You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (13 page)

Coincidentally, the first acting job I ever had involved me getting naked, which set the lowbrow tone for the remainder of my drawn out and tawdry career in front of the camera. To my eternal shame I allowed myself to be stripped down and placed on a rubber bath mat, appearing alongside my smiling mother, who at that time was sporting the haircut of the day, a sharp, glossy bob and fringe made popular by daffy
Hey Hey It's Saturday
co-host Jacki MacDonald. My job was to look inherently delighted by the fact that with the assistance of scientifically proven grip tests I was enjoying bath time without all the bothersome business of slipping over and knocking myself unconscious on the soap dish. I believe I acquitted myself with aplomb. I was, I think, fifteen months old.

It seems unlikely that I was nagging my parents for an agent prior to the bath mat commercial. At that point it was all I could do to pronounce the word ‘kaka' and not wet the bed.Which does seem to suggest that they are partly to blame for my crossing the line from insufferable family showoff to professional actor. ‘One bath mat ad won't hurt,' my mother must have said, ironing her bob into its sleek, rigid helmet. ‘And it's not like she'll remember being naked in front of an entire camera crew. If anything, we're doing her a favour by getting her out of the house.'

Child actors are, on the whole, abhorrent little creatures. Brittle dwarfish adults with forced, eager-to-please smiles and the sort of complicated maze of eating disorders usually found on the set of Bret Michaels'
Rock of Love
. They are forced into constant adult company at an age where they should instead be curiously sticking their fingers into each other's pants behind the shelter shed or eating rocks, and accordingly grow intolerably precocious. They tell jokes they don't fully understand, they become sexualised long before it's healthy and occasionally at Christmas they'll utilise that weird politician-style double-hand handshake, unnerving grandparents with their robotic manners and cold, dead eyes.

I became one, seamlessly. I took to it like Wilson Tuckey to an unhinged racist epithet, and graduated from bath mats to tap shoes. Once my parents had accepted that I wouldn't be swayed from my bloodthirsty lust for stardom, they were reluctantly and dutifully supportive.They permitted me to go to ballet school even though I showed all the co-ordination skills of an epileptic duck. They sent me backstage flowers on ‘performance days'; interminable afternoons where one hundred and fifty girls under the age of eleven wearing leotards flung themselves about beneath a cloud of toxic hairspray to songs like Cliff Richard's ‘Summer Holiday' or the less conventional Toto Coelo classic ‘I Eat Cannibals'. I showed no talent in any particular area—jazz, classical, modern; I was determinedly dreadful at all—yet persisted gamely.

‘I want to be a star . . . like Little Orphan Annie, or Astro Boy,' I told disturbed relatives at family gatherings.

In
All the Rivers Run
I got my wish, playing a delightful street urchin, running amok on the streets of Echuca in voluminous skirts. My parents were producing the series and I bothered them incessantly until they allowed me on set for the afternoon to elbow my way in front of the camera.

I have since spent my entire life dodging accusations of nepotism. Clearly I didn't do myself any favours as a child by forcing my way onto everything with a Hardy name in the credits. In children's series
The Henderson Kids
(Season 1) I can be seen in the background of a scene protesting outside a logging mill with my mother. I am six years old. And yes, my never-say-die father gave himself a role in that show too. He was a corrupt high school teacher who stole precious excursion money and spent a not unmoving confessional scene wringing his hands and stroking his chin in a way that suggested deep remorse.You should see it, not a dry beard in the house.

They were obviously paranoid about the association too. For the Henderson Kids 2 I was made to audition three times because my father was so worried that casting me would damage both his reputation—what was left of it after giving himself so many plum acting roles in his own productions—and my innocence. Eventually I got the role and spent the subsequent ten months playing Sally Marshall, pigtailed pesky neighbour to Tam and Steve Henderson. Wherever there were scrapes, you could be sure I was in 'em! And so forth. I was a reasonably terrible actor, but even more mortifyingly I had yet to grow into my cumbersome peg teeth and subsequently had the sort of lisp people would shield themselves from with wet weather gear, as though my mouth was an out-of-control car driving through a puddle of words.

Imagine those excruciating, sullen years of your pubescence, between the ages of about ten and fifteen when you gracelessly straddled the bridge of childhood and adolescence. Nobody survives this period unscathed. Overnight you morph from lithe, fresh-faced, eager-to-learn wee little boundling, to chunky, poor-postured, stringy-haired slattern. Your brows grow together, you get angry smears of acne, you've not yet learned how to hide the fact your untameable hair grows brittle and upwards, like a Steelo pad. When you look back at photographs of yourself from that time—always somehow sullenly mid-present opening at Christmas, cheeks flaming red, oversized t-shirt to hide your lumpy, misshapen frame—you see the adult you will one day become, trapped in the body of Alf. Imagine now that you had spent that particular period devotedly ensuring that every agonising moment of that interminable process was captured on film and later broadcast on national television. And that at any moment of grownup reprieve years later where you want to start congratulating yourself for being a not abhorrent human being, someone will dig out the Aquavac commercial where you are parading around in front of the camera sporting high-waisted boardshorts and a cowlick.

It's there forever for me, like a time-lapse camera of puberty, like a flick book any stranger can thumb through to watch my boobies grow in fast motion. All the bad haircuts, the ravaged skin from poorly applied makeup, the period where my face was so full and pudding-like it appeared as though I was orally smuggling a pair of hackey sacks. The speech impediments, the costumes you can tell I'm agonisingly self-conscious in, the thickly knit monobrow. If my parents had really wanted to dissuade me from a career as an adolescent actor they need only have said, ‘Listen, you're welcome to do it—but we're going to compile a “best of ” reel for your twenty-first birthday and it will feature you wearing too-tight leggings and a polo neck and rescuing a wombat and anyone who sees it will never want to have sex with you again.'

In school I was monotonously in every production. Carey Baptist Grammar did
Man of La Mancha
in 1990, a musical theatre show about a man losing his mind and chasing windmills which seems a torturously apt analogy for the tumult of adolescence. There are really only three main roles—Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and Aldonza—and outside of a few speaking parts for priests and jolly inn-keepers the majority of minor roles are either town drunks or whores. There's nothing like being in a high school production where fifteen teenage girls are cast as a chorus of prostitutes. All those hormones on stage, intermingling like an oversexed gumbo. The
Herald Sun
letters page would have a field day.

The year after that we did
My Fair Lady
. They cast two Elizas, one who could sing and one who could act. I was the acting one. Given my Saturday mornings at the National Theatre Drama School (inhale, collect air in diaphragm, look meaningfully to back of room) I KNEW HOW TO PROJECT (exhale), so they had little choice but to allow me the role. Unfortunately, every time I opened my mouth to sing children in the front row wept. It's widely understood that in the previews a heavily pregnant woman in the stalls went into labour during my rendition of ‘I Could Have Danced All Night'. Rebecca Leitch was the singing Eliza, and later in life she went on to have a long and successful career in opera. We swapped roles on alternating nights, star to chorus, star to chorus. I'd watch her slay them with ‘Wouldn't It Be Loverly' in her rich alto while I overacted as a florist wench and fashioned character traits that would make me stand out, like an alarming tic of the eyelid or a cartoonish limp.

My parents gave me the ritual card and flowers on opening night. My mother had written in the card: ‘Chookas for the run, Miss Eliza Doolittle. And remember: P. E. E!' This stood for ‘Projection! Eyes! Energy!'—three essential parts of an actor's journey, though I can see how a passerby catching a glimpse of the card may have simply assumed I had bladder issues and even as a teenager needed to be reminded by my mother to urinate before taking the stage. My parents were there at every performance, never wavering in their support, always driving me home with constructive criticism along the lines of, ‘Well yes, I can see how a racegoer at Ascot might get so excited they spontaneously vomit into a pot plant, but I'm not sure it's the best thing to pull focus from Rebecca like that when she's trying her hardest to hold a high note.'

In
A Midsummer Night's Dream
I played Flute—a man who dresses up as a lady, then changes back to a man again, which confused pretty much the entirety of Year 5—and in the next year was shunted to the role of Phebe the shepherdess in
As You Like It
, while the far more beautiful and talented Elissa Elliott took the part of Rosalind. Phebe was a thankless role, requiring mostly that I race about swishing my petticoats through a forest made of cardboard trees painted by the Year 7 art class, the community service chain gang of high school. My love interest, Silvius, was a very nice boy named Ashley Warmbrand who stood at least a head shorter than me. ‘Sweet Phebe, do not scorn me; do not, Phebe,' he would squeak in an unbroken quaver, staring determinedly at my chest. I spent the majority of my time glaring hatefully at Elissa Elliott from the back of the stage and years later experienced an entirely mean-spirited pang of satisfaction when I saw her on television advertising fungal creams.

My stage career took me to
Eeny Meeny Miney Mo
, an amateur theatre piece that boasted as being ‘written, staged, directed and performed totally by the Agora Players!!!!' which in theatre speak means ‘we couldn't afford the rights to a real play so just made up our own!!!' The cast age ranged from fifteen to forty, and the show was a mish-mash of sketches about ‘relationships' written mostly by a young cast who had experienced very little outside of holding hands with James Grant on a playground swing. There was one particularly intense sketch called ‘Feelings' which involved us all pairing off in the dark and writhing around while somebody in the wings played panpipe. This was my favourite part of the show because I was partnered with an intensely handsome hippy actor in his twenties named Sim and we pressed up against each other with a breathy, unscripted urgency. I looked forward to ‘Feelings' with an unhealthy intensity. I think one night I may have actually cried when the sketch finished.

I moved out of home at sixteen and started doing idiotic things like shaving my head and wearing nightgowns over baggy old men's suit pants. It was the '90s. A sweep of adolescent girls were doing the same thing, aping Courtney Love's kinderwhore style and pretending with sneers and middle-finger salutes that they knew how to play guitar. I stopped being offered roles as a sweet, lisping girl next door and started auditioning for parts as mental patients and homeless teenagers. On
Stingers
, an undercover police drama starring Peter Phelps as a man who very much liked rolling across car bonnets in a butch fashion and yelling things like PUT THE GODDAMNED GUN DOWN, I played a pregnant junkie who held up a service station with
The Secret
Life of Us
star Samuel Johnson. The makeup department was instructed to put traces of white powder around our nostrils ‘for authenticity'. On
Raw FM
I was a lesbian stripper who wore nothing but ruffled underpants, feathers and a jaunty waistcoat. On
A Country Practice
I played a demented character named Yesterday Hubble—spawning the immortal line of dialogue, ‘I thought I told you that yesterday, Yesterday'—and stalked an otherwise respectable doctor who climbed out of a hospital window to escape my unhinged lust. Yesterday Hubble ended up running away with a man in a trenchcoat who kept lizards as pets.

On
The Bob Morrison Show
—a series starring a talking dog, and another to which my father was attached so I mustn't say anything too unkind or sarcastic—I was a gothic psychopath, making one whole episode's worth of life a misery for Elissa ‘just three easy applications and you'll say goodbye to fungus for life!' Elliott, who had irritatingly and to my mind unfairly again landed a leading role over me. I relished delivering acerbic comic put downs to her character's face like, ‘Is that your real hair colour, or do you use bleach?' (Hush, my father is reading) and probably put more bile and viciousness into the character than was originally intended. I even tried to adlib a few pertinent barbs related to my inner turmoil regarding all the parts she'd rudely stolen from me but I'm fairly certain my aside, ‘And in what sort of shit-crazy universe would Rosalind wear a push-up bra and Esprit bodysuit anyway?' ended up on the cutting room floor.

Without much success I competed for roles against the infinitely more successful Melissa George (
Home and Away
), Radha Mitchell (
Sugar and Spice
), and Rebecca Smart (
The
Shiralee
). Rejection after rejection began to crack my once impenetrable confidence. The inevitable downward trajectory my parents had suffered was making its inherited presence felt.

And then, of course, there was
Neighbours
.
Neighbours
, a series that has been on Australian television for exactly eight hundred and seventy three years—Doctor Karl Kennedy began life as an Indigenous dot painting on a cave wall, true story—chronicling the lives and loves of the residents of an unassuming yet dangerously lively Erinsborough court. Between good neighbours becoming good friends, as the theme song insistently informed us every weekday, there were weddings, car crashes, pregnancies, and the odd explosion that mysteriously occurred directly when ratings seemed to be taking a leisurely dive. Every Australian actor in the history of time has played a role in
Neighbours
at some point, however small. Russell Crowe played bad boy Kenny Larkin. Ben Mendelsohn played somebody forgettably named Warren Murphy. Greg Fleet—one of the finest and most interesting stand-up comedians in the country—breezed through his role of Dave Summers, a character famous only for running down one of the show's most popular cast members, Daphne Clarke, and killing her in a splatter of PG-rated blood and gore, which is to say a single delicate arc of tomato sauce against the windscreen.