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Mother of Sebastian Saville, Dominic Saville and Elizabeth Saville.

Mother-in-law of Tracy Granger.

Jane Arden was a British film director, actress, singer/songwriter and poet, who gained note in the 1950s.

Arden studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and began a career in the late 1940s on television and in film.

In 1970, Arden formed the radical feminist theatre group Holocaust and wrote the play A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches, which would later be adapted for the screen as The Other Side of the Underneath (1972). She directed the film and appeared in it uncredited; screenings at film festivals, including the 1972 London Film Festival, caused a major stir.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, she wrote for experimental theatre, adapting one work as a self-directed film, The Other Side of the Underneath (1972).

In July 2008, Arden was among the topics discussed at the Conference of 1970s British Culture and Society held at the University of Portsmouth.

In 1978, Arden published the book You Don't Know What You Want, Do You? and supported its publication with public readings and discussions, for instance at the King's Head Theatre in London on 1 October 1978. Although loosely defined as poetry, it is also a radical socio-psychological manifesto comparable to R. D. Laing's Knots.

Her comic television drama Curtains For Harry (1955) starring Bobby Howes and Sydney Tafler was shown on 20 October 1955 by the new ITV network, featuring also the Carry On actress Joan Sims. Arden's co-writer on this was the American Richard Lester, who was working as a television director at the time.

As a tribute to Arden, the experimental-music group Hwyl Nofio, fronted by Steve Parry from Pontypool, included the song "Anti-Clock" on their album Dark (2012).

Throughout her life, Arden's interest in other cultures and belief systems increasingly took the form of a personal spiritual quest.

In the 1950s Arden married the director Philip Saville. Arden then wrote several plays and television scripts, some of which her husband directed.

The play Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven (1969), starring Victor Spinetti, and Sheila Allen, was sold out for six weeks at London's Arts Lab. It was described by Arthur Marwick as "perhaps the most important single production" at the venue during that period.

In 1958, her play The Party, a family drama set in Kilburn, was directed at London's New Theatre by Charles Laughton. It turned out to be Laughton's last appearance on the London stage, while providing Albert Finney with his first.

Her television drama The Thug (1959) gave Alan Bates a powerful early role.

After The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) came two further collaborations with Jack Bond in the 1970s: Vibration (1974), described by Geoff Brown and Robert Murphy in their book Film Directors in Britain and Ireland (British Film Institute 2006) as "an exercise in meditation utilising experimental film and video techniques", and the futuristic Anti-Clock (1979), which featured Arden's songs and starred her son Sebastian Saville. The latter opened the 1979 London Film Festival.

Her books - poetry and plays - remain out of print.

Arden's work became increasingly radical through her growing involvement in feminism and the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s. This is particularly clear from 1965 onwards, starting with the television drama The Logic Game, which she wrote and starred in. The Logic Game, directed by Saville, also starred the British actor David de Keyser, who worked with her again in the film Separation (1967). Arden wrote the screenplay; the film was directed by Jack Bond. Separation, shot in black and white by Aubrey Dewar, featured music by the group Procol Harum.

In 1964, Arden appeared with Harold Pinter in In Camera, a television production of Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos directed by Philip Saville.

She appeared in a television production of Romeo and Juliet in the late 1940s and starred in two British crime films: Black Memory (1947) directed by Oswald Mitchell - which provided South African-born actor Sid James with his first screen credit (billed as Sydney James) - and Richard M. Grey's A Gunman Has Escaped (1948). In 2017 Renown Pictures released both films on DVD in a set of three discs, Crime Collection Volume One.