Helen Slayton-Hughes(1930-2022)

Helen Slayton-Hughes was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, to Ralph Emil Slayton and Helen (Peer) Slayton in 1930, one of four siblings. Her family includes a lot of performers. Peter Dinklage is a first cousin, once removed. Her mother, Helen, and maternal aunts Florence Peer (m. Dinklage) and Edna Peer (m. Cardinell) all used the last name "Pierre" when they sang in George M. Cohan musicals before marrying and settling down. One of Slayton-Hughes's brothers, Richard Slayton, spent his entire career with Ringling Brothers Circus, including three years as the top-hatted Ringmaster. He married a beautiful elephant-riding, trapeze-climbing chorus girl, and they brought up their three children on the circus train as well as in a trailer. Another brother, Ralph Slayton, established and ran the Children's Theater of Herkimer, New York, directing dozens of plays.

Slayton-Hughes earned a Bachelor's degree in Drama from Syracuse University, and a Master's in Communications from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). At Syracuse, her acting buddies included Jerry Stiller and Peter Falk, as well as the great dancer Paul Taylor. She had spent about forty years acting on stage (community theater, non-union and Equity waiver) in over two hundred plays and musicals when, at Berkeley Stage in the San Francisco Bay Area, she was cast in a two part story arc on Nash Bridges (1996) and discovered she could actually make money as an actor! So she moved to Los Angeles at the age of 70 to try to earn more. She has four children and six grandchildren. Between acting jobs, she wrote. In December 2015, she and her composer-collaborator, Dana Lewis Howell, had their new one-act opera "Rachel, the Innkeeper's Daughter" produced at St. John Eudes School, Chatsworth, with eleven-piece orchestra. They worked together on a musical adaptation of the Gene Stratton-Porter novel, 'A Girl of the Limberlost'. In 2016, she was working on developing her short film, Homage to Erik Satie's Laundress (2015).