Sarah Lawson

Sarah Lawson was born on the 7th of October, 1955, to Lt.-Col. Sir William Edward Harry Lawson, 5th Baron Burnham and Anne Petherick. She started out her career as a solicitor, working primarily with Macfarlanes in London. After four years of this, in 1980 she moved on to Curtis Brown, working as a writer's agent for a few years, but she eventually settled on a career as a producer in 1982, when she was appointed Vice President of Development at DL Taffner Ltd in Los Angeles. Over the next decade or so, she was also Managing Director of Anglia Television Entertainment, and then of her own company Lawson Productions, through which she created several television projects and a film: "The Dawning", with Anthony Hopkins, Jean Simmons, Trevor Howard and a then virtually unknown Hugh Grant and Rebecca Pidgeon. Having been married to Michael Grade for several years, she remarried David Maher, an Irishman, and from 1998 she took a hiatus from producing choosing to raise a family and to renovate the historic property Ardbraccan in Ireland; however, she did remain the executive producer of a BBC radio show ("Baldi"), and frequently consulted other industry members on various projects. Her main work focus up until 2008 had been getting the project "Grace O'Malley" (along with Anne Chambers, a biographer of the famous Irish pirate) up off the ground; in 2008 it was commissioned by RTÉ. Sadly, Sarah never got to see the project completed. Sarah died on November 8th, 2008, after many years of courageously battling cancer. She left behind her her husband and two children, and to many, the memory of an ambitious, patient, kind, generous, loving, brave and beautiful woman.