Thelma Afford's parents moved to Adelaide, where she attended the Presbyterian Girls' College, Glen Osmond.
13 Facts About Thelma Afford
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Thelma Afford acted between 1932 and 1934, then moved to Melbourne in 1934 to further study at Technical College.
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Max Afford and Thelma met when she was designing the costumes for his play Colonel Light: The Founder at the Tivoli, Adelaide.
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The play won awards in competitions run by the Australian Broadcasting Commission which in 1937 employed him in Sydney as a writer, and the following year Thelma was called to Sydney, to design the costumes for that city's sesqui-centenary pageant.
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In 1935, Thelma Afford joined the Ab-Intra for their last show Archway Motif before the theatre closed indefinitely.
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Thelma Afford started designing theatre costumes in the early 1930s at the Ab-Intra Studio Theatre founded during the Depression by Alan Harkness and Kester Baruch, and at the Adelaide Repertory Theatre, where she worked with Agnes Dobson and Robert Helpmann.
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Thelma Afford enjoyed costume designing on a large scale, and added that "period costumes give a designer more scope than modern clothes".
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Thelma Afford was resident designer at the Minerva Theatre from 1940 to 1950 and designed most of the costumes for husband Max's plays, including Awake My Love, and those of other playwrights including Sam Speewack, for the Independent Theatre through the 1950s.
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Thelma Afford worked for the Garrick Theatre and the Tivoli Theatre in Melbourne.
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Thelma Afford remarked that costumes for TV were different than for the stage since the focus was on the upper-body of the actors instead of the silhouette, and the filming was in black-and-white, more precisely 9 shades of grey.
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Thelma Afford authored articles in drama journals, newspapers, and a posthumously published a book titled Dreamers and Visionaries on the little theatres in Adelaide in the first half of the 20th century.
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Thelma Afford worked as an art teacher in the late 1920s and early 1930s, then again towards the end of her career from 1955 to 1978 at Queenwood School for Girls in Mosman where she was Senior Art mistress.
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Thelma Afford's designs are collected in the State Library of South Australia, the State Library of New South Wales and the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland.