"[Nicola Cavendish] is not just Shirley Valentine; SHE'S A UNIVERSE." (The Globe and Mail)

"Profound. The play is not only funny, it is also moving." (Financial Times, London)

“Nicola Cavendish is simply magnificent, a sure-fire smash hit." (CBC Radio)

"She’s not just Shirley Valentine; She’s a Universe.” (The Globe and Mail)

“Nicola is simply mesmerizing in this role. It seems to have been written just for her.” (Bob Baker)

"When I grew up, on an estate, we didn't live in a classic extended family, but there were all my aunties, cousins, my mum and granny. It was after the war and all the men were on shift in the factories, so I was brought up in a very maternalistic atmosphere, and I suppose I must have spent a lot of time sitting un-noticed but absorbing the women's view of the world. You know what adults are like when they're all together, talking; they think a small child isn't interested or isn't taking it in. But I think I did - not by consciously doing so. I think I absorbed it through my pores" (Willy Russell)

After leaving school at 15 with one O-level in English, he became a lady's hairdresser on the advice of his mum. Although he maintains he was never very good at it, he eventually managed a salon in Kirkby. He was a hairdresser for six years, an experience, he says, that made him an indifferent dresser of hair but 'a good listener'. He did a variety of other jobs, including stacking stockings in the warehouse at 'Bear Brand' and a brief spell in the Ford car factory at Hailwood, cleaning girders. During this time, he began writing as a songwriter, composing songs in the folk idiom. Many of his songs were performed at local folk clubs playing in a semi-pro capacity on the same kind of circuit where the likes of Billy Connolly, Barbara Dickson, Mike Harding, Jasper Carrot and Victoria Wood cut their teeth. He had one song recorded on a Radio Enterprise LP 'A Sampler of Britain' and he and his group The Kirkby Town 3 performed on Granada TV in 1967 - losing out in a talent competition that also featured an early incarnation of Tyrannosaurus Rex and was ultimately won by the band Amen Corner. Willy even ran a folk club for a time. He also wrote songs and sketches for local radio programs.

At the age of twenty, he decided to complete his education and went to college in order to improve his qualifications. He became a schoolteacher in Toxteth where he met Annie (now his wife) and at her prompting, became more interested in drama, started going to plays and began to write. His ambition to be a serious writer was further fired and focused when he saw a production of John McGrath's Unruly Elements at Liverpool's Everyman Theatre in 1971. What he particularly noticed was 'the poetry of common speech,’ which became a hallmark of his own work.

His first play, Keep Your Eyes Down, was produced in 1971, but he made his name in 1974 with John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert, a musical about the Beatles. The play had been commissioned by the Liverpool Everyman where it ran for an unprecedented eight weeks before transferring to the West End where it won the Evening Standard and London Theatre Critics awards for the best musical. Russell was then commissioned to write a play for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The result, Educating Rita (1981), ran on the West End for two years and has been performed all over the world. The play was inspired by his own experience of returning to education, and is about a young working class woman who decides to study English with the Open University. Educating Rita won London's SWET Award for Best Comedy. Russell's other huge theatrical success is Blood Brothers (produced by WCT in 1999), 'a Liverpudlian folk opera' about a pair of twins separated at birth and brought up in completely different environments. Blood Brothers opened in Liverpool in 1983, before subsequently moving to the West End. The show won 3 Best Music Awards and one Best Actress Award at the Laurence Olivier Awards. Shirley Valentine first opened in Liverpool in 1986, before moving to London in 1988. For Shirley Valentine, Russell won the 1989 Tony Award, Drama Desk Award for Best Play and Oliver Award for Best Comedy of the Year.

Both Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine were made into very successful films from Willy Russell's own screenplays, featuring the actresses who originally created the roles on stage (Julie Walters and Pauline Collins, respectively, each of whom won an Oscar nomination for their role). Russell received BAFTA and Oscar nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for both films. In addition to Educating Rita & Shirley Valentine he wrote the screenplay for the movie version of Dancing Thru The Dark based on his play Stags and Hens. Russell has also written plays for television, the most famous of which was Our Day Out (1984), an affecting story of a group of Liverpool schoolchildren on a coach outing with two teachers, one of whom is a disciplinarian, the other a liberal. This play has been enacted by tens of thousands of school kids across the UK. He penned another television drama, One Summer, which aired as a five-part series on Channel 4 in 1983, starring a young David Morrissey.

His plays have won widespread popular and critical acclaim. He has said that his work is concerned with the essential goodness of humanity, and although his characters are often depicted in bleak circumstances, there is an underlying optimism and warmth in his view of the world. His plays have been translated into almost every language, with productions being mounted all over the world including Japan, Australia, South America, Scandinavia and Europe. 

The Wrong Boy, Willy Russell's first novel, was published in 2000 to critical acclaim and, as with his all his plays, has been translated into many different languages. It is written in epistolary form, with main character Raymond Marks, a 19-year old from Manchester, telling the story of his life in letters to his hero Morrissey.

Willy Russell has continued to write songs since the early 1960s. He wrote the lyrics and score for Blood Brothers, wrote the score for Shirley Valentine, and wrote music for several other television series and plays. He co-wrote "The Show", the theme song to the 1985 ITV drama series Connie, which became a top 30 hit for vocalist Rebecca Storm.  In 2003 Willy Russell's first album - Hoovering The Moon - was released, and Willy's musical talent, partially sheltered for years behind his literary skills, was available for all to see and hear. In 2004, Hoovering the Moon was given a full commercial release and is now available at his gigs, direct from his website and from record shops across the UK. Willy Russell continues to live and work in his home city of Liverpool.

Nicola has a huge range; from the neo-classical ladies to the sturdy mother she played so well in the 1999 English-language premiere of Tremblay's For the Pleasure of Seeing her Again at Centaur Theatre. She subsequently toured the nation with the play and won the Montreal English Critics Circle Award for her performance. Among her other theatre credits include the world premiere of Sharon Pollock 's The Komagata Maru Incident, The Millionairess, Pygmalion, Cyrano de Bergerac, Present Laughter, Camille (The Shaw Festival), Blithe Spirit (Broadway, directed by Brian Bedford ), Dirty Blonde (Belfry/Arts Club Theatre), Daughter of the Regiment (Vancouver Opera), The Vagina Monologues (Vogue Theatre), and the Canadian Premiere of Mrs Dexter and her Daily (The National Arts Centre). Her other film roles include Suddenly Naked, Air Bud, It and My American Cousin, and her television roles include Men in Trees, The L Word, Highlander: The Series, The X-Files, Street Legal and Red Serge.

Nicola is also a nationally respected theatre director, having directed such productions as Mousetrap (Arts Club Theatre), Garage Sale (Belfry Theatre), The Laramie Project (UBC & Candida), Having Hope at Home & The Sunshine Boys (Chemainus Theatre Festival).  She has also written It's Snowing on Saltspring (produced at Western Canada Theatre in 1989) and Blowin' on Bowen. She is presently working on a few new projects: the plays Falling Through the Cracks, The Boy Who Wanted to Sew, and Him and Her and Dogface, and a children's book entitled CHANCE'S Second Chance. Nicola lives half the year in North Vancouver and the other half in Qualicum where she enjoys the woods around the Little Qualicum River.