Angela Wales Kirgo, who spent nearly two decades as executive director of the Writers Guild Foundation, the educational and charitable arm of the WGA West, died Tuesday in her native Sydney after a battle with cancer, a family spokesperson announced. She was 78.
After serving as executive director of the Australian Writers’ Guild, she came to Los Angeles in 1990, joined the Writers Guild Foundation in 1993 and helped transform it into one of the entertainment industry’s premier educational institutions.
During her tenure, she oversaw the creation of the Shavelson-Webb Library, now home to more than 50,000 produced film and television scripts, granting unprecedented access to the art and history of screenwriting and ensuring that the voices and legacies of generations of writers would be preserved.
Wales Kirgo also increased fundraising at the foundation more than tenfold and dramatically expanded its oral history archive, public events and other.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Tom Schulman, who served as president of the foundation from 1998-2002, credited her with helping usher in the organization’s modern era.
“Angela often said that running the foundation was her dream job,” he said in a statement. “As a board member and former foundation president, I can say without reservation that she was a dream executive director.”
Born in Sydney in 1948, she was the eldest of five children. Her father moved the family to a sheep farm near Walcha, New South Wales, where she spent her formative years, and she attended the University of Sydney, graduating with a degree in English and Classics.
She worked at the Cambridge University library in the U.K. and as a field archaeological assistant in Greece before returning to Sydney to work for the Elizabethan Theatre Trust and the National Playwrights Conference.
She joined the Australian Writers’ Guild in 1979 as an administrator and was named its first executive director in 1983, and during her decade there helped grow it from a volunteer-run association into the properly staffed and resourced professional body that represents Australian screenwriters and playwrights today.
Through the years, she maintained deep ties to her home country, regularly bringing distinguished American screenwriters to the National Screenwriters’ Conference and fostering a creative exchange between the writing communities of both countries.
And with her husband, Emmy-winning writer, producer and former WGAW president George Kirgo, she opened their Brentwood home to generations of visiting Australian writers (he died in 2004).
After she retired in 2013, she became a writer herself, and her memoir, Barefoot in the Bindis, a portrait of rural Australian life, was published in 2019.
She would move back to Australia to care for her elderly mother.
Survivors include her son, Alec Perrin, whom she had with Australian playwright Mil Perrin and who has worked for the WGAW for nearly two decades; her daughter-in-law, Luana; her granddaughter, Alice; and her siblings, Katrina, Philomena, Aidan, Robert and Duncan.
“First as program director, then as the long-serving executive director, Angela was instrumental in developing the Writers Guild Foundation from infancy to maturity,” former Writers Guild Foundation president and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Dan Petrie noted in a statement. “She avoided the limelight, preferring to act behind the scenes, but all of us who worked with her sprang to attention when we heard her ringing Australian-accented voice.”