Jonathan Dixon Price, was an Australian miner. Fiction abounds in the autobiographical details supplied by own Evadne Price. She claimed that she lied about her age, when her father died, and she went on stage to support herself and to travel alone to England. She said that she was born on 1896 at sea, on an ocean liner during a travel to Australia, or later that she was born on 1901 in Sussex, England. On 28 August 1909 in Sydney, she married Henry A. Dabelstein, a German-born actor. After moved to England to acting, she decided reinventing herself, changing her name to more evocative "Evadne". On 1920 in London, she married Charles A. Fletcher, and changed her acting career by journalism, writing a column for the Sunday Chronicle and other newspapers. Her husband was Captain in the 3rd Devonshire Regiment, and died on 1924 in Sudan. On 1928, she started to writing books, children's stories and romance novels, under the pseudonym Helen Zenna Smith, she also wrote two novelized books, about ambulance drivers in World War I. On 1939 in Kent, she married Kenneth Andrew Attiwill, an Australian writer. During World War II, she was the war correspondent for The People from 1943, covering the Allied invasion and all of the major war stories through the Nuremberg Trials. Her husband was a POW in Japan, and was presumed dead for two years. Her career as novelist took her into playwriting, radio scriptwriting and screenwriting. She also had a parallel career as a night astrologer during the early years of British television. When she and her husband retired to their native Australia in 1976, she wrote the monthly horoscope column for Australian Vogue. She also appeared weekly on the ITV Central evening news magazine show with a 5 minute astrological. Evadne Price died on 17 April 1985 in Sydney, Australia at 96. She had an unfinished autobiography that she named "Mother Painted Nude".