Cirrus@Austlit

Born in South Yorkshire as Coral O'Neill, Drouyn is the maternal grand-daughter of Charles Coppin and Bertha Baker, who together were the music-hall act Haig and Esco. Her maternal uncle, Jack Haig, was also a well-known British actor and her father, Terry O'Neill (born Terry Norris in Ireland in 1922), was also an actor and the son of an Irish tenor. With this performing background, Drouyn began her work as an actress with an uncredited role as 'Precocious Child' in 1949's I Was a Male War Bride. She continued to act subsequently (often as Coral Kelly), but her primary work since 1980 has been as a script-writer.

Drouyn began writing regularly for Australian television around 1980. Her father had been working in Australian television since the 1960s, and Drouyn notes in interviews that she had written comedy material for his Melbourne-based TV series, Time for Terry, since when she was around 20 (see Back to the Bay interview below). Her first full television scripts, however, were for Reg Watson's soap opera The Restless Years. She notes in her interview with Neighbours fansite The Perfect Blend that she was already writing

melodramas for theatre restaurants and comedy material. Ian Smith, who plays Harold Bishop, had worked in one of my theatre restaurants for many years and he had just moved into TV as a script editor on Prisoner. So when I saw the first ep and went "OH MY GAWD!!!" I called him and asked could I get a script...even though I didn't have a clue about doing it... But I had to wait for a while... and so my first script was for another Aussie soap The Restless Years or TRY.

By 1980, Drouyn was writing for Prisoner; she wrote at least sixty-four episodes between 1980 and 1985. She also worked as story editor for the series. While working for Prisoner, she also began work on Neighbours, then in its infancy:

I was aware of the development of Neighbours because Reg Watson was involved in both shows and he asked me if I would like to write some episodes during my break... that I guess must have been over Christmas 1984.... Good Lord...it's so long ago it's hard to get the date right. I guess it could have been 83. At any rate Neighbours had not started production. In those early days a writer wrote all five episodes for the week and I remember that I wrote episodes 16 - 20 - seems impossible now. I'd put in my two cents worth about the show during development - like the fact that I thought the working title of One Way Street was an abomination - but I don't know that I influenced it in any way. (Perfect Blend interview)

While writing for Neighbours, Drouyn also contributed material to The Gerry Connolly Show.

In the early 1990s, Drouyn began work on another long-running Australian soap opera, Home and Away, for which she worked until the mid-2000s. She also contributed scripts to a third 1990s' soap opera, Pacific Drive, and scripted the drama Change of Heart (1999). Her work for Blue Heelers included killing off popular character Maggie Doyle.

Drouyn has worked extensively in children's television, especially those programs produced in Western Australia by Barron Entertainment/Great Western Entertainment, including episodes of Chuck Finn (1999); Parallax (2004); Streetsmartz (2005-2006), for which she was also script producer; and Stormworld (2009). She also created (and wrote scripts for) the teen fantasy drama Wild Kat (2001) for Barron Entertainment.

Among her awards is an AWGIE Award (2003) for episode 3445 of Home and Away.

Further Reference

'Coral Drouyn' [interview]. Back to the Bay (http://www.backtothebay.net/interviews/coraldrouyn.shtml). Online. (Sighted: 22/10/2012)

'Coral Drouyn' [interview]. The Perfect Blend (http://perfectblend.net/features/interview-drouyn.htm). Online. (Sighted: 22/10/2012)