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THE GUARDIAN
SIGRID THORNTON : ‘A CONSTANT REMINDER OF ONE’s mortality is important.”
BY STEVE DOW
NOVEMBER 18 2023 01.00 AEDT
“How rapidly things have changed in certain ways,” says Thornton, “and not enough in others.”
Earlier today, Thornton was watching a clip of Meryl Streep “talking about the language of men and women, and how women fundamentally know how to speak ‘man’, but men don’t necessarily understand how to speak ‘woman’ yet.”
“It would be great if we were bilingual,” says Thornton, so that men and women might better work together to achieve their goals, although she is mindful of the importance of “non-binary folk” being “in the mix”.
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
SIGRID THORNTON TELLS THE WHOLE TRUTH
By Louise Rugendyke
September 22, 2022 — 5.30am
Should you ever let the truth get in the way of a good story?
For instance, if I told you Sigrid Thornton’s burlesque name is “Grover McIntosh”, would you believe me?
“Oh, this is fun,” says Thornton, laughing, as she works out the old equation: first pet’s name + first street name = burlesque name.
Sigrid Thornton is making her Sydney Theatre Company debut in The Lifespan of a Fact.
In my defence, she started it. Why would I ask one of Australia’s national treasures what her burlesque name is? This is the woman who won hearts as Laura in SeaChange and made paddleboats and petticoats sexy in All the Rivers Run. I’m all for a scoop, but that one was unexpected.
Thornton is in Sydney for her debut with Sydney Theatre Company. She’s starring in The Lifespan of a Fact, a Broadway comedy about the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (so help anyone who believes everything they read).
In it, she plays Emily Penrose, the editor of a US magazine who is caught between a high-minded writer (played by Gareth Davies) and a fastidious fact-checker (Charles Wu) and what each one believes is the truth.
I had been told she was tiny (true) and that Steven Spielberg once said she had the most beautiful eyes in the world (they are hidden behind shaded lenses today, but they look pretty good), but she’s also a delight. A calming presence to my frazzled self, who is now standing before her, breathless, as I made a late dash to our lunch date at the Theatre Bar at the End of the Wharf.
For someone who has been in the public eye for 50-plus years, a favourite of women’s magazines and tabloids, I figured Thornton had some doozies printed about her over time.
READ FULL ARTICLE
For instance, if I told you Sigrid Thornton’s burlesque name is “Grover McIntosh”, would you believe me?
“Oh, this is fun,” says Thornton, laughing, as she works out the old equation: first pet’s name + first street name = burlesque name.
Sigrid Thornton is making her Sydney Theatre Company debut in The Lifespan of a Fact.
In my defence, she started it. Why would I ask one of Australia’s national treasures what her burlesque name is? This is the woman who won hearts as Laura in SeaChange and made paddleboats and petticoats sexy in All the Rivers Run. I’m all for a scoop, but that one was unexpected.
Thornton is in Sydney for her debut with Sydney Theatre Company. She’s starring in The Lifespan of a Fact, a Broadway comedy about the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (so help anyone who believes everything they read).
In it, she plays Emily Penrose, the editor of a US magazine who is caught between a high-minded writer (played by Gareth Davies) and a fastidious fact-checker (Charles Wu) and what each one believes is the truth.
I had been told she was tiny (true) and that Steven Spielberg once said she had the most beautiful eyes in the world (they are hidden behind shaded lenses today, but they look pretty good), but she’s also a delight. A calming presence to my frazzled self, who is now standing before her, breathless, as I made a late dash to our lunch date at the Theatre Bar at the End of the Wharf.
For someone who has been in the public eye for 50-plus years, a favourite of women’s magazines and tabloids, I figured Thornton had some doozies printed about her over time.
READ FULL ARTICLE
SCOOP MAGAZINE : WALK OF FAME JULY 2023
THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT : Reviewed BY MAXIM BOON
TIME OUT SEPTEMBER 2022
4 out of 5 starsThe truth is absolute. Right? Well, that could be a matter of opinion. Or not. But maybe?
This confounding tug-o-war between the crisp dimensions of objective fact and the fuzzier boundaries of subjective ‘truth’ is at the heart of this thoroughly meta Sydney Theatre Company production.
Through the lens of a true(ish) story about a lot of lies, it explores the tension between the fictions we choose to believe and the realities that stand up to confront them.
Two of the trio of roles in this three-hander are based on real people: celebrated essayist John D’Agata and one-time journalism intern Jim Fingal. In 2003, Harper’s Bazaar commissioned D’Agata to write an in-depth essay about the suicide of a teenager in Las Vegas. However, when plucky intern Fingal was assigned to fact check the piece – considered an easy bit of busy work for a budding sub-editor – he discovered hundreds of discrepancies – some small and forgivable, others egregiously fast and loose. But this wasn’t a mere case of carelessness on D’Agata’s part. In telling the story of how a young man came to leap to his death from the observation tower of a Sin City casino, his essay sought to force beauty’s will onto the beats of this teen’s last day. Simply substituting the elegantly crafted inaccuracies with their blunt factual counterparts would gut the essence and atmosphere of D’Agata’s writing, or so he insisted. Which raised a curious question: what’s more important – honesty, or artistry?
It took Fingal and D’Agata almost a decade to hash out an answer to this, with the 2013 publication of the co-authored book from which this play was adapted by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell in 2018. And given its content – plus the unanticipated resonances today’s disinformation culture brings to this production – it seems not just forgivable but entirely apt that the stage retelling of these events should also distort the truth.
The broadest strokes of the narrative are faithful to their inspiration, but the fine details care little for the facts. Most notably, a fictionalised composite character, magazine editor Emily Penrose (Sigrid Thornton in her STC debut), is added to provide context – both of the practical constraints of seeking truth under the tyranny of a deadline, as well as the slipping value of integrity in an industry that is slowly atrophying. As the play unfolds it gradually shapeshifts from a piece theatre vérité into a more philosophical sparring match, with Penrose playing referee as D’Agata argues the virtues of poetry against Fingal’s factual pedantry.
There are also clear liberties taken with the characterisations of these two men, to allow them to more easily shift the action from that of a biopic into a more intellectual realm over the course of this one-and-a-quarter-hour show. D’Agata (Gareth Davies) is a puffed-up diva, resistant to the mere suggestion that facts should overrule the rhythm of his words. Fingal (Charles Wu) channels a similar hyperbole, going to extraordinary, near-superhuman lengths to research in microscopic detail each and every line of enquiry, arguing for the most unimpeachable standards of integrity, above and beyond the call of any intern’s duty.
Now established as an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force, D’Agata and Fingal seamlessly transform into totems of their respective beliefs, in a way that sweeps aside social decorum or the innate power imbalance of a lowly intern going toe to toe with a venerated writer. On this idealised battleground where influence, status and being ‘somebody’ no longer matters, the strength of the arguments alone can cross swords. Delivering meta on meta on meta, the play itself becomes an essay on the way humanity, with all its flaws, its yearnings, its need for pathos and redemption, is an imperfect prism for the cruel sterility of fact. Especially when it gets in the way of a good story.
But I hasten to add that while this is a deeply thoughtful play, with a lot of intellectual red meat for those who are hungry for it, it’s also a helluva lot of fun. There’s a wonderful odd couple dynamic between Wu’s dorkiness and Davies’ world-weary exasperation. Thornton finds a goldilocks shade of Madison Avenue swagger (not too Miranda Priestly, not too Carrie Bradshaw, but just right) to fully round out the emotional terrain, and the chemistry between all three of these actors is a riot, philosophical musings notwithstanding.
Indeed, director Paige Rattray’s vision for this production is a similar melding of whimsical charm and quiet brilliance. There’s a lot of surprisingly physical comedy at work as D’Agata and Fingal butt heads, and amping up these moments of comedic relief helps to blunt the sharper edges of a show which spends quite a bit of time discussing suicide in not always the most delicate way.
But Rattray also finds scope for some intellectual flexing of her own. Summoning the spectre of Bertolt Brecht (the German theatrical innovator who prized bulldozing the fourth wall in order to make the stage’s artifice a conspicuous conceit), the use of projected titles, on-stage costume changes and the absence of wings, all frames the action as a fabrication from the outset. A wandering on-stage clarinettist, who plays phone ringtones and bluesy incidental ditties, is another Brechtian wink that keeps the audience away from any suggestion of realism (although whether this flourish adds much to the production is a little dubious). Marg Horwell’s set of trundled pieces and half-built structures against a sprawling vista of the Nevada desert also follows suit, while containing the action in a more intimate space – a useful trick, given the potentially overwhelming size of the Roslyn Packer stage for such a small-scale play.
You could be forgiven for thinking The Lifespan of a Fact is some kind of morality tale, but there’s no finger wagging to be seen in this production. Here in the real world back in 2003, Harper’s Bazaar eventually opted not to publish D’Agata’s essay because of its shortcomings (it would be ten years before another magazine would take a punt on it). However, in the make-believe world of the play, the essay’s fate is left as a question mark. This isn’t a cliffhanger per se, but more a bit of homework, as the audience is left to ponder what they might do themselves in Emily Penrose’s shoes.
On stage until October 22…
TICKETS
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
Sigrid Thornton’s new birthing centre drama reflects the timeS
By Bridget McManus
February 27, 2021 — 4.00pm
In the middle of Victoria’s 2020 hard lockdown, Sigrid Thornton picked up a script that spoke to her of “life affirmation and optimism”. Set in the unconventional birthing centre of a hospital, Amazing Grace, Nine’s new drama from the writers of Offspring, Playing for Keeps and Love Child, was, she felt, “quite reflective of the time”.
“I’ve no doubt that the lockdown affected my response,” she says. “People really need to feel a sense of connection in times of crisis, and they need to feel that they can see and hear one another, even though they are so distanced. So I thought this show really fit the bill. But the dynamic is a very complicated one, and all of the relationships are, in their own ways, quite complicated.”
If the first episode is any indication, Amazing Grace has more shock twists than a daytime soap. Except in this case, they’re right up front. As Diane, the hospital mentor to Kate Jenkinson’s gifted but frazzled midwife, Grace, Thornton appears at first stern and despairing of her protege, but, in tune with the rapidly developing plot, another vital element of their relationship soon becomes clear.
“The premise requires the audience to accept a coincidence, if one can call it that. Free-to-air television is at pains to keep creating drama but we are living in a very different environment, where people can absorb new screen stories very quickly in that binge setting. So, commercial television needs to take a slightly different approach. That’s something that [writers] Jonathan Gavin, Ainslie Clouston and Sarah Smith have managed to do very skillfully – to open up an enormous number of unanswered questions.”
In addition to the messy lives of the main players (the cast includes Alex Dimitriades, Luke Ford and Catherine Van-Davies), is the literal messiness that goes hand in hand with the location. As “one of those people who finds it difficult to look away when there’s a baby around,” Thornton delighted in working alongside numerous newborns. Due to a shortage of prosthetic tummies, there were also many pregnant extras: “There was a lot of new – life pending and real – and that creates a very tender and respectful situation on set.”
The series touches on controversial issues around maternity care.
“The show explores the way in which every birth is completely different,” Thornton explains. “The way in which any given birth will pan out is unpredictable, even to the experts. I don’t know that the show makes judgments either way. One thing that it does definitely support is increasing power for mothers and potential mothers.”
Having appeared on both Prisoner in the 1980s and, more recently, alongside Kate Jenkinson, on Foxtel’s Wentworth, Thornton hopes for a future in which female-led drama can move beyond prisons and maternity wards.
Both [shows] are signs of a movement in the direction of telling women’s stories. The dearth of women’s stories leading up to (Prisoner) over the previous generation was pretty gob-smacking, but also a reflection of societal norms.
The beauty of this new wave of women’s stories, which has been in train in the US and the UK for a long while, is there are so many stories yet to be told. We are moving into a new period of creative work that is seeking to more truly reflect the demographic breakdown of our society, and this goes for racial, ethnic and gender parity and true representation as well … The challenge with drama is to find an environment and a world that brings people together realistically in the one setting and that’s why there’s always a generous sprinkling of legal, police and medical drama. But as we start to seek new ways of looking at the world through innovative writing, that will change.”
AMAZING GRACE
New series Wednesday (March 3), 9pm, Nine
“I’ve no doubt that the lockdown affected my response,” she says. “People really need to feel a sense of connection in times of crisis, and they need to feel that they can see and hear one another, even though they are so distanced. So I thought this show really fit the bill. But the dynamic is a very complicated one, and all of the relationships are, in their own ways, quite complicated.”
If the first episode is any indication, Amazing Grace has more shock twists than a daytime soap. Except in this case, they’re right up front. As Diane, the hospital mentor to Kate Jenkinson’s gifted but frazzled midwife, Grace, Thornton appears at first stern and despairing of her protege, but, in tune with the rapidly developing plot, another vital element of their relationship soon becomes clear.
“The premise requires the audience to accept a coincidence, if one can call it that. Free-to-air television is at pains to keep creating drama but we are living in a very different environment, where people can absorb new screen stories very quickly in that binge setting. So, commercial television needs to take a slightly different approach. That’s something that [writers] Jonathan Gavin, Ainslie Clouston and Sarah Smith have managed to do very skillfully – to open up an enormous number of unanswered questions.”
In addition to the messy lives of the main players (the cast includes Alex Dimitriades, Luke Ford and Catherine Van-Davies), is the literal messiness that goes hand in hand with the location. As “one of those people who finds it difficult to look away when there’s a baby around,” Thornton delighted in working alongside numerous newborns. Due to a shortage of prosthetic tummies, there were also many pregnant extras: “There was a lot of new – life pending and real – and that creates a very tender and respectful situation on set.”
The series touches on controversial issues around maternity care.
“The show explores the way in which every birth is completely different,” Thornton explains. “The way in which any given birth will pan out is unpredictable, even to the experts. I don’t know that the show makes judgments either way. One thing that it does definitely support is increasing power for mothers and potential mothers.”
Having appeared on both Prisoner in the 1980s and, more recently, alongside Kate Jenkinson, on Foxtel’s Wentworth, Thornton hopes for a future in which female-led drama can move beyond prisons and maternity wards.
Both [shows] are signs of a movement in the direction of telling women’s stories. The dearth of women’s stories leading up to (Prisoner) over the previous generation was pretty gob-smacking, but also a reflection of societal norms.
The beauty of this new wave of women’s stories, which has been in train in the US and the UK for a long while, is there are so many stories yet to be told. We are moving into a new period of creative work that is seeking to more truly reflect the demographic breakdown of our society, and this goes for racial, ethnic and gender parity and true representation as well … The challenge with drama is to find an environment and a world that brings people together realistically in the one setting and that’s why there’s always a generous sprinkling of legal, police and medical drama. But as we start to seek new ways of looking at the world through innovative writing, that will change.”
AMAZING GRACE
New series Wednesday (March 3), 9pm, Nine
STELLAR MAGAZINE: Sigrid Thornton on the ‘great joy’ of ageing
JAN 23 2021
SHE’S BEEN THE DARLING OF THE AUSTRALIAN STAGE AND SCREEN FOR ALMOST 50 YEARS, AND AT 61, SIGRID THORNTON CONTINUES TO PUSH BOUNDARIES AND STAND HER GROUND.
Credits
Photography: Damian Bennett @damianbennettphoto
Styling: Kelly Hume @kellyahume
Interview: Angela Mollard @angelamollard
Stellar Magazine
The full interview and shoot can be seen inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD), Sunday Mail (SA) and Sunday Tasmanian (TAS) this weekend.
Photography: Damian Bennett @damianbennettphoto
Styling: Kelly Hume @kellyahume
Interview: Angela Mollard @angelamollard
Stellar Magazine
The full interview and shoot can be seen inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD), Sunday Mail (SA) and Sunday Tasmanian (TAS) this weekend.
EXCLUSIVE:
Wentworth star Sigrid Thornton and mum Merle share their special bond
MERLE THORNTON IS A BATTLER, AN ACADEMIC, AN AUTHOR AND A WOMAN WHO HAS MADE HISTORY. SHE AND HER SCREEN STAR DAUGHTER SIGRID DISCUSS THEIR DEEP AND COMPLEX MOTHER-DAUGHTER BOND.
As a little girl, Sigrid Thornton was blithely unaware of the vicious death threats targeting her family.
Aged six, she was still too young to realise the police cars parked in their quiet suburban street were lurking to protect her radical parents from their political enemies.
It was March 1965, and Sigrid's feisty, outspoken, audacious mother was making national news – and becoming a feminist icon in the process.
Merle Thornton and friend Ro Bogner had sent shockwaves through the establishment after chaining themselves to the bar of Brisbane's landmark Regatta Hotel, demanding that women be allowed to drink there alongside men.
"Mum has never exactly been a shrinking violet," laughs Sigrid, whose iconic roles play like a greatest-hits reel of Australian film and television, from The Man From Snowy River to All The Rivers Run, Seachange, Underbelly, Prisoner and Wentworth.
"She has been a fighter all her life and I admire her bravery and dogged determination. I suppose I learned how to be strong and independent from that example, although it's really hard to unpick because the empathy that exists between parent and child is so strong."
"Certainly it's pretty difficult to grow up with such a very, very strong personality without being imbued with some of the same characteristics." Merle nods, approvingly.
"It's the age-old thing, isn't it? 'I don't want to be like my mother,' and then realising that I am like my mother and becoming more and more like her as time goes by!"
Sigrid flashes the infectious smile so obviously inherited from Merle, together with forensic intelligence, bone-dry wit, a passion for fairness and that distinctive heart-shaped face.
"Back then I didn't fully understand the issues, but I was very aware of the Regatta protest because we were allowed to stay up late and watch Four Corners on telly," the award-winning actor and producer fondly remembers.
"I didn't know about the death threats – I vaguely remember a little bit of scuttlebutt about that – because our parents largely tried to protect us from the darker side of what went on.
"But growing up in an environment of social activism – not just in terms of women's liberation, but more generally – wasn't always the easiest thing.
"It's a natural response for small children whose parents are out there doing things for other people to think, 'What about me?' although that wasn't exclusive to being the daughter of a feminist. It would have been exactly the same had Mum been a brain surgeon."
Sigrid admits that she becomes more and more like her mother as time goes by. Photography by Alana Landsberry. Styling by Mattie Cronan.
In The Australian Women's Weekly's light-filled studio before the COVID-19 shutdown, a small legion of stylists, publicists and hair and make-up artists are fussing over Sigrid's diminutive figure.
She is businesslike and charming, yet her focus keeps defaulting to Merle who is pacing nearby, waiting for the shoot to begin.
"Mum, darling, sit down," her daughter chides with obvious affection.
"You were up before dawn and you're going to be standing for a very long time today. We don't want to wear you out."
Merle, however, is made of sterner stuff.
Now aged 89, the redoubtable writer and former teacher – who introduced a ground-breaking women's studies course at The University of Queensland – shows scant sign of slowing down and has just released a compelling new memoir, Bringing the Fight, a firebrand feminist's life of defiance and determination.
As her book reveals, the fearless mother-of-two fiercely battled injustice wherever she found it.
And in Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen's notoriously oppressive Queensland – where public bars remained 'men only' havens until 1970 – there was a cornucopia of discrimination to be set right.
Incredible as it now seems, women working in the state and commonwealth public services were forced to resign after tying the knot. (Merle hid her own married status for years, until pregnancy forced her to go public.)
There was no recognition of de facto rights for females who bucked the system by "living in sin" with their partners, and birth control was largely a taboo subject.
A born rebel, indulged only child and self-styled "girly swot," Merle set out to change these self-evident inequities, supported by her adored "male feminist" husband Neil.
The couple met at a Workers' Educational Association poetry class, studied at The University of Sydney (he read philosophy, she graduated with an arts degree) and became active in the free-thinking Libertarian Society.
So it was not an immediately natural fit when Neil's academic work saw them move to the then backwater of Brisbane, where Sigrid and older brother Harold grew up surrounded by heated political debate.
"Queensland became a breeding ground for anarchy and upheaval and uprising, because the state government was so repressive – the most repressive in the country."
Famously, the Thornton family was arrested en masse by Queensland police at a Vietnam Moratorium rally when Sigrid was only 13.
"I was scared that people were being hurt but I never imagined, in my naivety, that I was in any danger," she says.
"I was an optimistic teenager and I had my mother by my side. I think I saw it as an interesting adventure."
It must have been difficult to shock parents like Merle and Neil, who espoused free love in the straight-laced 1950s and had a generally eccentric approach to everyday life.
Setting up house together, they owned nothing but highball glasses and teaspoons.
"That was all. No dinner plates or bowls, no cooking utensils or cutlery.
I should admit I wasn't cut out to be a homemaker," reminisces the Thornton matriarch who, on one memorable occasion, scandalised her grandmother when a diaphragm fell out of her handbag onto the carpet.
Nonetheless, young Sigrid tried to push the envelope.
Wanting a bra – "I didn't really need one" – she was forced to hide the nefarious underwear in a bottom drawer, so a disapproving Merle would not find it.
Earlier, there was a memorable clothing "barney" when her mother sent her to kindergarten in overalls home-sewn from men's suit material, instead of a more suitable dress. The teacher was not amused.
- WOMEN'S WEEKLY
READ THIS NEXT
Aged six, she was still too young to realise the police cars parked in their quiet suburban street were lurking to protect her radical parents from their political enemies.
It was March 1965, and Sigrid's feisty, outspoken, audacious mother was making national news – and becoming a feminist icon in the process.
Merle Thornton and friend Ro Bogner had sent shockwaves through the establishment after chaining themselves to the bar of Brisbane's landmark Regatta Hotel, demanding that women be allowed to drink there alongside men.
"Mum has never exactly been a shrinking violet," laughs Sigrid, whose iconic roles play like a greatest-hits reel of Australian film and television, from The Man From Snowy River to All The Rivers Run, Seachange, Underbelly, Prisoner and Wentworth.
"She has been a fighter all her life and I admire her bravery and dogged determination. I suppose I learned how to be strong and independent from that example, although it's really hard to unpick because the empathy that exists between parent and child is so strong."
"Certainly it's pretty difficult to grow up with such a very, very strong personality without being imbued with some of the same characteristics." Merle nods, approvingly.
"It's the age-old thing, isn't it? 'I don't want to be like my mother,' and then realising that I am like my mother and becoming more and more like her as time goes by!"
Sigrid flashes the infectious smile so obviously inherited from Merle, together with forensic intelligence, bone-dry wit, a passion for fairness and that distinctive heart-shaped face.
"Back then I didn't fully understand the issues, but I was very aware of the Regatta protest because we were allowed to stay up late and watch Four Corners on telly," the award-winning actor and producer fondly remembers.
"I didn't know about the death threats – I vaguely remember a little bit of scuttlebutt about that – because our parents largely tried to protect us from the darker side of what went on.
"But growing up in an environment of social activism – not just in terms of women's liberation, but more generally – wasn't always the easiest thing.
"It's a natural response for small children whose parents are out there doing things for other people to think, 'What about me?' although that wasn't exclusive to being the daughter of a feminist. It would have been exactly the same had Mum been a brain surgeon."
Sigrid admits that she becomes more and more like her mother as time goes by. Photography by Alana Landsberry. Styling by Mattie Cronan.
In The Australian Women's Weekly's light-filled studio before the COVID-19 shutdown, a small legion of stylists, publicists and hair and make-up artists are fussing over Sigrid's diminutive figure.
She is businesslike and charming, yet her focus keeps defaulting to Merle who is pacing nearby, waiting for the shoot to begin.
"Mum, darling, sit down," her daughter chides with obvious affection.
"You were up before dawn and you're going to be standing for a very long time today. We don't want to wear you out."
Merle, however, is made of sterner stuff.
Now aged 89, the redoubtable writer and former teacher – who introduced a ground-breaking women's studies course at The University of Queensland – shows scant sign of slowing down and has just released a compelling new memoir, Bringing the Fight, a firebrand feminist's life of defiance and determination.
As her book reveals, the fearless mother-of-two fiercely battled injustice wherever she found it.
And in Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen's notoriously oppressive Queensland – where public bars remained 'men only' havens until 1970 – there was a cornucopia of discrimination to be set right.
Incredible as it now seems, women working in the state and commonwealth public services were forced to resign after tying the knot. (Merle hid her own married status for years, until pregnancy forced her to go public.)
There was no recognition of de facto rights for females who bucked the system by "living in sin" with their partners, and birth control was largely a taboo subject.
A born rebel, indulged only child and self-styled "girly swot," Merle set out to change these self-evident inequities, supported by her adored "male feminist" husband Neil.
The couple met at a Workers' Educational Association poetry class, studied at The University of Sydney (he read philosophy, she graduated with an arts degree) and became active in the free-thinking Libertarian Society.
So it was not an immediately natural fit when Neil's academic work saw them move to the then backwater of Brisbane, where Sigrid and older brother Harold grew up surrounded by heated political debate.
"Queensland became a breeding ground for anarchy and upheaval and uprising, because the state government was so repressive – the most repressive in the country."
Famously, the Thornton family was arrested en masse by Queensland police at a Vietnam Moratorium rally when Sigrid was only 13.
"I was scared that people were being hurt but I never imagined, in my naivety, that I was in any danger," she says.
"I was an optimistic teenager and I had my mother by my side. I think I saw it as an interesting adventure."
It must have been difficult to shock parents like Merle and Neil, who espoused free love in the straight-laced 1950s and had a generally eccentric approach to everyday life.
Setting up house together, they owned nothing but highball glasses and teaspoons.
"That was all. No dinner plates or bowls, no cooking utensils or cutlery.
I should admit I wasn't cut out to be a homemaker," reminisces the Thornton matriarch who, on one memorable occasion, scandalised her grandmother when a diaphragm fell out of her handbag onto the carpet.
Nonetheless, young Sigrid tried to push the envelope.
Wanting a bra – "I didn't really need one" – she was forced to hide the nefarious underwear in a bottom drawer, so a disapproving Merle would not find it.
Earlier, there was a memorable clothing "barney" when her mother sent her to kindergarten in overalls home-sewn from men's suit material, instead of a more suitable dress. The teacher was not amused.
- WOMEN'S WEEKLY
READ THIS NEXT
Sigrid Thornton: bringing the gift of reinvention to Seachange 2.0
BY Michael Idato
July 21, 2019 — 12.00am
|
A working actor for more than four decades, Sigrid Thornton is accustomed to early starts. Unfazed by the transition from darkness to light, she stands perfectly silhouetted in the half-light, beside the glass-like surface of a nearby ocean pool, as the sun sends its first spray of gold across the sky.
Around her is the marketing machinery powering her return to television screens as Seachange's delightful, dysfunctional mother-andmagistrate Laura Gibson; behind her the water casts a shimmering reflection of the iconic Australian actor.
"I think I see in the mirror someone who's actually really, really striving to live a full life," Sigrid says as we retire to the comfortable indoors. "I'm pretty determined to just keep going. And I don't mean that as an actor. I mean, to strive for fulfilment, for happiness, for [creative] enrichment."
She adds that these aspects of her personality haven't really changed. "They've been tempered by sadness, pain and grief, and all of the things that happen to most people if they live long enough. And that's not an easy thing."
It's a challenging question, Sigrid says, wondering aloud where the eye instinctively goes when set against the reflected image. "Is the eye exploring the superficiality of the face, or is the eye looking past that into other things?" she asks me. "For most people, I would imagine if you look into your eyes in the mirror for long enough, you go way past the physicality that's there."
In her life, Sigrid says, she has discovered "a greater personal understanding of the deepest aspects of survival. And, what it means to keep overcoming the natural tendency to dissolve oneself into darker experiences. I think that's a pretty normal thing for most people."
Born in Canberra, Sigrid is the daughter of academic Neil Thornton, and teacher and writer, Merle. She is married to producer/director Tom Burstall and they have two adult children, Jaz and Ben. Physically, Sigrid says, "more and more I do see my mother [in my reflection]. And, with a daughter who is very much an adult now, I can see that generational pool. You know what I mean? Really clearly now, which is fascinating."
In a career peppered with film masterpieces such as The Getting of Wisdom and cultural classics such as The Man from Snowy River, the role of Seachange's Laura Gibson stands out.
As written for the television screen between 1998 and 2000, Laura was given a narrative complexity that was rare for television two decades ago. The corporate lawyer-turned-country magistrate had permission to fail spectacularly, and to defy convention. And she did both admirably.
She was also herded away from the traditionally narrow storytelling boxes women had previously been pushed into: saint, sinner, housewife, harridan.
"One of the ways in which women have been kept at bay is through a sort of societal push to have them feel insecure about being something other than one of those archetypal roles," Sigrid says. "Laura was pushing those boundaries and I hope that that's one of the things people enjoyed seeing."
Laura Gibson was also part of something larger. The original series was driven creatively by Deb Cox, working with co-creator Andrew Knight and producers Sue Masters, Andrea Denholm and Sally Ayre-Smith. The new series is produced by Cox, Fiona Eagger, Lois Randall and Sigrid herself.
And all of that two decades before the #MeToo movement. "We've really got a lot of catching up to do with the firmament of women's stories," Sigrid says. "There's a thirst for it. And we can call it a fashion or a fad, but I don't think it's that, I think it's a movement."
Sigrid says we are now in a much more fertile environment for women's stories. "And that's a good thing. It was unusual at the time to make a story about a woman of that age. It's actually still unusual to make a story about a woman of this age. [Sigrid is 60.] But I think that's a sign of the maturation of the industry."
The original Seachange took us to an inexplicably magical place: Pearl Bay was a seaside town seemingly lost in time, cut off from the rest of the world after the destruction of its bridge by a water spout. Its characters – real estate agent Bob Jelly (John Howard), his wife Heather (Kerry Armstrong), caravan park manager Kev (Kevin Harrington), shop owner Phrani Gupta (Georgina Naidu) and Laura's love interest Diver Dan (David Wenham) – were an eccentric slice of small-town Australian life.
In particular, the series explored our sense of longing for a simpler life, such as the one the show's theme song by Wendy Morrison and Richard Pleasance espoused: Don't wanna live in the city, my friends tell me I'm changing/The smell of salty air, is what I'm chasing/You probably think I'm mad, but it feels good to me.
"In some ways my own life is a bit paradoxical," Sigrid says. "I am sentimental and I can lean towards nostalgia. But really I'm quite a genuine optimist. And when you're an optimist you need to keep putting one foot in front of the other."
Now, however, Sigrid says there is a discernible ripple in the cultural consciousness. "It's a longing for the times that have slipped by. If you want to discuss nostalgia in terms of a wave, or fashion, that's what we're experiencing now.
"Fashion is probably the wrong word – it makes too light of it," she continues. "I think there is a kind of wave of nostalgia, and that's about very obvious things. It's about people coping with underlying fear and uncertainty about the future of the planet, essentially."
In that sense, Laura Gibson's existential crisis – that the stress of city living was off the scale, prompting a decision to wind the clock back to the moment that her family was last genuinely happy – may even have come two decades early.
In the pilot episode, which aired on the ABC on May 10, 1998, Laura packed up her kids Miranda and Rupert and returned to the location of the family's last idyllic summer holiday – the small town of Pearl Bay.
Initially, Sigrid admits, she was sceptical of the role. "But as soon as I read the pilot script, I was completely hooked in. And I really wanted it. I loved the prospect of playing a woman who had sort of buggered things up and was seeking to reinvent herself. "
The role gave the actor the gift of reinvention after a career playing a number of frontier heroines. "It was in many ways the most complex role I'd had to date and playing her was sheer joy," she says. "I don't really remember an unhappy day at work. It was a particular time of life. I was able to work the schedule around my being a working mother at that time. It doesn't always work as harmoniously as that.
"Maybe I'm being nostalgic and romanticising it, but it always held a special place for all of us."
Returning to the role two decades later, the answer to whether Laura is a profoundly different woman is difficult to ascertain, even for the actor playing her. Whatever happens, Sigrid says, Laura is a different woman if for no other reason than Sigrid herself is a different woman. "That's the answer," she says. "I mean, it's exactly that.
"An actor is often asked, 'How much of yourself do you see in the character?' And, I always say, 'Well, it's all me.' It's not exactly how I would behave, or how I dress. But, it's all me."
But perhaps the most profound quality of the original Seachange is that the show possessed a healing quality, Sigrid says. It was the result of a peculiar recipe of gentility, authenticity and humour, and something else: an intangible, subcutaneous energy borrowed from the town's own cosmically powered sweet spot, Brabey Point.
"It soothed the soul," Sigrid says. "And there's a lot to be said for that because, there are a lot of uneasy souls that need soothing. I've been a strong advocate for the importance of vital cultural expression. It's critical. We have to be exposed to creative work. It's the way through for us. It's our way of cutting through surface-level communication. And we have to keep doing that to survive."
She adds that the First Nations people knew that. "Telling stories to one another, and handing down stories, and discussing new events through storytelling, was critical to their survival. I don't think that any of that has changed at base level.
"Television has had to respond to massive change, vast changes, in the whole framework of communications," Sigrid says. "It's a really interesting time for television. To be in the middle of that is very exciting, because it's still the strongest narrative force."
In a sense, Seachange 2.0 evolves its story to be one of three generations of Australian women: Laura, her elder daughter Miranda (Brooke Satchwell) and the younger, though now teenage, daughter Stella (Ella Newton), whom Laura discovered she was pregnant with in the final episode of the original series.
"I think it's a great premise, to have people thrown together in that way," Sigrid says. "And, then to have some of those discussions that reveal that age-old phenomenon: that you have to live it, you have to experience it, to be able to know it."
According to Sigrid, Laura has various things to say to her daughters – but they have just as much to teach her. "The thing about conversations between women is that women have a tendency to get down to tin tacks much more quickly than men are able to do – for all sorts of reasons," she says, adding that no two women are the same.
"They might share characteristics, and they might be able to rap on about this or that. But they're all, of course, unique. What we've tried to do with Seachange is create women who are very distinct from one another."
Looking back at her own life's work, the not-too-nostalgic Sigrid is nonchalant. In many respects she was Australia's first cinematic sweetheart of the modern age, the progenitor of a character archetype subsequently filled by actors such as Georgie Parker, Lisa McCune and Kate Ritchie.
The singular characteristic that all of those women share is that they grew up on the screen, before the nation's eyes, along the way creating a powerful bond between actor and audience.
"There's actually no point in looking back," Sigrid says. "Mostly what I see are the things I could have done differently. Someone extremely wise said quite recently that creative work is simply the best you can do, on the day, at the time.
"And that's all it is. There's no caption to explain away the fact that, 'Oh, I had a really bad day. I woke up with a headache. I just couldn't tie my shoes.' It's just what you can do; it's the best you can give on the day."
Sigrid adds that the thing about being an actor is that all your mistakes are recorded. "It used to be cellular; not any more. Now they're digitised forever. They never go away. But there's no point in worrying about that. You just simply move to the next project."
Seachange will air on the Nine Network in early August.
Fashion editor Penny McCarthy. Hair Graeme Cumming using Hair by Sam McNight. Make-up Jody Oliver using La Mer. Fashion assistant Rebecca Alonzo. Deckchair by Ici Et Là. Sunday Supply beach umbrella from Commune Bondi.
This article appears in Sunday Life magazine within the Sun-Herald and the Sunday Age on sale July 21.
Merle and Sigrid Thornton to get 'Frank and Fearless'
26/27 July 2019 - Queensland Music Festival
More than 50 years since chaining herself to a bar in Brisbane’s west to draw attention to women’s rights in Australia, activist Merle Thornton makes her stage debut with daughter and legendary actor Sigrid Thornton, for a special new show entitled ‘Frank and Fearless’.
Commissioned by Queensland Music Festival for its 2019 program, ‘Frank and Fearless’ will see Merle Thornton team up with her daughter for an open, no-holds-bar discussion about women’s rights, women in the media and to recount the stories of one of Australia’s greatest social activists through the musical soundtrack that inspired her life.
Merle Thornton, who helped The Equal Opportunities union in QLD , and made international headlines in 1963 for chaining herself to the bar at The Regatta Hotel in Brisbane, as a protest against Queensland laws that excluded women from public bars, played a vital role in initiating the second wave of feminism in Australia.
Her hard work and passion for gender equality has led to the removal of the ‘marriage bar’ law, helped establish the first Women's Studies course at the University of Queensland and has been pivotal in garnering national attention for women’s rights in Australia.
Frank and Fearless will play for two shows only 26 & 27 July, Powerhouse Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse and will include live music from Brisbane neo-soul four piece Pink Matter, and Sunshine Coast artist Tiana Khasi. Don’t miss the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn, laugh, cry and be inspired by two Australian icons.
The Queensland Music Festival presents Frank and Fearless An In-conversation between Merle Thornton & Sigrid Thornton
Friday 26 July & Saturday 27 July | Powerhouse Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse | 7.30pm With Pink Matter and Tiana Khasi For ticketing information, click here.
Frank and Fearless is presented by Queensland Music Festival and supported by Brisbane City Council and Regatta Hotel. Queensland Music Festival is an initiative of the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland. For more information, pics, interviews or story ideas, please contact: Mitch Fresta mitch@sgcmedia.com // (07) 3123 5331 ext 1 To download media release: Click here.
Commissioned by Queensland Music Festival for its 2019 program, ‘Frank and Fearless’ will see Merle Thornton team up with her daughter for an open, no-holds-bar discussion about women’s rights, women in the media and to recount the stories of one of Australia’s greatest social activists through the musical soundtrack that inspired her life.
Merle Thornton, who helped The Equal Opportunities union in QLD , and made international headlines in 1963 for chaining herself to the bar at The Regatta Hotel in Brisbane, as a protest against Queensland laws that excluded women from public bars, played a vital role in initiating the second wave of feminism in Australia.
Her hard work and passion for gender equality has led to the removal of the ‘marriage bar’ law, helped establish the first Women's Studies course at the University of Queensland and has been pivotal in garnering national attention for women’s rights in Australia.
Frank and Fearless will play for two shows only 26 & 27 July, Powerhouse Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse and will include live music from Brisbane neo-soul four piece Pink Matter, and Sunshine Coast artist Tiana Khasi. Don’t miss the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn, laugh, cry and be inspired by two Australian icons.
The Queensland Music Festival presents Frank and Fearless An In-conversation between Merle Thornton & Sigrid Thornton
Friday 26 July & Saturday 27 July | Powerhouse Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse | 7.30pm With Pink Matter and Tiana Khasi For ticketing information, click here.
Frank and Fearless is presented by Queensland Music Festival and supported by Brisbane City Council and Regatta Hotel. Queensland Music Festival is an initiative of the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland. For more information, pics, interviews or story ideas, please contact: Mitch Fresta mitch@sgcmedia.com // (07) 3123 5331 ext 1 To download media release: Click here.
Sigrid Thornton named an Officer to the Order of Australia in Queen's Birthday Honours.
9 June 2019
- Officer to the Order of Australia (AO) Sigrid Madeline THORNTON NSW
For distinguished service to the performing arts as a film, television and stage actor, and to professional arts organisations.
Sigrid Thornton has been recognised for her contributions to the performing arts across film, television and stage in the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours.
Hugh Jackman, Ita Buttrose, Rosie Batty, and Kevin Rudd are among the esteemed Australians also receiving recognition.
Thornton, who is currently working on the Seachange reboot, was named an Officer to the Order of Australia (AO) for distinguished service to the performing arts as a film, television and stage actor, and to professional arts organisations.
Ms Thornton has also contributed to many professional arts organisations through board roles. She currently sits on the board of the National Institute of Dramatic Arts and was previously on the Australian Film Institute board.
The Queen's Birthday Honours are set to make history this year, with the highest percentage of women ever on the recipient list.
Women make up 40 per cent of recipients across all tiers of the awards, including five out of the 12 people receiving the top honour, the Companion of the Order of Australia (AC).
Chauvel Award winner Sigrid Thornton reflects on her career and returning to ‘SeaChange’
04 April, 2019 by Jackie Keast
iF Magazine
Sigrid Thornton will be presented with the Chauvel Award tonight at a screen industry gala event held as part of the Gold Coast Film Festival.
The award recognises the prolific actress’ significant contribution to the Australian screen industry. Her long career includes films such The Man From Snowy River and The Lighthorsemen, and TV series SeaChange, All The Rivers Run, Prisoner and recently, The Code and Wentworth. Established in 1992, previous winners of the Chauvel Award include Fred Schepisi, Gillian Armstrong, George Miller, Jan Chapman, Heath Ledger and Deborah Mailman.
“This recognition is a wonderful and very humbling acknowledgement of essentially what’s been a lot of hard work,” Thornton tells IF.
“It’s a career that’s been full, rich and enormously joyful, but it’s also had a lot of ups and downs as well.”
Thornton will soon return to one of her most notable roles, that of Laura Gibson, in Seachange: Paradise Reclaimed (working title) for the Nine Network, about to enter pre-production.
An ITV Studios Australia and Every Cloud Productions series, the eight-parter will see Laura return to Pearl Bay 20 years on to attend the birth of her estranged daughter’s baby, and rising seas levels, community coverups and some very stormy weather will conspire to convince her this town now needs her as much as she needs it.
Thornton is also working on the series as an executive producer, together with Fiona Eagger, Deb Cox and David Mott, and will be re-joined by fellow castmate John Howard, who was mayor Bob Jelly in the original.
She believes the original SeaChange, which aired on the ABC in the late ’90s, has a “heartfelt legacy in the Australian consciousness”, and is excited to see it how it re-enters the zeitgeist.
“It’s an unusual thing to come back to the same role almost 20 years later and to be able to tell the story of the same character in a changed world.
“Pearl Bay has not been completely protected from a rapidly shifting generational change. So she’s entered a new generation, and has things to say about that and things to experience in the context of that.”
Thornton also has a small role in the upcoming Foxtel/Lingo Picture’s comedy drama Lambs of God, which recently had its world premiere at France’s Series Mania.
“I really wanted to be a part of this production. I’d worked with Foxtel previously on Wentworth and I knew it was coming down the pike. It was just so exciting and I love Jeffrey Walker’s work. I knew that it was going to be a very unusual piece, and I suppose I just wanted to have peek in.”
Having worked in the Aussie screen industry since the ’70s, appearing in Crawford Productions series like Homicide and Division 4, Thornton has watched the Australian film and television industry grow. She is proud to have had opportunity over her career to work to strengthen the industry more broadly, serving on various boards such as that of AACTA, AFI, NIDA and Film Victoria. She has advocated for the industry on a number of occasions, including recently as part of the guilds’ Make It Australian campaign.
Thornton regards the industry as presently in a “tricky state of transition”, with both government and the industry having to play ‘catch up’ to the world of streaming. In particular, she mourns consistent financial cuts to the ABC, arguing its role as the “flagship Australian storyteller” is somewhat diminished and constrained at present. She sees SBS as being in a similar financial tight-spot, and observes the free-to-air networks are also presently having to make swift adjustments to compete with new market entrants.
“On the one hand, everybody’s talking about the enormous amount of content that is required to fill this seemingly bottomless pit of need by audiences for screen stories. But the flipside of that is that the Australian industry continues to be pretty tight; there’s never quite enough finance, there’s never quite enough time.
“We are in a period of quite important transition and we need to be very vigilant and we need to be very resilient and responsive.”
However, she is buoyed by the industry’s movements towards greater gender parity and diversity. “We are starting to include more women and redressing the imbalance between male and female practitioners. We are also starting to embrace the telling of our wealth of Indigenous stories by our First Australians.”
Overall, Thornton feels incredibly fortunate to have sustained a career in Australia. “One of the reasons it keeps me coming back is that I’m continuing to learn, and it keeps me open, it keeps me on my toes.
“It’s constantly shifting; the environment in which I work is never the same, the people, the teams with which I’m working with are never the same… so it is always interesting. Even when it’s challenging it’s interesting. I’m definitely open to that – that’s one of the things I enjoy most, that you can never really second guess this work.”
The award recognises the prolific actress’ significant contribution to the Australian screen industry. Her long career includes films such The Man From Snowy River and The Lighthorsemen, and TV series SeaChange, All The Rivers Run, Prisoner and recently, The Code and Wentworth. Established in 1992, previous winners of the Chauvel Award include Fred Schepisi, Gillian Armstrong, George Miller, Jan Chapman, Heath Ledger and Deborah Mailman.
“This recognition is a wonderful and very humbling acknowledgement of essentially what’s been a lot of hard work,” Thornton tells IF.
“It’s a career that’s been full, rich and enormously joyful, but it’s also had a lot of ups and downs as well.”
Thornton will soon return to one of her most notable roles, that of Laura Gibson, in Seachange: Paradise Reclaimed (working title) for the Nine Network, about to enter pre-production.
An ITV Studios Australia and Every Cloud Productions series, the eight-parter will see Laura return to Pearl Bay 20 years on to attend the birth of her estranged daughter’s baby, and rising seas levels, community coverups and some very stormy weather will conspire to convince her this town now needs her as much as she needs it.
Thornton is also working on the series as an executive producer, together with Fiona Eagger, Deb Cox and David Mott, and will be re-joined by fellow castmate John Howard, who was mayor Bob Jelly in the original.
She believes the original SeaChange, which aired on the ABC in the late ’90s, has a “heartfelt legacy in the Australian consciousness”, and is excited to see it how it re-enters the zeitgeist.
“It’s an unusual thing to come back to the same role almost 20 years later and to be able to tell the story of the same character in a changed world.
“Pearl Bay has not been completely protected from a rapidly shifting generational change. So she’s entered a new generation, and has things to say about that and things to experience in the context of that.”
Thornton also has a small role in the upcoming Foxtel/Lingo Picture’s comedy drama Lambs of God, which recently had its world premiere at France’s Series Mania.
“I really wanted to be a part of this production. I’d worked with Foxtel previously on Wentworth and I knew it was coming down the pike. It was just so exciting and I love Jeffrey Walker’s work. I knew that it was going to be a very unusual piece, and I suppose I just wanted to have peek in.”
Having worked in the Aussie screen industry since the ’70s, appearing in Crawford Productions series like Homicide and Division 4, Thornton has watched the Australian film and television industry grow. She is proud to have had opportunity over her career to work to strengthen the industry more broadly, serving on various boards such as that of AACTA, AFI, NIDA and Film Victoria. She has advocated for the industry on a number of occasions, including recently as part of the guilds’ Make It Australian campaign.
Thornton regards the industry as presently in a “tricky state of transition”, with both government and the industry having to play ‘catch up’ to the world of streaming. In particular, she mourns consistent financial cuts to the ABC, arguing its role as the “flagship Australian storyteller” is somewhat diminished and constrained at present. She sees SBS as being in a similar financial tight-spot, and observes the free-to-air networks are also presently having to make swift adjustments to compete with new market entrants.
“On the one hand, everybody’s talking about the enormous amount of content that is required to fill this seemingly bottomless pit of need by audiences for screen stories. But the flipside of that is that the Australian industry continues to be pretty tight; there’s never quite enough finance, there’s never quite enough time.
“We are in a period of quite important transition and we need to be very vigilant and we need to be very resilient and responsive.”
However, she is buoyed by the industry’s movements towards greater gender parity and diversity. “We are starting to include more women and redressing the imbalance between male and female practitioners. We are also starting to embrace the telling of our wealth of Indigenous stories by our First Australians.”
Overall, Thornton feels incredibly fortunate to have sustained a career in Australia. “One of the reasons it keeps me coming back is that I’m continuing to learn, and it keeps me open, it keeps me on my toes.
“It’s constantly shifting; the environment in which I work is never the same, the people, the teams with which I’m working with are never the same… so it is always interesting. Even when it’s challenging it’s interesting. I’m definitely open to that – that’s one of the things I enjoy most, that you can never really second guess this work.”
Australian actor Sigrid Thornton named 2018 Screen Legend at CinefestOZ Film Festival gala
Annelies Gartner PerthNow August 26, 2018 2:33PM
AWARD-WINNING actor Sigrid Thornton has been considered a screen legend for a long time, but last night it was made official.
At the CinefestOZ Film Festival gala, Thornton was named as this year’s Screen Legend, an award that honours an Australian actor or filmmaker of international repute.
“I am thrilled to receive this award from a festival that focuses on and celebrates the diversity of Australian creatives,” Thornton said.
At the CinefestOZ Film Festival gala, Thornton was named as this year’s Screen Legend, an award that honours an Australian actor or filmmaker of international repute.
“I am thrilled to receive this award from a festival that focuses on and celebrates the diversity of Australian creatives,” Thornton said.
Thornton’s illustrious career has spanned more than 40 years and seen her perform in film, television and on stage in a diverse range of roles including director of Bruce Beresford’s The Getting of Wisdom and George Miller’s The Man from Snowy River.
The award, presented to Thornton by her SeaChange co-star David Wenham, puts her in the company of stalwarts of the industry including actors Hugo Weaving, Bryan Brown and Jacqueline McKenzie as well as filmmakers Fred Schepisi, Scott Hicks and Gillian Armstrong.
Thornton also chaired this year’s CinefestOz Film Festival jury along with Geraldton-born actor Tasma Walton, WA producer Tania Chambers, Animal Logic chief executive and film producer Zareh Nalbandian and actor Michael Caton.
The five-member jury decided on which of the four finalists took home Australia’s richest film prize.
Jirga, directed by Benjamin Gilmour and produced by John Maynard, was named the winner of the $100,000 award at the Busselton-based festival.
The war drama about a former Australian soldier who returns to Afghanistan seeking redemption from the family of a civilian man he killed was competing against WA-made bikie film 1%, comedy The Merger and the Beresford-directed comedy-drama set in the summer of 1959, Ladies in Black.
“In the spirit of all great film festivals, this was an extremely difficult decision to make,” Thornton said.
“We salute all the filmmakers for their very fine work. Jirga is a singular and courageous film, which gives us a visceral insight into an age-old culture. It explores the nature and definition of forgiveness, leaving us with truly unforgettable cinematic moments.”
The award, presented to Thornton by her SeaChange co-star David Wenham, puts her in the company of stalwarts of the industry including actors Hugo Weaving, Bryan Brown and Jacqueline McKenzie as well as filmmakers Fred Schepisi, Scott Hicks and Gillian Armstrong.
Thornton also chaired this year’s CinefestOz Film Festival jury along with Geraldton-born actor Tasma Walton, WA producer Tania Chambers, Animal Logic chief executive and film producer Zareh Nalbandian and actor Michael Caton.
The five-member jury decided on which of the four finalists took home Australia’s richest film prize.
Jirga, directed by Benjamin Gilmour and produced by John Maynard, was named the winner of the $100,000 award at the Busselton-based festival.
The war drama about a former Australian soldier who returns to Afghanistan seeking redemption from the family of a civilian man he killed was competing against WA-made bikie film 1%, comedy The Merger and the Beresford-directed comedy-drama set in the summer of 1959, Ladies in Black.
“In the spirit of all great film festivals, this was an extremely difficult decision to make,” Thornton said.
“We salute all the filmmakers for their very fine work. Jirga is a singular and courageous film, which gives us a visceral insight into an age-old culture. It explores the nature and definition of forgiveness, leaving us with truly unforgettable cinematic moments.”
Photos: Supplied.
Sigrid Thornton Style Credits: @nwl_creative @juliegoodwincouture@edwardmellershoes @kitte_au
Sigrid Thornton Style Credits: @nwl_creative @juliegoodwincouture@edwardmellershoes @kitte_au
Sigrid Thornton takes on new role for CinefestOz
Annelies Gartner The West Australian Thursday, 26 July 2018 12:00PM
A vivacious star of the stage, TV and film, Sigrid Thornton’s illustrious career began when she was a child and has gone on to span more than 40 years.
She’s starred in many memorable Aussie movies, including director Bruce Beresford’s The Getting of Wisdom (1977), George Miller’s The Man From Snowy River (1982) and Simon Wincer’s The Lighthorsemen (1987). On the small screen, her roles include classic TV series Prisoner and its current reimagining Wentworth, SeaChange, MDA and The Code as well as mini-series All the Rivers Run and Peter Allen: Not the Boy Next Door. She won the AACTA award for best guest or supporting actress in a television drama for her portrayal of Judy Garland in Not the Boy Next Door. Thornton tread the boards with Anthony Warlow in Fiddler on the Roof and A Little Night Music, and her performance of Blanche Du Bois in Black Swan State Theatre Company’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire garnered rave reviews. Her 2014 appearance in Tennessee Williams’ play as the emotionally charged Blanche was her last professional role in Perth. Next month, she’s heading back west to take up a completely new role as jury chair for this year’s CinefestOz Film Festival. Along with four other members of the film industry, she will award the $100,000 prize established to reward excellence in Australian filmmaking. It will be the first time Thornton has been to the festival and also her first trip to the South West, where the five-day event is based. “Its reputation goes before it,” she says of the festival over the phone. “I mean, I really am that keen. I’m most sincere when I say I’ve got a number of friends in the industry who are now into the festival and they all say ‘Look, you’ve got to go, it’s so much fun and so friendly and such an incredible environment in which to see film’.” As head judge of the Busselton-based festival, which is in its 11th year, Thornton is excited about the diversity in filmmaking. “I think what we actually have is a really interesting and a diverse mix of stories being told,” she says. “Not only that, we also have, for the very first time, really a seed of a true indigenous filmmaking culture, feature filmmaking culture ... we are also seeing an indigenous star system begin to emerge, which is really wonderful to see and it’s long overdue.” Thornton thinks filmmaking is about creating something different and the list of the four finalists for the film prize is a reflection of this belief. Among the contenders are WA-made film 1%, which explores the inner workings of an outlaw motorcycle club; Ladies in Black, a comedy- drama set in the summer of 1959 about the lives of female department store employees; The Merger, a regional football comedy paired with the issue of the refugee crisis; and Jirga, which tells the story of a former Australian soldier who is seeking redemption from the family of a civilian he accidentally killed. During her illustrious career, Thornton has had a firsthand insight into how the Australian TV and film industry has developed to where it is today. “The film industry has grown enormously and it’s been through various cycles and out the other side and into a new one several times over,” she says. “I’ve managed through thick and thin and through great good fortune to have experienced real longevity in my career and to have stuck around through all of that.” Thornton thinks her upbringing made her better prepared than most to take on roles in a traditionally male-dominated industry. “There’s a definite kind of a feeling of optimism for change and women for change right now and that’s terrifically heartening and encouraging,” she says. “However, I always like to remind myself that I was fortunate enough to be raised by a radical feminist in the early women’s liberation ... who was railing against a lack of opportunity, which a lot of young women today wouldn’t even be aware was so acute. “I was very fortunate in that and I didn’t think about it in these terms then but nevertheless it was true. So I was able to pursue excellence and go after being the very best version of myself as a performer regardless of my sex.” Whether it was a role she missed out on or one that didn’t go quite to plan, it is not in Thornton’s nature to look back with regret. “There’s been some really challenging experiences, I couldn’t deny that, it’s not possible,” she says. “It’s pretty difficult to be alive on the planet for these years without having had some really challenging periods in life but I think that whatever difficult work experience I’ve had has been the greatest learning period as well.” Cinefest Oz is on from August 22-26. Don’t miss the full program in The Weekend West on July 28. |
Foxtel’s gritty prison drama Wentworth wins big at the 2018 Logies
news.com.au
GRITTY prison drama Wentworth was the real MVP at the 2018 Logie awards, as the cult pay TV hit took home some major gongs.
IT was a big night for pay TV provider Foxtel who took out multiple categories at the 60th Annual Logie Awards. Aside from streaming service Stan, Foxtel was the only non free to air station up for awards, with its cult-favourite Wentworth taking out Most Popular Drama Series, Most Outstanding Drama Series and Most Oustanding Actress and the co-produced Gogglebox winning Most Popular Entertainment Program.
Wentworth won the fan voted Most Popular Drama Series, beating out Doctor Doctor (Nine Network), Home And Away (Channel 7), Love Child (Nine Network) and Offspring (Network Ten), as well as the critically judged Most Oustanding Drama Series, beating out A Place To Call Home (Foxtel — Showcase), Doctor Doctor (Nine Network), Harrow (ABC) and Top Of The Lake: China Girl (Foxtel — BBC First).
Foxtel also dominated the Most Oustanding Actress category with Wentworth’s Pamela Rabe and Kate Atkinson as well as Elisabeth Moss for Top Of The Lake: China Girl, with Rabe ultimately taking out the award.
Sigrid Thornton: “I think Foxtel is creating some of the finest drama we have in this country and they’re setting a gold standard for Australian drama. We are the proud recipients of the gold dust of their work and their development and belief in Australian stories. “This is a surprise to us all but perhaps there’s been this trickledown effect. A ripple effect that takes some years to take hold and that’s what happened with Wentworth here tonight.”
Wentworth: Sigrid Thornton ‘Why I am proud of this show
’News posted 09:00am on Fri Apr 21, 2017
It’s been 34 years since we fell in love with her in The Man From Snowy River. Now, Wentworth’s newest cast member reveals how living abroad as a child led her to acting.
Growing up in the UK as a small child shaped me tremendously.
I feel very fortunate to have had the experience of living in another culture.
The childhood years are hugely formative and I think being ensconced in another culture is such a big learning experience.
Throwing a child out of their comfort zone makes them think on their feet and develop. Not to over dramatise, but [it gives them] survival skills, and performance can be a survival skill.
I could have reaped the benefits of being able to perform in different situations from experiencing cross cultures.
Certainly, when I came back to Australia I started acting classes almost immediately. From the age of seven I decided to become an actor.
I am sure living in London had something to do with it.
I saw the world as my oyster when I left my Brisbane home at 17.
I dread to think how I would have felt if my children said to me at 17 ‘I am moving to another city’, but that’s what I did and I didn’t really think twice about it.
I was quite driven to become an actor and Sydney was the place I needed to be. All the good agents were in Sydney.
I take my hat off to my parents for having so much respect for me as a young person to appear not to flinch too heavily. Looking back it must have been a really difficult thing for them.
My children enrich my life in every way.
There is proof in the saying, ‘You are only as happy as your happiest child’. It’s fundamental to parenting, that you have that desire to keep your children safe and happy. That doesn’t go away with age, with their age or mine.
I am always nervous at the beginning of every job.
I wouldn’t be alive if I wasn’t! That nervous adrenaline is very important – it keeps you on your toes.
As long as it doesn’t shoot you down. In fact, if a job seems frightening that’s a recommendation for me to go for it.
I feel very privileged and excited to be asked to join Wentworth because apparently I am the only alumni of Prisoner to be invited to come into the main cast [playing Sonia Stevens, debuting on June 14 2016].
The character I played in Prisoner [1979 to 1980] is very different to the one I play in Wentworth.
It’s a show I admire enormously and the cast is extraordinary.
I greatly admire that Wentworth is providing really terrific, strong, meaty roles for a group of very fine Australian women.
That in itself is a bit unusual, and it shouldn’t be quite that unusual, but never the less it is.
That’s the only thing I would say with some sadness, is that there aren’t a few more shows with female ensembles today.
Behind the scenes with the cast of Wentworth
I’ve always enjoyed music.
I was affected by the death of David Bowie. I was a really big fan from a really young age.
I followed his career, not because he was a performer and musician, but as a person in terms of his overall contribution to the planet.
I think he was really quite something. He was a genuine innovator in all sorts of different ways. I also grew up with the Beatles.
I saved up to buy my first album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as a child in London.
Kirk Douglas was hugely influential on me for a number of reasons.
I was young and at a very particular stage of my career. I was very sponge-like.
You learn at a faster rate than you do at maturity. Kirk and I got on extremely well [while filming The Man From Snowy River] and he was very generous with his knowledge.
He taught me a lot about film acting and editorial skills – more like understanding scripts and what was useful in scripts and what wasn’t.
Looking back, the knowledge he gave me in a relatively short space of time was a big deal.
He had an extremely strong personality. He wasn’t backward in coming forward with little gems of advice.
It was a very interesting relationship. I really enjoyed it. He’s 99 now. When I think of that, my mind boggles.
My marriage is a genuine partnership.
Tom [Burstall] and I have been together for a very long time now.
The way in which a person challenges you is partly by sharing their opinions and responding to yours.
What a fortunate person I am to have someone to share life’s wonders with.
Wentworth Season 5 continuing Tues at 8.30pm EST on showcase [114]
Stream Wentworth S5 on the Foxtel Now Pop pack.
And don’t forget to tune into the Wentworth Facebook page following Episode 4, to see who will face the Interrogation Room next.
- Erin McWhirter
Growing up in the UK as a small child shaped me tremendously.
I feel very fortunate to have had the experience of living in another culture.
The childhood years are hugely formative and I think being ensconced in another culture is such a big learning experience.
Throwing a child out of their comfort zone makes them think on their feet and develop. Not to over dramatise, but [it gives them] survival skills, and performance can be a survival skill.
I could have reaped the benefits of being able to perform in different situations from experiencing cross cultures.
Certainly, when I came back to Australia I started acting classes almost immediately. From the age of seven I decided to become an actor.
I am sure living in London had something to do with it.
I saw the world as my oyster when I left my Brisbane home at 17.
I dread to think how I would have felt if my children said to me at 17 ‘I am moving to another city’, but that’s what I did and I didn’t really think twice about it.
I was quite driven to become an actor and Sydney was the place I needed to be. All the good agents were in Sydney.
I take my hat off to my parents for having so much respect for me as a young person to appear not to flinch too heavily. Looking back it must have been a really difficult thing for them.
My children enrich my life in every way.
There is proof in the saying, ‘You are only as happy as your happiest child’. It’s fundamental to parenting, that you have that desire to keep your children safe and happy. That doesn’t go away with age, with their age or mine.
I am always nervous at the beginning of every job.
I wouldn’t be alive if I wasn’t! That nervous adrenaline is very important – it keeps you on your toes.
As long as it doesn’t shoot you down. In fact, if a job seems frightening that’s a recommendation for me to go for it.
I feel very privileged and excited to be asked to join Wentworth because apparently I am the only alumni of Prisoner to be invited to come into the main cast [playing Sonia Stevens, debuting on June 14 2016].
The character I played in Prisoner [1979 to 1980] is very different to the one I play in Wentworth.
It’s a show I admire enormously and the cast is extraordinary.
I greatly admire that Wentworth is providing really terrific, strong, meaty roles for a group of very fine Australian women.
That in itself is a bit unusual, and it shouldn’t be quite that unusual, but never the less it is.
That’s the only thing I would say with some sadness, is that there aren’t a few more shows with female ensembles today.
Behind the scenes with the cast of Wentworth
I’ve always enjoyed music.
I was affected by the death of David Bowie. I was a really big fan from a really young age.
I followed his career, not because he was a performer and musician, but as a person in terms of his overall contribution to the planet.
I think he was really quite something. He was a genuine innovator in all sorts of different ways. I also grew up with the Beatles.
I saved up to buy my first album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as a child in London.
Kirk Douglas was hugely influential on me for a number of reasons.
I was young and at a very particular stage of my career. I was very sponge-like.
You learn at a faster rate than you do at maturity. Kirk and I got on extremely well [while filming The Man From Snowy River] and he was very generous with his knowledge.
He taught me a lot about film acting and editorial skills – more like understanding scripts and what was useful in scripts and what wasn’t.
Looking back, the knowledge he gave me in a relatively short space of time was a big deal.
He had an extremely strong personality. He wasn’t backward in coming forward with little gems of advice.
It was a very interesting relationship. I really enjoyed it. He’s 99 now. When I think of that, my mind boggles.
My marriage is a genuine partnership.
Tom [Burstall] and I have been together for a very long time now.
The way in which a person challenges you is partly by sharing their opinions and responding to yours.
What a fortunate person I am to have someone to share life’s wonders with.
Wentworth Season 5 continuing Tues at 8.30pm EST on showcase [114]
Stream Wentworth S5 on the Foxtel Now Pop pack.
And don’t forget to tune into the Wentworth Facebook page following Episode 4, to see who will face the Interrogation Room next.
- Erin McWhirter
CAMPAIGNERS PROTEST TO SAVE THE QUEEN VICTORIA MARKET
Ian Royall, Sunday Herald Sun
December 16, 2017 9:20pm
CELEBRITY power joined with stallholders to voice their outrage over the planned $250 million redevelopment of the heritage-listed Queen Victoria Market.
Actors, singers and comedians swapped the stage for the back of a truck to speak out against the looming revamp of the 7ha site. Australian acting veterans Sigrid Thornton and Michael Caton spoke out at the rally. Thornton said shoppers wanted authentic open-air markets to buy fresh food. Caton, whose The Castle battler hero Darryl Kerrigan fought unwanted development, said he fought to save Bondi Pavilion and said the market must saved too. “How’s the serenity?’’ he asked shoppers at the busy market. Father Bob Maguire told the rally the market is a sacred site and that visiting the market was like a pilgrimage to gather fresh food.
HUMPHRIES HITS OUT AT QVM REDEVELOPMENT
QVM’S RENOVATION PLANS REVEALED
Fr Bob said the redevelopment would make it harder for poor families to access fresh, cheap food. Comedian Gerry Connolly, dressed as the Queen, said the market should stay for the people. “It doesn’t belong to property dealers and developers.”
The Queen (aka Gerry Connolly) buys some doughnuts for her police escort at the Queen Victoria Market protest. Father Bob Maguire at a rally for the QVM. Many of the speakers aimed their anger at Lord Mayor Robert Doyle. Traders said they didn’t have certainty of tenure in the new-look market and were concerned about their livelihoods. Phil Cleary, who ran for mayor last year on a Save the Market ticket, called for a community picket to stop the redevelopment’s bulldozers.“My message to Daniel Andrews and (planning Minister) Richard Wynne if you put a bulldozer on this site you will pay at the next election.”
Mr Cleary said the revamp was nothing more than a land grab. Actor Sigrid Thornton told shoppers that people wanted authentic open-air markets to buy fresh food. Comedian Gerry Connolly and singer Dan Sultan were there and many speakers directed anger at Lord Mayor Robert Doyle. Opponents also object to the construction of a $400 million, 40-storey tower on the neighbouring Munro site. Traders said they didn’t have certainty of tenure in the new-look market and were concerned about their livelihoods.
Stall holders, Michael Ciafa (bakery), Belinda Vitalone (fruit and veg) and George Cinn (fruit &veg) at the Queen Victoria Market protest. A protest at the Queen Victoria Market. Messages were read out from entertainment great Barry Humphries who said the proposed redevelopment of the Queen Victoria Market would gamble away its future. Humphries said Melbourne had been committing “architectural suicide” since the 1960s by demolishing significant buildings. And Australian musician Paul Kelly, who is performing at the Myer Music Bowl tonight, said the market wasn’t broken and didn’t need fixing. The protest was organised by Friends of the Queen Victoria Market.
The protest was organised by Friends of the Queen Victoria Market. But the council and market management have said the heritage-listed site needed to change or it would not survive. A City of Melbourne spokeswoman said business analysis showed that the future of the market was at risk. Work is expected to start early next year on construction of a glasshouse-style pavilion for traders who are disrupted by works. The full $250m, five-year redevelopment will also include the renovation of the meat and delicatessen halls and restoration of the building facade fronting Elizabeth St. The current carpark will become a public open space, to be known as Market Square. Car spaces will instead be provided under four of the sheds on Peel St and in the $400m revamp of the Munro site, which is bordered by Queen, Franklin and Therry streets. The council is waiting for final sign-off from Heritage Victoria which is reviewing about 1600 submissions to the proposed rebuilding of sheds A to D as well as excavating down for three levels of storage and car parking. Earlier this week, the market reported a $2.3 million loss for the last financial year.
ian.royall@news.com.au
@IanRoyall
Actors, singers and comedians swapped the stage for the back of a truck to speak out against the looming revamp of the 7ha site. Australian acting veterans Sigrid Thornton and Michael Caton spoke out at the rally. Thornton said shoppers wanted authentic open-air markets to buy fresh food. Caton, whose The Castle battler hero Darryl Kerrigan fought unwanted development, said he fought to save Bondi Pavilion and said the market must saved too. “How’s the serenity?’’ he asked shoppers at the busy market. Father Bob Maguire told the rally the market is a sacred site and that visiting the market was like a pilgrimage to gather fresh food.
HUMPHRIES HITS OUT AT QVM REDEVELOPMENT
QVM’S RENOVATION PLANS REVEALED
Fr Bob said the redevelopment would make it harder for poor families to access fresh, cheap food. Comedian Gerry Connolly, dressed as the Queen, said the market should stay for the people. “It doesn’t belong to property dealers and developers.”
The Queen (aka Gerry Connolly) buys some doughnuts for her police escort at the Queen Victoria Market protest. Father Bob Maguire at a rally for the QVM. Many of the speakers aimed their anger at Lord Mayor Robert Doyle. Traders said they didn’t have certainty of tenure in the new-look market and were concerned about their livelihoods. Phil Cleary, who ran for mayor last year on a Save the Market ticket, called for a community picket to stop the redevelopment’s bulldozers.“My message to Daniel Andrews and (planning Minister) Richard Wynne if you put a bulldozer on this site you will pay at the next election.”
Mr Cleary said the revamp was nothing more than a land grab. Actor Sigrid Thornton told shoppers that people wanted authentic open-air markets to buy fresh food. Comedian Gerry Connolly and singer Dan Sultan were there and many speakers directed anger at Lord Mayor Robert Doyle. Opponents also object to the construction of a $400 million, 40-storey tower on the neighbouring Munro site. Traders said they didn’t have certainty of tenure in the new-look market and were concerned about their livelihoods.
Stall holders, Michael Ciafa (bakery), Belinda Vitalone (fruit and veg) and George Cinn (fruit &veg) at the Queen Victoria Market protest. A protest at the Queen Victoria Market. Messages were read out from entertainment great Barry Humphries who said the proposed redevelopment of the Queen Victoria Market would gamble away its future. Humphries said Melbourne had been committing “architectural suicide” since the 1960s by demolishing significant buildings. And Australian musician Paul Kelly, who is performing at the Myer Music Bowl tonight, said the market wasn’t broken and didn’t need fixing. The protest was organised by Friends of the Queen Victoria Market.
The protest was organised by Friends of the Queen Victoria Market. But the council and market management have said the heritage-listed site needed to change or it would not survive. A City of Melbourne spokeswoman said business analysis showed that the future of the market was at risk. Work is expected to start early next year on construction of a glasshouse-style pavilion for traders who are disrupted by works. The full $250m, five-year redevelopment will also include the renovation of the meat and delicatessen halls and restoration of the building facade fronting Elizabeth St. The current carpark will become a public open space, to be known as Market Square. Car spaces will instead be provided under four of the sheds on Peel St and in the $400m revamp of the Munro site, which is bordered by Queen, Franklin and Therry streets. The council is waiting for final sign-off from Heritage Victoria which is reviewing about 1600 submissions to the proposed rebuilding of sheds A to D as well as excavating down for three levels of storage and car parking. Earlier this week, the market reported a $2.3 million loss for the last financial year.
ian.royall@news.com.au
@IanRoyall
ART PRIZE LAUNCHES IN SPECTACULAR FASHION
Gympie Times
8th September 2017 5:57 PM
THIS year's Brisbane Art Prize (BAP), founded and directed by former Gympie artist Cathy Condon, was launched with all the passion and glamour the prize is gaining attention for. The annual international exhibition that boasts a $10, 000 prize was launched in Fortitude Valley with a surprise visit from well-renowned Australian actress Sigrid Thornton of Seachange fame. Ms Thornton collected a painting gifted to her by Albanian artist Petraq Pecani, a Brisbane Art Prize finalist who, as a young boy in communist-controlled Albania, was inspired by Thronton's character of Philadelphia in All the Rivers Run.
."I remembered her lengthy journey on that steamer boat and the many challenges she faced and how she would courageously pick up her paint brushes,” Mr Pecani wrote when he entered the prize.
When the TV show was airing in Albania, Mr Pecani said you could see shocking things done to those pursuing the arts; poets executed, imprisoned artists living in exile.
"Tenors of international calibre were pushing wagons in the coal mines, or successful authors reaping by hand the wheat in the fields under the scorching sun.
"At this time, Sigrid's character Philadelphia helped me to have more courage to face the difficulties and fight more bravely, at the same time to be more committed and dedicated to my art.”
BAP director Cathy Condon said Mr Pecani's inspirational story was just one reason it was so important to invest in art.
"When artists are supported and valued they thrive, creating work that enriches our lives and puts Australian culture on the map. The Brisbane Art Prize is a powerful instrument to do just this.”
The Brisbane Art Prize, of which Gympie artist Stephanie Robson is a finalist, will run at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts from October 5 - 28 with the winner announced at an awards evening on October 12.
Photo: Contributed
Article : Francis Klein
."I remembered her lengthy journey on that steamer boat and the many challenges she faced and how she would courageously pick up her paint brushes,” Mr Pecani wrote when he entered the prize.
When the TV show was airing in Albania, Mr Pecani said you could see shocking things done to those pursuing the arts; poets executed, imprisoned artists living in exile.
"Tenors of international calibre were pushing wagons in the coal mines, or successful authors reaping by hand the wheat in the fields under the scorching sun.
"At this time, Sigrid's character Philadelphia helped me to have more courage to face the difficulties and fight more bravely, at the same time to be more committed and dedicated to my art.”
BAP director Cathy Condon said Mr Pecani's inspirational story was just one reason it was so important to invest in art.
"When artists are supported and valued they thrive, creating work that enriches our lives and puts Australian culture on the map. The Brisbane Art Prize is a powerful instrument to do just this.”
The Brisbane Art Prize, of which Gympie artist Stephanie Robson is a finalist, will run at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts from October 5 - 28 with the winner announced at an awards evening on October 12.
Photo: Contributed
Article : Francis Klein
SIGRID THORNTON ON THE ART OF REINVENTION
by Kerrie O'Brien 24 May 2017
Things have come full circle for Sigrid Thornton. Appearing in Wentworth, a contemporary take on life for women behind bars, takes her back some 35 years to her work on Prisoner. It was her longest stint on a television series and she learnt much from older actors such as Sheila Florance and Maggie Kirkpatrick. Just as Prisoner developed a serious cult following, audiences today are obsessed with the show's more recent incarnation. Distributed by FremantleMedia, it is screened in more than 140 territories with local productions in Dutch, German and Flemish.
"The fanbase of Wentworth has become part of its personal identity in some ways. The fact that it has a cult following has informed the way people are on set. We are very aware of playing to an international audience."
The cast is a who's who of Australian female talent. "It's very unusual to see an all-women ensemble, in the same way that it was groundbreaking back in the day under the Prisoner mantle."
Wentworth has gained a cult following worldwide. As wonderful as it is, Thornton points out "it's a little bit unfortunate that we're still saying it's ground-breaking. Nevertheless we have it and aren't we lucky to be able to explore such a thing." Having an all-female cast provides opportunities for many actors who wouldn't necessarily find themselves playing leading characters to "really strut their stuff". The production cleverly reverses typecasts, with those best-known for caring roles, for example, or as reserved, as powerful, sometimes menacing characters.
"It is very boldly cast. When a project like this takes off and gains its stripes that gives the creatives licence to keep stretching. Not only that but as the show goes on you've got to find new challenges and keep the stakes high. That's one of the markers of Wentworth, its very high stakes. It's a credit to the creators that they've managed to keep the stakes so high."
She can't give away too much about what happens to her character as there are major confidentiality clauses around storylines. Such things are particularly important for shows like Wentworth. "It's such a juggernaut and its got an extremely dedicated and seriously voracious fan base internationally, who can pick out a sniff on the wind if you like, so the confidentiality needs to be quite strict."
We meet for lunch at a lovely Italian restaurant in North Melbourne called Sosta Cucina. It's busy on a warm weekday lunchtime; we order a glass of wine each and Thornton looks for and finds a dish she's had before and enjoyed, linguine with blue swimmer crab, while I choose the rabbit ragu. Travel is something she and her husband filmmaker Tom Burstall have prioritised over the years, and Italy is her No 1 destination. "I suppose if I could choose just one place and I could jump in a box and be there in one hour, it would be to Italy."
Over the course of lunch our conversation ranges far and wide, taking in children (she has two, aged 25 and 31, one still at home), the lottery of life ("I often think how fortunate I am to have been brought up in this country") and the notion of social justice instilled by her parents.
Raised in Brisbane, Thornton proclaimed she wanted to be an actor at age 6. Although she first hit our screens as a fresh-faced 18-year-old in The Getting of Wisdom, it was through All the Rivers Run and The Man from Snowy River that Thornton rose to prominence. She counts herself lucky to have won roles as feisty, independent women early in her career.
In Slate, Wynn and Me in 1987. "I played a good number of very strong female characters of this time, women who were in some ways ahead of their time, who were boldly treading where women hadn't trod before," she says. That said, those roles weren't without drawbacks. They firmly etched her on the public psyche but cast her firmly in the olde-worlde genre.
Receipt for lunch at Sosta Cucina. "I was associated with crinolines for a very long time because most of the work was period stuff. And then we just decided it was completely sick-making to do period drama. No one would touch period with a 50-foot pole.
"That new wave that was coming up at that time when mainstream was not where you wanted to be. Being someone who was recognised in the street was anathema. That did have its downside for me at that time. [It's] very different from the United States, the opposite trajectory almost.
A few factors were at play – budgets certainly contracted, but shows set in that era also simply went out of fashion. "It was another kind of cringe. Only more recently have we started to mature and realise that there's room for all of it – historical, futuristic, science fiction, contemporary. All of it. And that's what's so exciting. The strongest story can be set in any period." Which brings us to Thornton's current mission: championing writers. The shift away from film to television in recent years was in large part the result of writers moving away from the big screen. "Because the writing is where it all starts, the writing is the fundamental key to everything. If the writing is great, everything else flows from that."
Rough-cut breadcrumb pasta with goat ragu. Fresh back from a planning day in Sydney for Scripted Ink, a board she recently joined, she's excited about the work ahead. Founded by Australian writer/producer Shane Brennan, best-known for his work on the NCIS franchise, the not-for-profit organisation was set up to help scriptwriters. Part of that is ensuring writers get a bigger slice of the financial pie but it's more about positioning them as the foundation of creative work. Grants available through the organisation can be used for a range of purposes. "You might need it for a script editor, you might need it for a mentor, you might need it to take your script overseas, so it's tailored and very personalised and it's very lean."
It was fabulous writing that attracted her to the ground-breaking SeaChange. After some time "in the wilderness", Thornton re-invented herself in the late '90s in the lead role of Laura Gibson; audiences fell in love with her neurotic, big-hearted city lawyer turned small-town judge. She was complex and messed up and honest about life being a struggle.
"We found her at the threshold of something and we were able to explore this new world through her eyes and get a better look at it because she was a stranger."
"I can't think of very many things about SeaChange that weren't completely joyful for me. Fundamentally, it was because the writing was so rich but also Andrew [Knight] and Deb [Cox] created something very unusual at the time – the fact of it being comedy/drama, that was very new in Australian television.
The show was pioneering Australian television in part because it reflected reality, especially the people who don't fit stereotypes. The alchemy of the cast was extraordinary. There was something about that group of people coming together with that material at that point in time that was very special," Thornton says."It showed you people that you knew ... and there are lots of people out there like that. Even though those people were quirky and stranger than truth, they were people we could understand and relate to and empathise with."
"They weren't tacked on, they were genuinely embedded in that community. The beautiful thing the show was about was community interaction."
Of course, the series was widely regarded as inspiring 'seachangers'; 'the Sigrid factor', as demographer Bernard Salt called it. For Thornton, the follow-on was much more significant: "It was about the nature of community life and village life, which is that, regardless of the quirkiness or the outsider-ness or the strangeness, or the loveliness or the beauty or the ugliness of the person living in that community, they are inextricably knitted in to the web of that community. And we have a responsibility to them. And indeed even if we don't want to have a responsibility to them, we do. We must look after them, that's what community does."
Although she started acting in television and film, professional theatre would wait until she was well into her 30s. That must have been rather terrifying? "Yes, but terrifying is a recommendation for me and lots of other actors."
Her first role was in the Harold Pinter play Betrayal. She loved the experience and went on to do Blue Room with Marcus Graham, again with the Melbourne Theatre Company. In recent years, she's added musicals to her repertoire, notably A Little Night Music for Opera Australia and Fiddler on the Roof.
"It's corny but there's a kind of magic that can happen in the theatre that is unique to theatre. The live audience and the fact that you are in mid air as it were, with nowhere to turn if you make a mistake, that creates an extra level of adrenalin that's hard to match."
As to what's ahead, Thornton recently joined the board of NIDA, will continue her advocacy work with Greenpeace and Save the Vic Market and would like to do more theatre. "I don't necessarily have a plan. However, I would like to make some forays into creating my own work. And it's not necessarily creating roles for me but I would like to move into production and create something else, outside of myself."
While she delights in the fact the industry is now truly global, she is concerned that we don't lose our distinctive voice. It seems to me we are still trying to work out who we are; Thornton agrees.
"Storytelling is about that search really, the search for meaning and for understanding and it's actually also about the fact that there's no destination. It's about memory and history and how it informs today, it's about the future and what we might become, it's about so many things."
"We are in an extraordinarily position in Australia now with a slightly greater critical mass and a real need for stories from all over the world. But as I said, we need to be very, very careful. It is an age-old bleat I suppose but never was it more important to remember that we are ourselves and our stories have intrinsic value."
Wentworth airs Tuesdays on Foxtel's Showcase.
THE BILL, PLEASE
Sosta Cucina
12 Errol St, North Melbourne
Tues-Fri and Sunday 12pm-3pm; from 6pm Tues-Sun; 9329 2882
"The fanbase of Wentworth has become part of its personal identity in some ways. The fact that it has a cult following has informed the way people are on set. We are very aware of playing to an international audience."
The cast is a who's who of Australian female talent. "It's very unusual to see an all-women ensemble, in the same way that it was groundbreaking back in the day under the Prisoner mantle."
Wentworth has gained a cult following worldwide. As wonderful as it is, Thornton points out "it's a little bit unfortunate that we're still saying it's ground-breaking. Nevertheless we have it and aren't we lucky to be able to explore such a thing." Having an all-female cast provides opportunities for many actors who wouldn't necessarily find themselves playing leading characters to "really strut their stuff". The production cleverly reverses typecasts, with those best-known for caring roles, for example, or as reserved, as powerful, sometimes menacing characters.
"It is very boldly cast. When a project like this takes off and gains its stripes that gives the creatives licence to keep stretching. Not only that but as the show goes on you've got to find new challenges and keep the stakes high. That's one of the markers of Wentworth, its very high stakes. It's a credit to the creators that they've managed to keep the stakes so high."
She can't give away too much about what happens to her character as there are major confidentiality clauses around storylines. Such things are particularly important for shows like Wentworth. "It's such a juggernaut and its got an extremely dedicated and seriously voracious fan base internationally, who can pick out a sniff on the wind if you like, so the confidentiality needs to be quite strict."
We meet for lunch at a lovely Italian restaurant in North Melbourne called Sosta Cucina. It's busy on a warm weekday lunchtime; we order a glass of wine each and Thornton looks for and finds a dish she's had before and enjoyed, linguine with blue swimmer crab, while I choose the rabbit ragu. Travel is something she and her husband filmmaker Tom Burstall have prioritised over the years, and Italy is her No 1 destination. "I suppose if I could choose just one place and I could jump in a box and be there in one hour, it would be to Italy."
Over the course of lunch our conversation ranges far and wide, taking in children (she has two, aged 25 and 31, one still at home), the lottery of life ("I often think how fortunate I am to have been brought up in this country") and the notion of social justice instilled by her parents.
Raised in Brisbane, Thornton proclaimed she wanted to be an actor at age 6. Although she first hit our screens as a fresh-faced 18-year-old in The Getting of Wisdom, it was through All the Rivers Run and The Man from Snowy River that Thornton rose to prominence. She counts herself lucky to have won roles as feisty, independent women early in her career.
In Slate, Wynn and Me in 1987. "I played a good number of very strong female characters of this time, women who were in some ways ahead of their time, who were boldly treading where women hadn't trod before," she says. That said, those roles weren't without drawbacks. They firmly etched her on the public psyche but cast her firmly in the olde-worlde genre.
Receipt for lunch at Sosta Cucina. "I was associated with crinolines for a very long time because most of the work was period stuff. And then we just decided it was completely sick-making to do period drama. No one would touch period with a 50-foot pole.
"That new wave that was coming up at that time when mainstream was not where you wanted to be. Being someone who was recognised in the street was anathema. That did have its downside for me at that time. [It's] very different from the United States, the opposite trajectory almost.
A few factors were at play – budgets certainly contracted, but shows set in that era also simply went out of fashion. "It was another kind of cringe. Only more recently have we started to mature and realise that there's room for all of it – historical, futuristic, science fiction, contemporary. All of it. And that's what's so exciting. The strongest story can be set in any period." Which brings us to Thornton's current mission: championing writers. The shift away from film to television in recent years was in large part the result of writers moving away from the big screen. "Because the writing is where it all starts, the writing is the fundamental key to everything. If the writing is great, everything else flows from that."
Rough-cut breadcrumb pasta with goat ragu. Fresh back from a planning day in Sydney for Scripted Ink, a board she recently joined, she's excited about the work ahead. Founded by Australian writer/producer Shane Brennan, best-known for his work on the NCIS franchise, the not-for-profit organisation was set up to help scriptwriters. Part of that is ensuring writers get a bigger slice of the financial pie but it's more about positioning them as the foundation of creative work. Grants available through the organisation can be used for a range of purposes. "You might need it for a script editor, you might need it for a mentor, you might need it to take your script overseas, so it's tailored and very personalised and it's very lean."
It was fabulous writing that attracted her to the ground-breaking SeaChange. After some time "in the wilderness", Thornton re-invented herself in the late '90s in the lead role of Laura Gibson; audiences fell in love with her neurotic, big-hearted city lawyer turned small-town judge. She was complex and messed up and honest about life being a struggle.
"We found her at the threshold of something and we were able to explore this new world through her eyes and get a better look at it because she was a stranger."
"I can't think of very many things about SeaChange that weren't completely joyful for me. Fundamentally, it was because the writing was so rich but also Andrew [Knight] and Deb [Cox] created something very unusual at the time – the fact of it being comedy/drama, that was very new in Australian television.
The show was pioneering Australian television in part because it reflected reality, especially the people who don't fit stereotypes. The alchemy of the cast was extraordinary. There was something about that group of people coming together with that material at that point in time that was very special," Thornton says."It showed you people that you knew ... and there are lots of people out there like that. Even though those people were quirky and stranger than truth, they were people we could understand and relate to and empathise with."
"They weren't tacked on, they were genuinely embedded in that community. The beautiful thing the show was about was community interaction."
Of course, the series was widely regarded as inspiring 'seachangers'; 'the Sigrid factor', as demographer Bernard Salt called it. For Thornton, the follow-on was much more significant: "It was about the nature of community life and village life, which is that, regardless of the quirkiness or the outsider-ness or the strangeness, or the loveliness or the beauty or the ugliness of the person living in that community, they are inextricably knitted in to the web of that community. And we have a responsibility to them. And indeed even if we don't want to have a responsibility to them, we do. We must look after them, that's what community does."
Although she started acting in television and film, professional theatre would wait until she was well into her 30s. That must have been rather terrifying? "Yes, but terrifying is a recommendation for me and lots of other actors."
Her first role was in the Harold Pinter play Betrayal. She loved the experience and went on to do Blue Room with Marcus Graham, again with the Melbourne Theatre Company. In recent years, she's added musicals to her repertoire, notably A Little Night Music for Opera Australia and Fiddler on the Roof.
"It's corny but there's a kind of magic that can happen in the theatre that is unique to theatre. The live audience and the fact that you are in mid air as it were, with nowhere to turn if you make a mistake, that creates an extra level of adrenalin that's hard to match."
As to what's ahead, Thornton recently joined the board of NIDA, will continue her advocacy work with Greenpeace and Save the Vic Market and would like to do more theatre. "I don't necessarily have a plan. However, I would like to make some forays into creating my own work. And it's not necessarily creating roles for me but I would like to move into production and create something else, outside of myself."
While she delights in the fact the industry is now truly global, she is concerned that we don't lose our distinctive voice. It seems to me we are still trying to work out who we are; Thornton agrees.
"Storytelling is about that search really, the search for meaning and for understanding and it's actually also about the fact that there's no destination. It's about memory and history and how it informs today, it's about the future and what we might become, it's about so many things."
"We are in an extraordinarily position in Australia now with a slightly greater critical mass and a real need for stories from all over the world. But as I said, we need to be very, very careful. It is an age-old bleat I suppose but never was it more important to remember that we are ourselves and our stories have intrinsic value."
Wentworth airs Tuesdays on Foxtel's Showcase.
THE BILL, PLEASE
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SIGRID THORNTON'S NEW ROLE
by Holly Byrnes 28 August 2016
Styled in urban nautical pieces from Scanlan Theodore, Calvin Klein, Gianvito Rossi and Sandro Paris, Sigrid was photographed by Cameron Grayson for publication in the nationally distributed Stellar Magazine last Sunday. Giving a rare interview, she spoke of the changing winds in Australian film and television and her access to roles previously perceived as masculine in an increasingly diverse cultural landscape. “The wheels for more representation of women across the board are turning slowly, but they are turning in the right direction and that’s very encouraging,” she says. “It opens up the world of film, TV and theatre in all sorts of ways,which is going to be very exciting.” Feature Editorial as seen in The Daily Telegraph / Herald Sun (C) NewsCorp Photography by Cameron Grayson |
JAILBIRD SIGRID ON SECOND TERM
by Vanessa Williams - The West Australian on June 9, 2016 8:10am
It may sound like a coup for Foxtel’s gritty prison drama Wentworth to add a Prisoner alumnus to its stellar ensemble cast. But seasoned actress Sigrid Thornton couldn’t wait to join the fourth season of the award- winning series, which has captivated viewers around the globe and has even spawned remakes in Europe.
“Not only had I worked on the original Prisoner but I also was very interested in understanding what they were going to do with a reboot,” says Thornton, who appeared on Prisoner more than 36 years ago. “It’s very unusual television, there’s not a lot out there that you can really compare to something like Wentworth, which is a pretty difficult thing to say in television these days.”
The 57-year-old will make her Wentworth debut next week as jailed cosmetics entrepreneur Sonia Stevens, who Thornton describes as being “worlds apart” from her original character Roslyn Coulson. So different, in fact, that Thornton blocked out her experience on Prisoner and instead immersed herself in the world of Wentworth.
“I couldn’t really go back to what I had and I’m not the same actor, I’ve grown,” she says. “I just immersed myself in the material and the environment that the television series has created, and searched for a place in there. (Sonia) is an amalgam from my imagination. The combination of my imagination and the writing. In terms of the backdrop, I really just tried to make her very different from the other characters.”
Sonia’s arrival comes amid tension among the inmates, fuelled by the conniving former governor Joan Ferguson (Pamela Rabe), who is slowly manipulating the women to turn against Bea Smith (Danielle Cormack). As Ferguson exerts her power within the prison, Vera (WA’s Kate Atkinson) is still grappling with her new position as governor. Refusing to wear Wentworth’s signature teal threads and reluctant to integrate with the other women, Thornton says Sonia makes herself an easy target.
“I thought it was an interesting situation, dramatically, because she’s from a very different socioeconomic grouping to most of the women and she’s not making a special effort, really,” she says. “The way she goes about her business is to further her own ends more than anything else. That’s not to say she doesn’t develop genuine affection towards some of the women but I think there are ways in which she surprises herself.”
Wentworth’s self-appointed mother hen Liz (Celia Ireland) could very well be Sonia’s lifeline even though she is serving her own agenda, having agreed to work with detectives to extract information from Sonia regarding the suspected murder of her best friend. “Because she is tasked with this job of trying to extract information, she’s a little bit more friendly with Sonia than some of the others,” Thornton says. Last seen in Seven’s Peter Allen: Not the Boy Next Door as Judy Garland, Thornton boasts a stellar career that includes roles in Aussie shows SeaChange, The Sullivans and All the Rivers Run. Yet Wentworth was like nothing she had done before.
“To some extent it’s in the moment and it’s something I really haven’t put my finger on before,” she says. “It is very momentary, it’s very immediate and that’s what gives it a particular edge. But because I was new in that world, and I was still exploring my character, it was useful because I could feed that into what Sonia was going through so that art imitated life.”
Wentworth airs on Tuesdays at 6.30pm on pay-TV channel SoHo.
SOURCE: au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/entertainment/a/31801629/sigrid-thornton-goes-back-behind-bars/
WATCH THE SHOW: https://www.foxtel.com.au/watch/wentworth.html#cast
“Not only had I worked on the original Prisoner but I also was very interested in understanding what they were going to do with a reboot,” says Thornton, who appeared on Prisoner more than 36 years ago. “It’s very unusual television, there’s not a lot out there that you can really compare to something like Wentworth, which is a pretty difficult thing to say in television these days.”
The 57-year-old will make her Wentworth debut next week as jailed cosmetics entrepreneur Sonia Stevens, who Thornton describes as being “worlds apart” from her original character Roslyn Coulson. So different, in fact, that Thornton blocked out her experience on Prisoner and instead immersed herself in the world of Wentworth.
“I couldn’t really go back to what I had and I’m not the same actor, I’ve grown,” she says. “I just immersed myself in the material and the environment that the television series has created, and searched for a place in there. (Sonia) is an amalgam from my imagination. The combination of my imagination and the writing. In terms of the backdrop, I really just tried to make her very different from the other characters.”
Sonia’s arrival comes amid tension among the inmates, fuelled by the conniving former governor Joan Ferguson (Pamela Rabe), who is slowly manipulating the women to turn against Bea Smith (Danielle Cormack). As Ferguson exerts her power within the prison, Vera (WA’s Kate Atkinson) is still grappling with her new position as governor. Refusing to wear Wentworth’s signature teal threads and reluctant to integrate with the other women, Thornton says Sonia makes herself an easy target.
“I thought it was an interesting situation, dramatically, because she’s from a very different socioeconomic grouping to most of the women and she’s not making a special effort, really,” she says. “The way she goes about her business is to further her own ends more than anything else. That’s not to say she doesn’t develop genuine affection towards some of the women but I think there are ways in which she surprises herself.”
Wentworth’s self-appointed mother hen Liz (Celia Ireland) could very well be Sonia’s lifeline even though she is serving her own agenda, having agreed to work with detectives to extract information from Sonia regarding the suspected murder of her best friend. “Because she is tasked with this job of trying to extract information, she’s a little bit more friendly with Sonia than some of the others,” Thornton says. Last seen in Seven’s Peter Allen: Not the Boy Next Door as Judy Garland, Thornton boasts a stellar career that includes roles in Aussie shows SeaChange, The Sullivans and All the Rivers Run. Yet Wentworth was like nothing she had done before.
“To some extent it’s in the moment and it’s something I really haven’t put my finger on before,” she says. “It is very momentary, it’s very immediate and that’s what gives it a particular edge. But because I was new in that world, and I was still exploring my character, it was useful because I could feed that into what Sonia was going through so that art imitated life.”
Wentworth airs on Tuesdays at 6.30pm on pay-TV channel SoHo.
SOURCE: au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/entertainment/a/31801629/sigrid-thornton-goes-back-behind-bars/
WATCH THE SHOW: https://www.foxtel.com.au/watch/wentworth.html#cast
19 MARCH 2016
SIGRID THORNTON, ACTOR, 57 ANSWERS 10 QUESTIONS
by Verity Edwards at Weekend Australian "Life" Magazine
Merle, your mum, chained herself to the public bar in Brisbane’s Regatta Hotel in 1965 to protest that women weren’t allowed there. What attitudes did you inherit?
My views on equality for women were clearly shaped early by my mother. Fortunately for me I was able to choose a career – it might not have been so a few generations before me when women weren’t allowed to work. Your parents were academics. Is that what they wanted for you? I had such a strong drive to become an actor early that there was no question about it. They were supportive – they were theatre-goers, movie-goers and readers. Perhaps I didn’t fulfil some of their desires because I didn’t finish university. But they just wanted me to have a career and be happy. You never had formal training; have you missed it? There was a time when I thought for social reasons it would have been good – not that I have any regrets. I matriculated at 16 and left home at 17 and wouldn’t pass that up for anything. I trained in the field and I continue to train. The Man from Snowy River (1982) was your first big hit, then SeaChange (1998-2000) and last year Peter Allen: Not the Boy Next Door, playing Judy Garland. Have you ever wanted a normal life? That is my normal life. There’s been some kind of stage recognition factor for so long that I don’t take it too seriously. You’ve played roles from Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, to a prostitute, to a lesbian police officer. Is there a favourite character? Judy Garland, and I loved playing Laura Gibson in SeaChange. She was neurotic enough to be continuously fascinating. Blanche was the most difficult, a piece of work. It was like going to war every night, but I’d do it again. You’re starring in Fiddler on the Roof, the story of Russian Jews suffering under Tsarist rule, as Golde, the wife of Tevye. What was the appeal of that role? Part of it is that she is a true character role and she sings, and both of those are relatively new to me. It’s a joyful experience dancing, having a soundtrack and learning new skills. Of the great actors you’ve worked with, who taught you the most? Working with Kirk Douglas, who’s now 99, in The Man from Snowy River was formative. I learnt a lot from him about screen performance. He would stay up all night working on scripts, getting things right. There was so much to admire about him. How would you describe yourself? Constantly attempting to grow, an innate optimist, driven to excel. I’m very loyal, very concerned about egalitarianism. If I had a major tenet, it would be: “Treat others as you’d like to be treated.” You have two adult children with your husband, producer Tom Burstall. Have they acted or worked behind the camera? Not really. Ben is doing a masters of teaching and Jaz works for a publishing company. I encouraged them to do whatever helps them to fulfil their aspirations. I don’t know if I turned them off acting! Demographer Bernard Salt coined the term “the Sigrid factor” for the towns where you made movies that have since prospered. What do you think of that? It’s given me a lot of smiles and I thank Bernard for writing about me. I’ve been fortunate enough to work on a number of projects that have made their mark in the consciousness of the country.
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6 JANUARY 2016
FIDDLER OPENS IN MELBOURNE - WARLOW & THORNTON'S TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO STAGE
The fiddler is ready to raise the roof in Melbourne. Australia's entertainment elite have rubbed shoulders on the red carpet at the Princess Theatre on Tuesday for the latest revival of the 50-year-old musical, Fiddler on the Roof. An impressive line-up of Australian talent has been assembled for the new production, with stage royalty Anthony Warlow and Sigrid Thornton in the leading roles. And looking at the red carpet, it's clear the pair have some serious pulling power. - Seven Y. News "Sigrid Thornton is Australian entertainment royalty. As Golde, she is both the supporting wife but knows how far to allow her old-fashioned husband to go before she needs to give him a reality check." - Noise 11 "Warlow rises to this challenge brilliantly and delivers a strong, grounded performance. The supporting cast and ensemble meet this high standard and manage to bring a wonderful array of characters to life, maintaining a mostly uniform and authentic accent throughout. Sigrid Thornton, well known for film, television and theatre, is a confident and strong Golde (Tevye's wife)." - Australian Stage "Warlow’s colleagues hold their own, with each of the principal characters drawn with great attention to detail. Sigrid Thornton’s Golde is a mirror image of her husband - strong-willed, pragmatic, yet thoughtfully sentimental." - Limelight Magazine "Fiddler is remarkably affecting, more domestically than politically, though the refugee angle is especially pertinent today... Warlow's twinkling eyes, gestures and careworn charisma stay in the mind... Sigrid Thornton skilfully avoids cliche as Golde, the tough matriarch. For once, tradition really does rule." - The Australian "The village of Anatevka might be remote to ours, but not so the tension between tradition and radical change, the unruliness of human desire, or the power to endure great suffering: the very things that make Fiddler – staring out at us from the other side of all the horrors of the 20th century – so poignant and immediate." - The Age "Long-term star Sigrid Thornton, at home in all mediums of entertainment, is a canny choice to play opposite Warlow, in that the veteran actress brings mighty skills in standing her ground and establishing a solid character... Thornton finds a characterful, delicate tone for Golde’s vocals." - Man In Chair "Anthony Warlow always brings his own touch of class to a show and finds a new gravelly timbre in his voice as Tevye...He is well matched by Sigrid Thornton as his wife Golde who has a strong stage presence and brings colour to the spirited character. It is not a big singing role but Thornton shows the importance of conveying character through song, particularly in her duet Do You Love Me... A tale of dignity and honour, it holds a timeless poignancy and humanity while bubbling with Yiddish inspired tunes that are as melodic and moving as ever...When Fiddler premiered on Broadway in 1964 it quickly became acclaimed as a masterpiece. It still is." - The Herald Sun |
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9 DECEMBER 2015
SIGRID WINS AACTA FOR GARLAND ROLE
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Honoured for her critically acclaimed role of Judy Garland in Peter Allen, Not The Boy Next Door, Sigrid Thornton cradles her first AACTA/AFI award at the December 2015 ceremony in which cast mates, Joel Jackson and Ky Baldwin also accepted nods. Sigrid accepted the award in honour of her late father who was a life long Garland fan. From @Channel7 :: "What a class act #SigridThornton #AACTAs #PeterAllen." |
'THERE IS NO ENDGAME' : SIGRID THORNTON ON A LIFE EMBRACING CHANGE
December 6, 2015
Karl Quinn
Sigrid Thornton welcomes me into her home like a long-overdue visitor.
We settle into couches on opposite sides of a sunny living room dominated by a massive cabinet, salvaged from a long-gone pharmacy, that's groaning with books.
"They belonged to my father-in-law," she says, motioning to the library.
"He was an inveterate collector of old paperbacks. He'd read them all. We've kept them the way he had them organised – by author mostly, some by subject."
Family. Culture. Order. These things loom large in Thornton's life, as becomes apparent over the next couple of hours. As guiding principles go, you could do a lot worse.
She and her husband, the film producer Tom Burstall (whose father, Tim, was a pioneer of the Australian New Wave, the '70s film renaissance, directing Stork and Alvin Purple among others), have lived in this house in inner-suburban Melbourne for more than 30 years
We settle into couches on opposite sides of a sunny living room dominated by a massive cabinet, salvaged from a long-gone pharmacy, that's groaning with books.
"They belonged to my father-in-law," she says, motioning to the library.
"He was an inveterate collector of old paperbacks. He'd read them all. We've kept them the way he had them organised – by author mostly, some by subject."
Family. Culture. Order. These things loom large in Thornton's life, as becomes apparent over the next couple of hours. As guiding principles go, you could do a lot worse.
She and her husband, the film producer Tom Burstall (whose father, Tim, was a pioneer of the Australian New Wave, the '70s film renaissance, directing Stork and Alvin Purple among others), have lived in this house in inner-suburban Melbourne for more than 30 years
SIGRID THORNTON JOINS WENTWORTH AS PART OF FOXTEL'S HOME-GROWN ROSTER FOR 2016
November 5, 2015
Sarah Thomas Entertainment writer
SEE SKY NEWS VIDEO
Sigrid Thornton says she had been urging TV executives for years to revisit Prisoner, in which she starred during 1979-80. "It always seemed to me to have such great and long-running potential to produce an incredibly strong vehicle for strong female performers, which is exactly what it's doing," she says of Wentworth, which will enter its fourth season next year.
Thornton is set to become the second Prisoner actor to appear in its Wentworth offspring, but not as her original character Ros Coulson. Instead she'll appear as a wealthy cosmetics entrepeneur and murder suspect Sonia Stevens. "It's a bit of a no-brainer for an actress to come into a show like this full of a cast whom I admire so much and who are doing some of the boldest work on television," Thornton says.
Thornton joins a female-heavy Foxtel programming roster for 2016, with Wentworth remaining the flag-bearer for home-grown productions. Danielle Cormack, who took the Logie this year for most outstanding actress for her portrayal of Bea Smith, says the show's continuing success both in Australia and abroad, where it has been sold to 87 countries, is its grittiness.
"There's stories being told that they haven't seen on television before. A lot of stories on television tend to be quite diluted and saccharine – this show is anything but, and the calling-card is that it's a female -driven story and that's unusual."
A Place to Call Home will enter its fourth season next year after settling into its new home on SoHo after being ditched by Seven during season two last year.
Marta Dusseldorp, who spearheads the drama as nurse Sarah Adams, says the show's ratings for season three, currently airing, make it one of the highest drawcards on Foxtel. "It shows you that there's an appetite for locally made Australian drama and that's what Foxtel does so well," she says.
Co-star Abby Earl says: "We're just really happy it's being made again. It didn't feel like it was finished. We're happy for the fans because they were quite ferocious in getting it back on air and I feel really satisfied for them." One of Foxtel's hotly anticipated offerings next year will be the Jacki Weaver-Anna Torv thriller Secret City, set in Canberra amid a political world of lies, murder and betrayal. Actor Benedict Samuel, who also stars in The Walking Dead, season six of which will also appear on Foxtel next year, plays an IT professor and says the production is packed with stunts and action. "Anything that can make you feel like you could be James Bond is exciting to watch," he says. "It's certainly cloak and dagger."
Another home-grown drama will be The Kettering Incident, with Elizabeth Debicki and Matt Le Nevez, an eight-part thriller about a missing teen who returns 15 years later. Foxtel executive director of television Brian Walsh said: "Our growing commitment to producing exclusive home-made signature programming for our subscribers will continue in 2016, with more Australian original series than ever before."
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
Sigrid Thornton says she had been urging TV executives for years to revisit Prisoner, in which she starred during 1979-80. "It always seemed to me to have such great and long-running potential to produce an incredibly strong vehicle for strong female performers, which is exactly what it's doing," she says of Wentworth, which will enter its fourth season next year.
Thornton is set to become the second Prisoner actor to appear in its Wentworth offspring, but not as her original character Ros Coulson. Instead she'll appear as a wealthy cosmetics entrepeneur and murder suspect Sonia Stevens. "It's a bit of a no-brainer for an actress to come into a show like this full of a cast whom I admire so much and who are doing some of the boldest work on television," Thornton says.
Thornton joins a female-heavy Foxtel programming roster for 2016, with Wentworth remaining the flag-bearer for home-grown productions. Danielle Cormack, who took the Logie this year for most outstanding actress for her portrayal of Bea Smith, says the show's continuing success both in Australia and abroad, where it has been sold to 87 countries, is its grittiness.
"There's stories being told that they haven't seen on television before. A lot of stories on television tend to be quite diluted and saccharine – this show is anything but, and the calling-card is that it's a female -driven story and that's unusual."
A Place to Call Home will enter its fourth season next year after settling into its new home on SoHo after being ditched by Seven during season two last year.
Marta Dusseldorp, who spearheads the drama as nurse Sarah Adams, says the show's ratings for season three, currently airing, make it one of the highest drawcards on Foxtel. "It shows you that there's an appetite for locally made Australian drama and that's what Foxtel does so well," she says.
Co-star Abby Earl says: "We're just really happy it's being made again. It didn't feel like it was finished. We're happy for the fans because they were quite ferocious in getting it back on air and I feel really satisfied for them." One of Foxtel's hotly anticipated offerings next year will be the Jacki Weaver-Anna Torv thriller Secret City, set in Canberra amid a political world of lies, murder and betrayal. Actor Benedict Samuel, who also stars in The Walking Dead, season six of which will also appear on Foxtel next year, plays an IT professor and says the production is packed with stunts and action. "Anything that can make you feel like you could be James Bond is exciting to watch," he says. "It's certainly cloak and dagger."
Another home-grown drama will be The Kettering Incident, with Elizabeth Debicki and Matt Le Nevez, an eight-part thriller about a missing teen who returns 15 years later. Foxtel executive director of television Brian Walsh said: "Our growing commitment to producing exclusive home-made signature programming for our subscribers will continue in 2016, with more Australian original series than ever before."
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
SIGRID THORNTON TAKES PIVOTAL ROLE IN WENTWORTH SEASON 4
05/11/2015
Sigrid Thornton has joined the cast of Wentworth Season 4, which will premiere on Foxtel in 2016.
Thornton is the first actress to have starred in the original Prisoner series to join the cast of Wentworth. However, rather than reprising her previous character Ros Coulson, she enters the prison as Sonia Stevens - a new character partially inspired by one originally played by Tina Bursill. Thornton plays a wealthy but self-made dynamo behind a cosmetics empire. She comes into the prison on remand, suspected of the murder of a missing woman.
Foxtel head of drama Penny Win said the fourth season continued the series’ finely-honed evolution as a world class contemporary drama which proudly forges its own path. “Having Sigrid Thornton sign on to return behind the walls of Wentworth is a casting dream and a wonderful acknowledgement of the work the writing team has put into the creation of Sonia Stevens and our plans for her and all our characters,” she said. FremantleMedia Australia director of drama, Jo Porter, said Sigrid was always on the top of the casting wish list. "From the second Sonia Stevens steps from the brawler, there is an unsettling sense all is not as it may seem," she said. "I am sure audiences will relish watching Sonia's long game play out across season four.”
Wentworth’s cast and crew have been shooting the new 12 episode season in Melbourne since August. The story will resume on air next year as Bea and her cell-block mates are returning to Wentworth after the fire and rebuilding of H Block to find a new dynamic in play with a new contender for Top Dog. On the outside, Franky is trying hard to be a productive member of society. As always, no-one should underestimate “the Freak”. The cast includes Danielle Cormack (Bea Smith), Pamela Rabe (Joan Ferguson), Kate Atkinson (Vera Bennett), Nicole da Silva (Franky Doyle), Celia Ireland (Liz Birdsworth), Shareena Clanton (Doreen Anderson), Katrina Milosevic (Sue “Boomer” Jenkins), Robbie Magasiva (Will Jackson), Socratis Otto (Maxine Conway), Tammy MacIntosh (Kaz Proctor), Libby Tanner (Bridget Westfall), Jacquie Brennan (Linda Miles) and in the course of the season introduces Kate Jenkinson (Allie Novak), Bernard Curry (Jake Stewart) and Sigrid Thornton (Sonia Stevens).
Wentworth is a FremantleMedia Australia production for Foxtel with Porter and Win as executive producers. Pino Amenta is series producer for season four.
The directors are Kevin Carlin, Steve Jodrell, Jet Wilkinson and Adrian Russell Wills. The writers are John Ridley, Pete McTighe, Michael Lucas, Sam Winston and Marcia Gardner, who is both script producer and writer.
Wentworth’s third season has garnered two nominations for The 5th AACTA Awards to be held on December 9 – Best Television Drama Series and Best Lead Actress in a Television Drama for Pamela Rabe. Wentworth is distributed by FremantleMedia International and has been sold to 87 countries.
FROM IF.COM.AU
Thornton is the first actress to have starred in the original Prisoner series to join the cast of Wentworth. However, rather than reprising her previous character Ros Coulson, she enters the prison as Sonia Stevens - a new character partially inspired by one originally played by Tina Bursill. Thornton plays a wealthy but self-made dynamo behind a cosmetics empire. She comes into the prison on remand, suspected of the murder of a missing woman.
Foxtel head of drama Penny Win said the fourth season continued the series’ finely-honed evolution as a world class contemporary drama which proudly forges its own path. “Having Sigrid Thornton sign on to return behind the walls of Wentworth is a casting dream and a wonderful acknowledgement of the work the writing team has put into the creation of Sonia Stevens and our plans for her and all our characters,” she said. FremantleMedia Australia director of drama, Jo Porter, said Sigrid was always on the top of the casting wish list. "From the second Sonia Stevens steps from the brawler, there is an unsettling sense all is not as it may seem," she said. "I am sure audiences will relish watching Sonia's long game play out across season four.”
Wentworth’s cast and crew have been shooting the new 12 episode season in Melbourne since August. The story will resume on air next year as Bea and her cell-block mates are returning to Wentworth after the fire and rebuilding of H Block to find a new dynamic in play with a new contender for Top Dog. On the outside, Franky is trying hard to be a productive member of society. As always, no-one should underestimate “the Freak”. The cast includes Danielle Cormack (Bea Smith), Pamela Rabe (Joan Ferguson), Kate Atkinson (Vera Bennett), Nicole da Silva (Franky Doyle), Celia Ireland (Liz Birdsworth), Shareena Clanton (Doreen Anderson), Katrina Milosevic (Sue “Boomer” Jenkins), Robbie Magasiva (Will Jackson), Socratis Otto (Maxine Conway), Tammy MacIntosh (Kaz Proctor), Libby Tanner (Bridget Westfall), Jacquie Brennan (Linda Miles) and in the course of the season introduces Kate Jenkinson (Allie Novak), Bernard Curry (Jake Stewart) and Sigrid Thornton (Sonia Stevens).
Wentworth is a FremantleMedia Australia production for Foxtel with Porter and Win as executive producers. Pino Amenta is series producer for season four.
The directors are Kevin Carlin, Steve Jodrell, Jet Wilkinson and Adrian Russell Wills. The writers are John Ridley, Pete McTighe, Michael Lucas, Sam Winston and Marcia Gardner, who is both script producer and writer.
Wentworth’s third season has garnered two nominations for The 5th AACTA Awards to be held on December 9 – Best Television Drama Series and Best Lead Actress in a Television Drama for Pamela Rabe. Wentworth is distributed by FremantleMedia International and has been sold to 87 countries.
FROM IF.COM.AU
FOXTEL'S FEMALE REVOLUTION IS HERE WITH A HOST OF AUSTRALIA'S LEADING LADIES AT THE HEART OF 2016 SCHEDULE
November 5 2015
Holly Byrnes News Corp Australia Network
THE female revolution will be televised — with Foxtel supercharging its 2016 programming launch with some of Australia’s most talented leading ladies at the heart of next year’s schedule. AACTA-nominee Sigrid Thornton joined her new Wentworth co-star Danielle Cormack in celebrating the growing opportunities for female actors on the local small screen. Thornton, who recently won acclaim as Judy Garland in Seven’s Peter Allen telemovie, will guest star as inmate, cosmetics business owner and socialite Sonia Stevens.
The special appearance marks Thornton’s return to the prison drama, after she starred in 26 episodes of the original Prisoner series playing as a teenage murderer — just before her breakthrough film role in George Miller’s The Man From Snowy River. While keeping tight-lipped about her character’s storyline, she admitted she was “confronted with the intensity of the show and it’s also quite violent at times.”
Embracing her return to TV, she said it was vibrant time for women in the industry. “We are following a global trend that does seem to be introducing a lot more strong female characters into the mix with television,” the 56-year-old Thornton said. “The Danes are doing it, the Americans are doing it very well. Women of different age groups as well, and that’s a really healthy thing to see because it reflects our society as it is.”
She will continue filming her Wentworth role next week, after recently completing the production of the second season of the ABC’s thriller, The Code. Foxtel’s drama slate next year will also include Jackie Weaver and Anna Torv leading an all-star ensemble in Secret City (showcase channel); returning favourite A Place To Call Home (starring Marta Dusseldorp and Noni Hazlehurst); while the much-anticipated event series, The Kettering Incident, featuring Elizabeth Debicki and Matt Le Nevez is expected to air in early 2016. Kitchen queen Donna Hay returns to Foxtel with a new series, Donna Hay — Basics to Brilliance, for LifeStyle FOOD.
Foxtel executive director of television Brian Walsh said: “our growing commitment to producing exclusive homemade signature programming for our subscribers will continue in 2016, with more Australian original series than ever before. Our significant investment in acquisitions will also continue giving Foxtel viewers the biggest array of overseas series available in Australia.”
The special appearance marks Thornton’s return to the prison drama, after she starred in 26 episodes of the original Prisoner series playing as a teenage murderer — just before her breakthrough film role in George Miller’s The Man From Snowy River. While keeping tight-lipped about her character’s storyline, she admitted she was “confronted with the intensity of the show and it’s also quite violent at times.”
Embracing her return to TV, she said it was vibrant time for women in the industry. “We are following a global trend that does seem to be introducing a lot more strong female characters into the mix with television,” the 56-year-old Thornton said. “The Danes are doing it, the Americans are doing it very well. Women of different age groups as well, and that’s a really healthy thing to see because it reflects our society as it is.”
She will continue filming her Wentworth role next week, after recently completing the production of the second season of the ABC’s thriller, The Code. Foxtel’s drama slate next year will also include Jackie Weaver and Anna Torv leading an all-star ensemble in Secret City (showcase channel); returning favourite A Place To Call Home (starring Marta Dusseldorp and Noni Hazlehurst); while the much-anticipated event series, The Kettering Incident, featuring Elizabeth Debicki and Matt Le Nevez is expected to air in early 2016. Kitchen queen Donna Hay returns to Foxtel with a new series, Donna Hay — Basics to Brilliance, for LifeStyle FOOD.
Foxtel executive director of television Brian Walsh said: “our growing commitment to producing exclusive homemade signature programming for our subscribers will continue in 2016, with more Australian original series than ever before. Our significant investment in acquisitions will also continue giving Foxtel viewers the biggest array of overseas series available in Australia.”
FIDDLER ROLE HAS SIGRID RAISING ROOF
The Daily Telegraph (Syd) / Herald-Sun (Melb)
21 October 2015
CRITICAL RESPONSE
Sigrid As Garland in Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door : "Mesmerising" "Dazzling" "Meticulous" "A Master Class," "Positively Kills It."
"Sigrid Thornton pulls out all stops, succeeding wildly as Judy Garland. If Thornton grabs a scenery-rattling role with gusto, Rebecca Gibney takes an understated approach as Allen's stoic and supportive mother. There was a danger that Garland and Minnelli could be reduced to caricatures; instead, both become much more "
Debi Enker, The Age. Peter Allen sets a high bar for Australian drama. "Judy Garland is played with much sturm and drang by Sigrid Thornton" Gordon Farrer, The Age TV Guide "Just as Allen is afforded more than the two standard dimensions of tragedy, so is Judy Garland. After a long break, the 1980s empress of Australian miniseries, Sigrid Thornton has returned to positively kill it with all of the bird-on-barbiturate mannerisms of the late-career diva. Anyone who has seen Thornton on stage will know of her willingness to expose herself to peril in the name of art, but it’s a taller and more intimate order to do the same thing on the telly. This actor works all the lines on her face and all the wrinkles of the self to bring an immense audience a fairly Judy Judy and even if you are not, as I am, an old queen who just loves a fallen chanteuse, you will love Sigrid for making this meticulous effort." Helen Razer: Daily Review "Without beating us over the head with it we see the ground laid for several key developments in Allen's adult life, including the genesis of several of his biggest hits and his instinctive connection with both Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. Sigrid Thornton as Garland and relative newcomer Sara West as Minnelli are both also excellent in difficult roles, managing to steer away from impersonation while convincing us they are these famous ladies" Melanie Houston, The Age "Thornton is mesmerising as Garland, forever fighting off the rigours of diet, pills and overstrain, taking us over the rainbow into a world of indulgence and victimhood. And West’s Liza is so charismatic and charming, she brings tears to the eye with the fine tremulous suggestion of vulnerability. A round of applause too for Melanie Parry for the impeccable singing voice of Garland. " The Australian "Thornton’s performance as Garland is a master class of the 56-year-old’s ability to surprise; to translate her own fascination for one of the most well-known women in the world into a character both familiar and intriguing." Herald Sun "Taking on her first major TV role since starring in ABC drama series, SeaChange, Thornton delivers a dazzling performance as entertainment icon, Judy Garland.." News.com.au "Sigrid Thornton is a revelation as Garland. On paper, it just couldn’t work, but on screen Thornton is wonderful as the larger-than-life Hollywood child star turned movie icon who struggled to live up to her own legend all the while trying to live down her own demons. When her daughter, the relatively unknown singer Liza, announced her engagement to Allen, Garland was over the moon, or the rainbow." Same Same Online |
A STAR IS REBORN
Sigrid Thornton on the leap from Seachange to Judy Garland in Seven's Peter Allen Telemovie.
By Holly Byrnes - 12 Sept 2015
IT’S hard to see any obvious parallels between small town magistrate, Laura Gibson of SeaChange fame and showbiz luminary, Judy Garland. Until Sigrid Thornton explains her decision to take on the two disparate TV characters came down to the same leap of faith.
Making an impressive return to the small screen in Channel 7’s acclaimed new miniseries, Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door, it’s Thornton — the reborn TV enthusiast — who shares the unlikely link between the roles — and in doing so, closes the gap between then and now. “(Playing Garland) was a bit like jumping off a cliff but I always think that’s a good recommendation for taking a job,” the Brisbane-raised Thornton told News Corp Australia.
Coastal bliss ... the on-screen chemistry of SeaChange co-stars William McInnes and Sigrid Thornton triggered a social migration, dubbed ‘the Sigrid factor.’ It was in SeaChange that Thornton, as single working mother Gibson, went in search of a new start and became the pin-up woman for taking chances. The ABC drama series, created by Deborah Cox and Andrew Knight, marked a turning point for local, quality storytelling when it launched back in 1998; but also sparked a social phenomenon — dubbed The Sigrid Factor, by demographer Bernard Salt — as a generation of viewers chose to leave city-living behind, and seek out the kind of coastal bliss Gibson (Thornton) had found — first with Max Connors (played by William McInnes) and later, ‘Diver Dan’ Della Bosca (David Wenham).
Her connection with McInnes, in particular, is the stuff of industry legend, one of those rare marriages of palpable sexual chemistry and intelligent writing. But despite their magnetism together, it took until last year for the pair to be reunited in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of The Effect (unsurprisingly, Thornton received rave reviews for her “sexy” and “thought-provoking” performance). The stage has kept this noted thinker and social activist largely engaged since those heady days of SeaChange, but the chance to challenge herself with the scope and scale of Garland’s life was just too tempting, Thornton said.
Thornton said her experience playing Judy Garland in Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door ‘exceeded my expectations.’ “I like to keep moving forward with my work and to work on good material and so I’ve been doing a lot of theatre for that reason. But this just jumped out. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t relish the chance to take it on.”
Even before she began the obligatory research for the role, Thornton was “a Judy fan,” a passion passed down to her by her University of Queensland lecturer father, Neil (who died in 2013). Far from overwhelmed by the task of taking on “such an enormous life,” Thornton leaned into the retelling of this lesser known chapter of the icon’s biography.
“I am a lifelong fan of Garland, that isn’t any exaggeration, so I felt a particular responsibility to do justice to her legacy and that, of course, involved a great deal of research and application,” she said. “Judy’s career had a number of chapters and in this chapter, in Not The Boy Next Door, we explore her (life) in the context of Peter’s life. It follows a period of time where she was in the process of trying to rejuvenate her concert career, with varying degrees of success.”
Garland (Thornton) took Peter Allen (played by Joel Jackson) under her wing, guiding his US career and introducing him to her daughter, his first wife, Liza Minnelli. Taking him under her wing, Allen was like a son to the singer, until he made that arrangement more formal by marrying Garland’s daughter Liza Minnelli.
While he was the obvious beneficiary of her showbiz smarts and connections, Thornton explained: “Peter came along for Judy at a very good time and I really think she saw something particular in him which struck a chord with her. She had three children but I think she had a maternal instinct towards Peter, nevertheless. It was something that could be worked on and grown and she wanted to give him a big opportunity and she certainly did that.”
Thornton was given her own big break in the US in the late 80s, after parlaying the international interest from her appearances in the wildly successful 1983 miniseries, All The Rivers Run and The Man from Snowy River movies; into a three-year stint as bank manager Amelia Lawson in American TV western, Paradise. It was an experience which helped inform her understanding of Allen’s journey as a boy from the bush to Broadway darling, Thornton said.
“Even though he came from being a working performer all his life, from a modest performance world, he was thrown, quite quickly, into the superstar soiree … and I suspect Peter took it much in his stride because he was that kind of guy. He was a very earthed person. I suppose for me, I wasn’t ever overwhelmed by the experience when it happened to me. It was different, but it was an adventure. Peter went on a pretty wild ride and I actually think he really lapped it up and knew how to enjoy his life, which is a great thing.”
Thornton’s performance as Garland is a master class of the 56-year-old’s ability to surprise; to translate her own fascination for one of the most well-known women in the world into a character both familiar and intriguing.
She is unusually complimentary about her own performance, but says it was a role and experience which “exceeded my expectations.”
“I might sound ridiculously effusive but I do think this has been a particularly precious experience for all of us, for all sorts of reasons … I don’t think any of us has worked on anything quite like this and I like to think that really, that unusual nature of the way in which this material has been handled will translate to the screen and people will be intrigued.”
Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door airs 8.30pm, Sunday on Seven
Making an impressive return to the small screen in Channel 7’s acclaimed new miniseries, Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door, it’s Thornton — the reborn TV enthusiast — who shares the unlikely link between the roles — and in doing so, closes the gap between then and now. “(Playing Garland) was a bit like jumping off a cliff but I always think that’s a good recommendation for taking a job,” the Brisbane-raised Thornton told News Corp Australia.
Coastal bliss ... the on-screen chemistry of SeaChange co-stars William McInnes and Sigrid Thornton triggered a social migration, dubbed ‘the Sigrid factor.’ It was in SeaChange that Thornton, as single working mother Gibson, went in search of a new start and became the pin-up woman for taking chances. The ABC drama series, created by Deborah Cox and Andrew Knight, marked a turning point for local, quality storytelling when it launched back in 1998; but also sparked a social phenomenon — dubbed The Sigrid Factor, by demographer Bernard Salt — as a generation of viewers chose to leave city-living behind, and seek out the kind of coastal bliss Gibson (Thornton) had found — first with Max Connors (played by William McInnes) and later, ‘Diver Dan’ Della Bosca (David Wenham).
Her connection with McInnes, in particular, is the stuff of industry legend, one of those rare marriages of palpable sexual chemistry and intelligent writing. But despite their magnetism together, it took until last year for the pair to be reunited in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of The Effect (unsurprisingly, Thornton received rave reviews for her “sexy” and “thought-provoking” performance). The stage has kept this noted thinker and social activist largely engaged since those heady days of SeaChange, but the chance to challenge herself with the scope and scale of Garland’s life was just too tempting, Thornton said.
Thornton said her experience playing Judy Garland in Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door ‘exceeded my expectations.’ “I like to keep moving forward with my work and to work on good material and so I’ve been doing a lot of theatre for that reason. But this just jumped out. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t relish the chance to take it on.”
Even before she began the obligatory research for the role, Thornton was “a Judy fan,” a passion passed down to her by her University of Queensland lecturer father, Neil (who died in 2013). Far from overwhelmed by the task of taking on “such an enormous life,” Thornton leaned into the retelling of this lesser known chapter of the icon’s biography.
“I am a lifelong fan of Garland, that isn’t any exaggeration, so I felt a particular responsibility to do justice to her legacy and that, of course, involved a great deal of research and application,” she said. “Judy’s career had a number of chapters and in this chapter, in Not The Boy Next Door, we explore her (life) in the context of Peter’s life. It follows a period of time where she was in the process of trying to rejuvenate her concert career, with varying degrees of success.”
Garland (Thornton) took Peter Allen (played by Joel Jackson) under her wing, guiding his US career and introducing him to her daughter, his first wife, Liza Minnelli. Taking him under her wing, Allen was like a son to the singer, until he made that arrangement more formal by marrying Garland’s daughter Liza Minnelli.
While he was the obvious beneficiary of her showbiz smarts and connections, Thornton explained: “Peter came along for Judy at a very good time and I really think she saw something particular in him which struck a chord with her. She had three children but I think she had a maternal instinct towards Peter, nevertheless. It was something that could be worked on and grown and she wanted to give him a big opportunity and she certainly did that.”
Thornton was given her own big break in the US in the late 80s, after parlaying the international interest from her appearances in the wildly successful 1983 miniseries, All The Rivers Run and The Man from Snowy River movies; into a three-year stint as bank manager Amelia Lawson in American TV western, Paradise. It was an experience which helped inform her understanding of Allen’s journey as a boy from the bush to Broadway darling, Thornton said.
“Even though he came from being a working performer all his life, from a modest performance world, he was thrown, quite quickly, into the superstar soiree … and I suspect Peter took it much in his stride because he was that kind of guy. He was a very earthed person. I suppose for me, I wasn’t ever overwhelmed by the experience when it happened to me. It was different, but it was an adventure. Peter went on a pretty wild ride and I actually think he really lapped it up and knew how to enjoy his life, which is a great thing.”
Thornton’s performance as Garland is a master class of the 56-year-old’s ability to surprise; to translate her own fascination for one of the most well-known women in the world into a character both familiar and intriguing.
She is unusually complimentary about her own performance, but says it was a role and experience which “exceeded my expectations.”
“I might sound ridiculously effusive but I do think this has been a particularly precious experience for all of us, for all sorts of reasons … I don’t think any of us has worked on anything quite like this and I like to think that really, that unusual nature of the way in which this material has been handled will translate to the screen and people will be intrigued.”
Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door airs 8.30pm, Sunday on Seven
SIGRID THORNTON PLAYS FIRST "LIVING" ROLE
By AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS PUBLISHED: 12:03 EST, 11 September 2015
Actress Sigrid Thornton has thrown herself into dozens of different roles, but has never played someone who truly "lived", like actress Judy Garland did. Thornton plays the US entertainment great in the Seven Network's upcoming Peter Allen biopic. It was Garland who introduced Allen to her daughter Liza Minnelli, who Allen later married. It's just one magical moment in the life of the flamboyant Australian song and dance man captured in the TV mini-series Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door, that starts on Sunday.
"It was new territory in that I'd never played a person who had lived before, so I did feel a terrific responsibility playing Judy and I had always adored her," Thornton told AAP. "I did my homework and turned up and did my bit but they are big shoes and it's a big life. It was just great fun."
Thornton has been appearing on Australian screens since the late sixties and has always idolised the Wizard Of Oz star. She knew plenty about the gossip and the well-documented tragic side to Garland's life but still took time to further research her career. However, there's not much to find about Garland's relationship with Allen, says Thornton. "The biographical's on both tend to be one or the other, and not the relationship between them. But it's also very clear they had a good and friendly relationship with one and other." The two-part TV series was not only the first time Thornton had played a character that had lived, but it's the first time she has worked with her good friend Rebecca Gibney.
Gibney plays Allen's mum Marion Woolnough while fledgling actor Joel Jackson plays the I Go To Rio hitmaker. "We are old friends but we have never worked together...her role suits her and she is so believable."
Allen died, aged 48, in 1992 from an AIDS-related illness. While he is known for songs such as I Go To Rio and I Still Call Australia Home, he also wrote compositions performed and recorded by other stars which include I Honestly Love You, sung by Olivia Newton-John, and the Melissa Manchester hit Don't Cry Out Loud.
* Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door airs on Sunday, September 3 on the Seven Network.
"It was new territory in that I'd never played a person who had lived before, so I did feel a terrific responsibility playing Judy and I had always adored her," Thornton told AAP. "I did my homework and turned up and did my bit but they are big shoes and it's a big life. It was just great fun."
Thornton has been appearing on Australian screens since the late sixties and has always idolised the Wizard Of Oz star. She knew plenty about the gossip and the well-documented tragic side to Garland's life but still took time to further research her career. However, there's not much to find about Garland's relationship with Allen, says Thornton. "The biographical's on both tend to be one or the other, and not the relationship between them. But it's also very clear they had a good and friendly relationship with one and other." The two-part TV series was not only the first time Thornton had played a character that had lived, but it's the first time she has worked with her good friend Rebecca Gibney.
Gibney plays Allen's mum Marion Woolnough while fledgling actor Joel Jackson plays the I Go To Rio hitmaker. "We are old friends but we have never worked together...her role suits her and she is so believable."
Allen died, aged 48, in 1992 from an AIDS-related illness. While he is known for songs such as I Go To Rio and I Still Call Australia Home, he also wrote compositions performed and recorded by other stars which include I Honestly Love You, sung by Olivia Newton-John, and the Melissa Manchester hit Don't Cry Out Loud.
* Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door airs on Sunday, September 3 on the Seven Network.
|
SIGRID: "JUDY CHAMPIONED PETER ALLEN TO BE HIS OWN MAN."
September 11th, 2015 By David Knox
Her body of work includes some of our finest achievements: Seachange, The Man from Snowy River, All the Rivers Run, Prisoner, and Homicide, but it’s been quite some time since Sigrid Thornton has been seen in a principal role on our small television. Now she is back in Seven’s miniseries Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door. While her more recent work has been in theatre and film, she is happy to be returning to the small screen.
“I like the pace and the momentum of television very much. But I like all the forms, really,” she says. “I’ve been doing it for the vast bulk of my years, but I love my work, it’s always changing, because people are always changing. I’m always changing. I’m really glad to be a part of this and particularly glad to have been able to have played Judy.”
Thornton is a long-time fan of Judy Garland so she leapt at the chance to play the role of the Hollywood star who became mentor and mother-in-law to Peter Allen.
“I auditioned for it because it was outside what people had seen me do and outside the body of work that is out there,” she continues. “So I’m very fortunate to have been offered it and to play it. I had a ball. She’s fascinating, complex, a chameleon and as bold as brass. They’re the best kinds of roles to play.”
While she was familiar with The Wizard of Oz and Garland’s music, the Peter Allen-years are less documented. Researching their association relied on loose documentation and photographs.
“Even in her biography there wasn’t a great deal about that period of her life with Peter, or their relationship. But one can surmise a great deal and the dynamic of their relationship, just by what happened to them,” she says. “I’d seen other films too but when you find out more about her you fall even more in love with her. That’s what happened to me. In the case of Peter Allen it’s Judy’s life as seen through the prism of Peter’s life. So we can’t show the entirety of her life, so I worked with what I was given in the beautiful script by Justin Monjo. He did allow me to experiment as an actor with quite a number of shades of Judy’s character. Multitudinous shades.”
Indeed it is a role that offers many colours of the rainbow. Thornton joins a growing list of Aussie actresses who have played Garland on camera and on stage including Judy Davis, Chrissy Amphlett and Caroline O’Connor.
“She was highly intelligent, a raconteur, a very sensitive person, and one of most extraordinarily talented people I loving memory. So it’s a big character to play and you can’t do it all –certainly not in the context of this 4 hours that are centred around another character,” she insists. “I tried to make her as identifiable as possible in the context of this particular story.”
While Thornton portrays Garland both in and out of the spotlight, vocals are supplied by Melanie Parry. But she prefers not to detail much about the magic of recreating the musical moments. “I don’t like to stretch the audience’s imagination too much, because you have to suspend disbelief. But I had a beautiful voice to work with. We couldn’t really use Judy’s voice because it wasn’t constructed around existing recordings,” she explains. “So I was lip-syncing another voice and I was very conscious of trying to get that right and doing justice to the way it was performed.”
While she never saw either Garland or Peter Allen live, Thornton still has vivid memories of watching Allen’s captivating performance in his I Go To Rio clip.
“I was a Countdown addict like everybody else at that time. I remember rushing home on a Sunday night and Peter’s clip would always be playing. That clip really sticks in the memory, doesn’t it? There was such a vivacious energy about the man and the way in which he sold a song,” she recalls. “I think that’s one of the things Judy saw in him, actually. He was a really good storyteller. She was a terrific champion of him selling himself as a performer, rather than selling other people’s songs. She really encouraged him to be his own man and to work on his songwriting skills. I think he regarded her as a serious mentor and he became an authentic performer. He managed to rise above his circumstances and that’s the story that’s really being told. It’s a hero’s journey of this young boy who could have crumbled under the pressure but didn’t.”
Next year Thornton will also appear in ABC’s drama The Code on ABC. With her previous industry roles including being on the Board of Film Victoria, I can’t resist asking about her views on the current state of production. Is it healthy? Is Drama faring better or worse than other points in her career?
“Television is in a very good place,” she observes. “I think it’s healthy and thriving, and we’re seeing a more mature industry than we ever have before. That’s of course what one would have hoped for, but not necessarily what one would have foreseen 10 years ago. Even 15 years ago it looked like television was in decline in Australia. But we’ve seen a tremendous upsurge of productions of all sorts. There’s now a genuine diversity of productions and we’re nurturing some terrific writers. So we’re in a pretty good place. We are still a relatively small population so we do have to look at that. But I think it’s important for us to be ever-diligent about continuing to tell our own stories. Even though we are an English-speaking producer of television….we need to keep reminding ourselves that we are quite different to other countries in all sorts of fundamental ways. But those differences are endlessly fascinating.”
Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door airs 8:40pm Sunday 13 and continues September 20 on Seven.
“I like the pace and the momentum of television very much. But I like all the forms, really,” she says. “I’ve been doing it for the vast bulk of my years, but I love my work, it’s always changing, because people are always changing. I’m always changing. I’m really glad to be a part of this and particularly glad to have been able to have played Judy.”
Thornton is a long-time fan of Judy Garland so she leapt at the chance to play the role of the Hollywood star who became mentor and mother-in-law to Peter Allen.
“I auditioned for it because it was outside what people had seen me do and outside the body of work that is out there,” she continues. “So I’m very fortunate to have been offered it and to play it. I had a ball. She’s fascinating, complex, a chameleon and as bold as brass. They’re the best kinds of roles to play.”
While she was familiar with The Wizard of Oz and Garland’s music, the Peter Allen-years are less documented. Researching their association relied on loose documentation and photographs.
“Even in her biography there wasn’t a great deal about that period of her life with Peter, or their relationship. But one can surmise a great deal and the dynamic of their relationship, just by what happened to them,” she says. “I’d seen other films too but when you find out more about her you fall even more in love with her. That’s what happened to me. In the case of Peter Allen it’s Judy’s life as seen through the prism of Peter’s life. So we can’t show the entirety of her life, so I worked with what I was given in the beautiful script by Justin Monjo. He did allow me to experiment as an actor with quite a number of shades of Judy’s character. Multitudinous shades.”
Indeed it is a role that offers many colours of the rainbow. Thornton joins a growing list of Aussie actresses who have played Garland on camera and on stage including Judy Davis, Chrissy Amphlett and Caroline O’Connor.
“She was highly intelligent, a raconteur, a very sensitive person, and one of most extraordinarily talented people I loving memory. So it’s a big character to play and you can’t do it all –certainly not in the context of this 4 hours that are centred around another character,” she insists. “I tried to make her as identifiable as possible in the context of this particular story.”
While Thornton portrays Garland both in and out of the spotlight, vocals are supplied by Melanie Parry. But she prefers not to detail much about the magic of recreating the musical moments. “I don’t like to stretch the audience’s imagination too much, because you have to suspend disbelief. But I had a beautiful voice to work with. We couldn’t really use Judy’s voice because it wasn’t constructed around existing recordings,” she explains. “So I was lip-syncing another voice and I was very conscious of trying to get that right and doing justice to the way it was performed.”
While she never saw either Garland or Peter Allen live, Thornton still has vivid memories of watching Allen’s captivating performance in his I Go To Rio clip.
“I was a Countdown addict like everybody else at that time. I remember rushing home on a Sunday night and Peter’s clip would always be playing. That clip really sticks in the memory, doesn’t it? There was such a vivacious energy about the man and the way in which he sold a song,” she recalls. “I think that’s one of the things Judy saw in him, actually. He was a really good storyteller. She was a terrific champion of him selling himself as a performer, rather than selling other people’s songs. She really encouraged him to be his own man and to work on his songwriting skills. I think he regarded her as a serious mentor and he became an authentic performer. He managed to rise above his circumstances and that’s the story that’s really being told. It’s a hero’s journey of this young boy who could have crumbled under the pressure but didn’t.”
Next year Thornton will also appear in ABC’s drama The Code on ABC. With her previous industry roles including being on the Board of Film Victoria, I can’t resist asking about her views on the current state of production. Is it healthy? Is Drama faring better or worse than other points in her career?
“Television is in a very good place,” she observes. “I think it’s healthy and thriving, and we’re seeing a more mature industry than we ever have before. That’s of course what one would have hoped for, but not necessarily what one would have foreseen 10 years ago. Even 15 years ago it looked like television was in decline in Australia. But we’ve seen a tremendous upsurge of productions of all sorts. There’s now a genuine diversity of productions and we’re nurturing some terrific writers. So we’re in a pretty good place. We are still a relatively small population so we do have to look at that. But I think it’s important for us to be ever-diligent about continuing to tell our own stories. Even though we are an English-speaking producer of television….we need to keep reminding ourselves that we are quite different to other countries in all sorts of fundamental ways. But those differences are endlessly fascinating.”
Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door airs 8:40pm Sunday 13 and continues September 20 on Seven.
SIGRID THORNTON PLAYS JUDY GARLAND UNRESTRAINED
September 5, 2015 David Dale meditates on patterns in popular culture in The Tribal Mind.
Sigrid Thornton says she would have leapt at the chance to play Judy Garland “even if she only came on and sneezed”. She rates playing Garland in Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door as one of her three favourite roles in a career that has lasted 43 years.
Thornton was already an expert on Garland’s tortured life when Channel Seven offered her the part in the miniseries that starts next Sunday. She knew, for example, that Garland helped launch Peter Allen’s career in the US, and encouraged the marriage between him and her daughter Liza Minnelli in 1967 (which ended in 1974 after Minnelli discovered he was gay). What Thornton needed to know was how Garland behaved during that period, when her health was declining through the effects of drugs and alcohol.
“My father was a lifelong Garland fan -- he probably passed it on to me,” she said. “I just immersed myself in whatever ways I could, by reading and watching and listening. There have been a great number of books written about her. There were a couple of seasons of a television show she did late in her career, with live interviews where she was the interviewer. That was an interesting way to observe some of her behaviours.”
Thornton had to become left-handed and put in brown contact lenses: “Judy’s large brown eyes really do sparkle and being able to look at myself in the mirror with brown eyes gave me another way of getting into Judy’s skin.”
Playing a diva such as Garland can be risky business for an actress. Garland lived in an era when movies and stars were melodramatic. Modern audiences are used to more restrained performances. There might be a temptation to go over the top, and end up looking hysterical. Did Thornton feel the need to pull herself back, to be more restrained?
Thornton chuckled. “No, no, it’s not a restrained performance. I don’t think anyone would describe what I’m doing as restrained. She was utterly unrestrained. She wore her heart on her sleeve, Judy. There were some interviews where one is so touched by her openness. On the other hand she was an inveterate liar. She was a raconteur. She would tell fantastic stories in order to make people happy. In one aspect of her character she was aware of her unique gift, but in another way she was never able to be satisfied that she was good enough. There was never really enough admiration for her, and this is not an unusual syndrome for actors. She was extremely intelligent, and operated on a very high frequency of intelligence and emotion and sensitivity. She could be very, very difficult to deal with professionally, but her actual baseline nature was tremendously optimistic.”
Garland was in the public eye for 40 years, just as Thornton has been. Does Thornton relate to that kind of pressure?
“Judy had a really different level of fame, but I understand it to a certain extent. I’m fortunate that it hasn’t handicapped me greatly. I think it would be extremely challenging to be followed down the street at every turn. Loss of privacy is a big deal for anybody. I’ve tried not to expose certain parts of myself, and that runs to my family. I’ve worked hard to keep my nearest and dearest who have not chosen a public life out of the public life.
“Judy lived in a different time. There was a great deal of moulding and shaping of the public persona of the stars. They allowed people into their private world. She would have said she had a great life and a lucky life. She would say I’ve had three wonderful children, I’ve been loved by extraordinary men, I’ve had a career to die for. Which she literally did.”
At what point did Garland realize Peter Allen was gay? “I think that’s not really clear. Judy was attracted to numbers of gay men in her life. The common knowledge these days is that her father was in fact gay, but people back then had double lives. Judy married a couple of gay men, so she was attracted to the exuberant humour, sensitivity and talent of Peter.
“The great advantage with telling this story now is we’ve come a long way, we’re very close to legalising same sex marriage. These kind of things have only been spoken about positively in the public arena very recently. We have the luxury of telling Peter’s story in a more straightforward and honest way than would have been possible in his lifetime.”
Sigrid Thornton's favourite roles ("in no particular order"): 1. Laura Gibson (Seachange, 2002); 2. Judy Garland (Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door, 2015); 3. Blanche Dubois (A Streetcar Named Desire, 2014); 4. Jessica Harrison (The Man From Snowy River, 1982); 5. Frances (1915, 1982); 6. Philadelphia Gordon (All The Rivers Run, 1983); 7. Amelia Lawson (Guns of Paradise, 1989); 8. Bridget Tankerton (Great Expectations: The Untold Story, 1987); 9. Angela (Snapshot, 1979); 10. Erica Johnston (Homicide, 1972).
When this column sent Sigrid Thornton a list of the major roles she’s played since her first professional performance (in Homicide, at the age of 13), and asked her to rank her ten favourites, she said she was “very touched … It was so funny receiving that, because you put these things behind you when you’re moving onto the next thing in life.”
Then she got down to business and produced the top ten list at the top of this column. She said it was “in no particular order” except that the equal top three had to be Laura Gibson, Judy Garland and Blanche Dubois (whom she played on stage last year). “Laura was an opportunity to reinvent myself as an actor on the screen. I played her over a number of years and Seachange became part of the zeitgeist.
“I had enormous fun playing Judy Garland, but over a short period of time. It was like a beautiful flash. I so admire all the creatives involved in this project. I can’t see a weak link in any of the performances. I had a lovely time watching them when I wasn’t working. And I got to chat with my old friend Rebecca Gibney [who plays Peter Allen’s mother]. And Blanche in Streetcar is one of the greatest roles in the female canon. It was an extraordinary experience, even though it was like going to war every night. I want to say Amelia from Paradise, because that was made in America and it was an opportunity to live and work in another country and culture, with a young family. It was the longest running series role I’d ever taken on. American series work is really hard slog, really long hours. I learned a great deal about the craft.
“Bridget in Great Expectations was a favourite because I got to work with my husband [Tom Burstall], who wrote it, and my late father-in-law [Tim Burstall], who directed it. I’d have to include Angela in Snapshot, not because it was the greatest film in the world, but because it was my first lead in a feature.
“Jessica in The Man From Snowy River was a major breakthrough point in my career, and Philadelphia in All The Rivers came along very soon after I’d played Jessica. She was strong-willed, probably a feminist of her time, really. Plus I was working opposite the wonderful John Waters and working in beautiful Echuca for five months.”
Thornton was already an expert on Garland’s tortured life when Channel Seven offered her the part in the miniseries that starts next Sunday. She knew, for example, that Garland helped launch Peter Allen’s career in the US, and encouraged the marriage between him and her daughter Liza Minnelli in 1967 (which ended in 1974 after Minnelli discovered he was gay). What Thornton needed to know was how Garland behaved during that period, when her health was declining through the effects of drugs and alcohol.
“My father was a lifelong Garland fan -- he probably passed it on to me,” she said. “I just immersed myself in whatever ways I could, by reading and watching and listening. There have been a great number of books written about her. There were a couple of seasons of a television show she did late in her career, with live interviews where she was the interviewer. That was an interesting way to observe some of her behaviours.”
Thornton had to become left-handed and put in brown contact lenses: “Judy’s large brown eyes really do sparkle and being able to look at myself in the mirror with brown eyes gave me another way of getting into Judy’s skin.”
Playing a diva such as Garland can be risky business for an actress. Garland lived in an era when movies and stars were melodramatic. Modern audiences are used to more restrained performances. There might be a temptation to go over the top, and end up looking hysterical. Did Thornton feel the need to pull herself back, to be more restrained?
Thornton chuckled. “No, no, it’s not a restrained performance. I don’t think anyone would describe what I’m doing as restrained. She was utterly unrestrained. She wore her heart on her sleeve, Judy. There were some interviews where one is so touched by her openness. On the other hand she was an inveterate liar. She was a raconteur. She would tell fantastic stories in order to make people happy. In one aspect of her character she was aware of her unique gift, but in another way she was never able to be satisfied that she was good enough. There was never really enough admiration for her, and this is not an unusual syndrome for actors. She was extremely intelligent, and operated on a very high frequency of intelligence and emotion and sensitivity. She could be very, very difficult to deal with professionally, but her actual baseline nature was tremendously optimistic.”
Garland was in the public eye for 40 years, just as Thornton has been. Does Thornton relate to that kind of pressure?
“Judy had a really different level of fame, but I understand it to a certain extent. I’m fortunate that it hasn’t handicapped me greatly. I think it would be extremely challenging to be followed down the street at every turn. Loss of privacy is a big deal for anybody. I’ve tried not to expose certain parts of myself, and that runs to my family. I’ve worked hard to keep my nearest and dearest who have not chosen a public life out of the public life.
“Judy lived in a different time. There was a great deal of moulding and shaping of the public persona of the stars. They allowed people into their private world. She would have said she had a great life and a lucky life. She would say I’ve had three wonderful children, I’ve been loved by extraordinary men, I’ve had a career to die for. Which she literally did.”
At what point did Garland realize Peter Allen was gay? “I think that’s not really clear. Judy was attracted to numbers of gay men in her life. The common knowledge these days is that her father was in fact gay, but people back then had double lives. Judy married a couple of gay men, so she was attracted to the exuberant humour, sensitivity and talent of Peter.
“The great advantage with telling this story now is we’ve come a long way, we’re very close to legalising same sex marriage. These kind of things have only been spoken about positively in the public arena very recently. We have the luxury of telling Peter’s story in a more straightforward and honest way than would have been possible in his lifetime.”
Sigrid Thornton's favourite roles ("in no particular order"): 1. Laura Gibson (Seachange, 2002); 2. Judy Garland (Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door, 2015); 3. Blanche Dubois (A Streetcar Named Desire, 2014); 4. Jessica Harrison (The Man From Snowy River, 1982); 5. Frances (1915, 1982); 6. Philadelphia Gordon (All The Rivers Run, 1983); 7. Amelia Lawson (Guns of Paradise, 1989); 8. Bridget Tankerton (Great Expectations: The Untold Story, 1987); 9. Angela (Snapshot, 1979); 10. Erica Johnston (Homicide, 1972).
When this column sent Sigrid Thornton a list of the major roles she’s played since her first professional performance (in Homicide, at the age of 13), and asked her to rank her ten favourites, she said she was “very touched … It was so funny receiving that, because you put these things behind you when you’re moving onto the next thing in life.”
Then she got down to business and produced the top ten list at the top of this column. She said it was “in no particular order” except that the equal top three had to be Laura Gibson, Judy Garland and Blanche Dubois (whom she played on stage last year). “Laura was an opportunity to reinvent myself as an actor on the screen. I played her over a number of years and Seachange became part of the zeitgeist.
“I had enormous fun playing Judy Garland, but over a short period of time. It was like a beautiful flash. I so admire all the creatives involved in this project. I can’t see a weak link in any of the performances. I had a lovely time watching them when I wasn’t working. And I got to chat with my old friend Rebecca Gibney [who plays Peter Allen’s mother]. And Blanche in Streetcar is one of the greatest roles in the female canon. It was an extraordinary experience, even though it was like going to war every night. I want to say Amelia from Paradise, because that was made in America and it was an opportunity to live and work in another country and culture, with a young family. It was the longest running series role I’d ever taken on. American series work is really hard slog, really long hours. I learned a great deal about the craft.
“Bridget in Great Expectations was a favourite because I got to work with my husband [Tom Burstall], who wrote it, and my late father-in-law [Tim Burstall], who directed it. I’d have to include Angela in Snapshot, not because it was the greatest film in the world, but because it was my first lead in a feature.
“Jessica in The Man From Snowy River was a major breakthrough point in my career, and Philadelphia in All The Rivers came along very soon after I’d played Jessica. She was strong-willed, probably a feminist of her time, really. Plus I was working opposite the wonderful John Waters and working in beautiful Echuca for five months.”
Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door starts on Seven at 8.30 next Sunday (September 13) in a two-part series.
The Tribal Mind column, by David Dale, appears in a printed form every Sunday in The Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age, and also as a forum on this website, where it welcomes your comments. David Dale teaches communications at UTS, Sydney. He is the author of The Little Book of Australia - A snapshot of who we are (Allen and Unwin). For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark The Tribal Mind.
UPDATE:
SMH's Nick Galvin introduces the series in anticipation of the premiere:
Read Online : Peter Allen's story is of a boy from the bush who found international acclaim
UPDATE:
SMH's Nick Galvin introduces the series in anticipation of the premiere:
Read Online : Peter Allen's story is of a boy from the bush who found international acclaim
ABC POLITICAL THRILLER THE CODE WRAPS FILMING IN CANBERRA FOR SEASON TWO - SEPTEMBER 4 2015
Jil Hogan Entertainment and lifestyle reporter
Filming for the second season of hugely popular mini-series The Code finished up in Canberra on Friday after two weeks. The story for the second season of the ABC political thriller, which has recently proved a favourite on both US and British Netflix, kicks back in a couple of months after the first season ended.
As well as the regulars, the new season has two rather familiar faces joining the cast in Sigrid Thornton plus Golden Globe winner Anthony LaPaglia who flew in and out of Canberra as his scenes required. "It's weird working with people that you saw on TV when you were growing up," said Adele Perovic who plays Hani. "I mean watching Sea Change it was such a big part of being young in Australia in the 90s with Diver Dan and everything so I was quite star struck when I first met her but Sigrid's so lovely."
The cast and crew, who stayed in Braddon, battled some chilly mornings as they filmed around town at Parliament House, Lake Burley Griffin, the Shine Dome and the Nishi building. The shoot coincided with filming of new political mini-series Secret City, which put some strain on the local facilities, but Dan Spielman, who plays Ned in The Code, said they managed to avoid being in each other's shots.
"I think it's the greatest form of compliment to have someone copy you," he joked. "I don't actually think it's a copy, but I think it's the greatest compliment to have another political thriller shooting in Canberra after we did."
The crew is now headed to Sydney for further filming, followed by North Queensland. ABC is yet to finalise when season two of The Code will air, but it will be some time in 2016.
As well as the regulars, the new season has two rather familiar faces joining the cast in Sigrid Thornton plus Golden Globe winner Anthony LaPaglia who flew in and out of Canberra as his scenes required. "It's weird working with people that you saw on TV when you were growing up," said Adele Perovic who plays Hani. "I mean watching Sea Change it was such a big part of being young in Australia in the 90s with Diver Dan and everything so I was quite star struck when I first met her but Sigrid's so lovely."
The cast and crew, who stayed in Braddon, battled some chilly mornings as they filmed around town at Parliament House, Lake Burley Griffin, the Shine Dome and the Nishi building. The shoot coincided with filming of new political mini-series Secret City, which put some strain on the local facilities, but Dan Spielman, who plays Ned in The Code, said they managed to avoid being in each other's shots.
"I think it's the greatest form of compliment to have someone copy you," he joked. "I don't actually think it's a copy, but I think it's the greatest compliment to have another political thriller shooting in Canberra after we did."
The crew is now headed to Sydney for further filming, followed by North Queensland. ABC is yet to finalise when season two of The Code will air, but it will be some time in 2016.
AUSTRALIAN ICON SIGRID THORNTON HAS LAUNCESTON IN HER DIARY
Much-loved actress Sigrid Thornton looks forward to August 7 theatre date.
The date August 7 is circled in Sigrid Thornton’s busy diary. For one night only, the award-winning actress of stage and screen is coming to Launceston to star in the Australian premiere of the play Diary of a Nobody.
Diary of a Nobody is a one-woman dramatic comedy monologue about a year (1955) in the life of an Australian housewife. Through reliving extracts from her Diary, she takes us on an emotional nostalgic journey into pre-television Australia, into the day-to-day ordinary existence of a ‘nobody’ who wants to be a ‘somebody’. Producer/Director Stephen Beckett, who has adapted the play from the classic British novel of the same name by George and Weedon Grossmith, says that he is very excited to cast such a famous icon as Sigrid Thornton in the role. “The idea of a real-life ‘somebody’ playing an everyday ‘nobody’ appeals to me,” says Beckett, “especially as the play reminds us of what it’s like to be so delightfully and ridiculously human no matter how ‘famous’ or not we are.” Dramatic monologues are no stranger to Sigrid Thornton, having being involved in Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads series on stage before. ‘In Her Big Chance I played a deluded actress, (laughs) so I could relate to that. And in Diary of a Nobody I am playing a woman who is a housewife, so I can relate to that as I have a ‘domestic’ side just like we all do.” ‘I’m a great admirer of Alan Bennett,” adds Beckett. “His monologues are always full of bittersweet humour, as is the case with Diary of a Nobody - it’s a theatre experience that’s as much about listening as watching.” No doubt, the audience in Launceston will be listening and watching closely as Sigrid Thornton, the star of much loved classics (The Man From Snowy River, SeaChange, All The Rivers Run, and hundreds more) takes to the stage on Friday August 7. Be sure to put Diary in your diary. ON STAGE What: Diary of a Nobody presented by Stephen Beckett Productions / Where: Princess Theatre, Launceston / When: Friday August 7 / Tickets: $55 adults, $50 conc. / Bookings: 6323 3666, the Princess Theatre box office or www.theatrenorth.com.au Photograph by Jennifer Stenglein. (c) 2015 |
SIGRID IN "LEGENDS OF THE SMALL SCREEN" LIFTOUT - JUNE 21 2015
Legends of the small screen: Australian TV Icons (Sunday Liftout)
“GOOD evening and welcome to television.” With those words, uttered by Bruce Gyngell in a Sydney studio on the evening of Sunday, September 16, 1956, Australian audiences got their first glimpse of the medium that would ultimately unite us in collective moments of joy, laughter, sadness, shock and relief.
- By: Siobhan Duck
“GOOD evening and welcome to television.” With those words, uttered by Bruce Gyngell in a Sydney studio on the evening of Sunday, September 16, 1956, Australian audiences got their first glimpse of the medium that would ultimately unite us in collective moments of joy, laughter, sadness, shock and relief.
THE actresses’ photoshoot had all the hallmarks of a school reunion. Old rivalries were set aside, long-distance friendships were revisited and laughter filled the room when the creme de la creme of Australia’s female small-screen talent came together for a special photo shoot celebrating their achievements in television.
Between them, Kerry Armstrong, Lorraine Bayly, Noni Hazelhurst, Rebecca Gibney, Claudia Karvan, Deborah Mailman, Lisa McCune, Georgie Parker, Kate Ritchie, Kat Stewart and Sigrid Thornton have won 42 Logies (nine of them gold), six AACTAs, 19 AFIs and two Order of Australia medals. Yet on the rare occasion they found themselves all in the same room at the same time, talk wasn’t about who had won what, or who had secured a role ahead of someone else - it was instead the sort of light-hearted banter you would find between old school chums. In one corner of the room, Gibney and Parker snapped selfies together while Armstrong and McCune compared photos of their children.
Sigrid Thornton and Lorraine Bayly traded stories about their recent night at the Logies together. Mailman and Karvan giggled together while getting their make-up done. Being the best in the business, most of the women had worked together at some point. On screen they had shared love interests and played each other’s family while off screen they forged friendships and a mutual respect for each other’s work. Armstrong and Gibney even shared a house after meeting on the mini-series Come in Spinner. The two actresses always watch each other’s work and then ring each other to offer their support for what the other has done. Over the years many stories have been written about the so-called cattiness of their profession. Vanity Fair famously captured the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of a photo shoot with the then-stars of Desperate Housewives, of the jostling over who would stand where, in what order they would select their wardrobe and who would get to wear the prized red swimsuit for the picture.
There were so such diva antics for Australia’s leading ladies of TV. Just mates enjoying each other’s company.
Between them, Kerry Armstrong, Lorraine Bayly, Noni Hazelhurst, Rebecca Gibney, Claudia Karvan, Deborah Mailman, Lisa McCune, Georgie Parker, Kate Ritchie, Kat Stewart and Sigrid Thornton have won 42 Logies (nine of them gold), six AACTAs, 19 AFIs and two Order of Australia medals. Yet on the rare occasion they found themselves all in the same room at the same time, talk wasn’t about who had won what, or who had secured a role ahead of someone else - it was instead the sort of light-hearted banter you would find between old school chums. In one corner of the room, Gibney and Parker snapped selfies together while Armstrong and McCune compared photos of their children.
Sigrid Thornton and Lorraine Bayly traded stories about their recent night at the Logies together. Mailman and Karvan giggled together while getting their make-up done. Being the best in the business, most of the women had worked together at some point. On screen they had shared love interests and played each other’s family while off screen they forged friendships and a mutual respect for each other’s work. Armstrong and Gibney even shared a house after meeting on the mini-series Come in Spinner. The two actresses always watch each other’s work and then ring each other to offer their support for what the other has done. Over the years many stories have been written about the so-called cattiness of their profession. Vanity Fair famously captured the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of a photo shoot with the then-stars of Desperate Housewives, of the jostling over who would stand where, in what order they would select their wardrobe and who would get to wear the prized red swimsuit for the picture.
There were so such diva antics for Australia’s leading ladies of TV. Just mates enjoying each other’s company.
Note: Online subscriptions may be necessary to view behind the scene's footage:
- FROM THE LIFTOUT :
"Channel 9 'Weekend Today' Interview"
MORNINGS - JUNE 21 2015
Sigrid popped in to Channel 9's 'Weekend Today' studio for a brief chat along side Kat Stewart & Peter Phelps upon the release of the 'Legends of The Small Screen' publication. |
"BELOVED ACTOR SIGRID THORNTON ENTERS A NEW STAGE..."
CULTURE - AUG 23, 2014 BY ROMY ASH
Much-loved actor Sigrid Thornton is back in the spotlight, performing for the MTC. .... |
ENTERTAINMENT - AUG 8, 2014 BY SHANE GREEN A year before, Caceres had met Thornton, who was back on stage for a production of A Streetcar Named Desire in Perth, to pitch the role to her. When she agreed, Carceres asked herself who she could find to play opposite Thornton, one of the icons of stage and screen. ‘‘How do you match Sigrid Thornton?’’ |
Sigrid Thornton tackles Streetcar’s ‘delicious, fabulous’ Blanche DuBois
BY PETER CRAVEN THE AUSTRALIAN MARCH 15, 2014 Her film and TV roles have been memorable. Now Sigrid Thornton is tackling one of the most demanding characters in theatre. OUTSIDE it is all heat and light but inside the big rehearsal space of Perth’s Heath Ledger Theatre, shadows loom. Sigrid Thornton is in a rough cut of the elegant gown she will wear when she plays Blanche DuBois in Black Swan Theatre Company’s production of Tennessee Williams’ classic A Streetcar Named Desire. Nearby is a mock-up of Streetcar’s set - menacingly vertical, one room wide, two storeys high, with nowhere for Blanche or Nathaniel Dean’s Stanley Kowalski to move except into each other’s space. Dean was the star of Neil Armfield’s production of The Secret River and he’s a looming figure, whereas Thornton is as small as a leading actress can be. “She’s so tiny and he’s so big,” director Kate Cherry says, as if awed by the intensity of the intimacy she’s triggered. Everything is sparse, 1940s, claustrophobic, the lower level dominated by a dusty old bed, a fitting backdrop for the savage, sexualised violence between Blanche and Stanley. Thornton might be thought of as an actress with a presence intimately connected to her beauty. I remember her in 2003 in Melbourne, in what became a record-breaking stint in The Blue Room with Marcus Graham, when they were both naked for the couple of hours of David Hare’s adaptation of Schnitzler’s La Ronde. Thornton as the prostitute had Cleopatra hair and looked extraordinarily lithe and trim. A few years later she looked opulent as Desiree in Opera Australia’s production of the musical A Little Night Music in 2009. That was the year when, astonishingly, she turned 50. “At my age and stage of life, the attractions of the stage are obvious,” Thornton says now. She finds the work vastly satisfying and says she can understand the English actress Kristin Scott Thomas, who recently declared her intention to concentrate on theatre. Thornton is alert and receptive when we meet, with a natural warmth and a strongly cultivated tendency to make whoever she’s talking to feel special. She’s soaring at the thought of tackling one of theatre’s greatest roles. “Blanche is a delicious, fabulous character to play,” she says. “There’s the wonderful satisfaction of being in rehearsal; you’re working within a timeframe and with a deadline but you have the joy of this brilliant text. There’s that enormous hurdle but at the same time I feel very grateful to be playing this great part.” A Streetcar Named Desire opened at the Barrymore Theatre in New York on December 3, 1947, directed by Elia Kazan, with a 23-year-old Marlon Brando as Stanley and Jessica Tandy, then 38, as Blanche. Blanche, Williams’ ageing southern belle, loses the last vestiges of her sanity while visiting her sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley in New Orleans. He subjects her, sexually, to what he calls “some rough-house” but later denies the assault. Stella refuses to believe Blanche, who descends into madness and is committed to an asylum. Laurence Olivier directed the play in London with Vivien Leigh as Blanche, and Luchino Visconti directed it in Italy with Vittorio Gassman as Stanley. Ingmar Bergman did it in Sweden and Jean Cocteau’s adaptation was produced in Paris with the great Arletty as Blanche. Among the string of distinguished Australian actresses who have played the character is Cate Blanchett in the 2009 Sydney Theatre Company production directed by Liv Ullmann, which was a great success in Australia and New York. Blanchett’s performance and the play’s text were obvious influences on the script Woody Allen wrote for her Oscar-winning role in Blue Jasmine. The famous 1951 film version, again directed by Kazan, brought Leigh’s Blanche together with the bull-like Brando, a revelation as Stanley, the guy in the singlet that came to be known as “a wife-beater” because of the savagery of his performance. “The performance re-invented screen acting,” says Thornton, who over decades has shown what a particular kind of delicacy and beauty can achieve on screen. For Thornton, television is where it all began, in girlhood, with small roles in series including Homicide and Division Four in the 1970s. She played Roslyn Coulson in Prisoner before making the leap to telemovies and then feature films including The Man From Snowy River in 1982 and its 1988 sequel. She was the sumptuous star of elaborate miniseries such as All the Rivers Run (1983), which gave back to Australia an image of its colonial past that was like a splendid dream, not least because of the way Thornton looked and her effortless communion with the camera. Thornton went on to shift the parameters of Australian television in SeaChange(1998-2000), creating the character of a “nice” middle-class woman on a journey of self-discovery she barely understood in a small, beachside community. It showed that we could create a TV drama that was residually soapy, with a touch of whimsy, but with greater clarity in its narrative and dramatic lines, about a world that was open to every kind of feminine and romantic inflection. SeaChange was full of memorable characters: John Howard as the full-of-himself mayor, Kerry Armstrong as his ditzy wife; it made a star of David Wenham as Diver Dan. But the figure without whom nothing else would have been possible was Thornton, the embodiment of self-doubting, good-hearted Australian womanhood, intelligent but at sea, struggling to do her best for her children, to find the right murmur of her heart, luminous but on the edge of middle age. It was an unexpected portrait of “Mrs Australia”. It didn’t, of course, exhaust her range. People will remember her fierce lesbian cop in Underbelly (2010). Before that, in the pilot of a show the networks did not take up, Oberon’s Wood, she was bald, an older woman receiving cancer treatment, bitter, scathing, with a tongue designed to cut. Some hint of that performance, pulled back but with the same ice, was there in her portrayal of Vince Colosimo’s wife in the film of David Williamson’s Face to Face (2011). Somehow the understanding and patience that animate the most famous of Thornton’s television personas are pulled inside out; she’s anguished, cold, a woman at the end of her tether. Where might this lead with the role of Blanche DuBois, one of the most demanding in theatre? Blanche, who can jump from sugary seductiveness to sour desolation, a strangeness for which there is no comfort? “There are no good people and no bad people in this play, only people who misunderstand each other,” Thornton says. “In some ways Blanche is the least understood character in the play. You have to capture the deliberate manipulation and the deliberate cruelty and at the same time you have to convey that the coquette stuff is an attempt by a woman to protect herself, and she can’t.” Thornton talks of Blanche’s background, her relationship with her late homosexual husband, her virtual prostitution and descent into destitution that precipitated the flight to Stella’s. “The princess act she puts on is transparent,” says Thornton. “She’s self-involved, narcissistic, extremely clever. At the same time she’s capable of complete authenticity.” Thornton wants to show how the two things work: the externalisation of the act Blanche puts on and the terrible melancholy that underlies it. In this sense, her characterisation of Blanche is of someone to whom the dreadful has already happened. Or at any rate that there’s a fateful inevitability about events. “She crashes towards desolation,” she says. “She has a very strong forward drive and a very deep central understanding that she is going towards a very dark place but she has no other choice. Besides, even if she had some other choice, how would she take it? There’s an overwhelming sense of fatality. I can’t imagine it going any other way, given her opening lines.” This is a reference to the stunning opener where Blanche almost anticipates an elegy for herself via street directions. “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one named Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!” The role reunites Thornton with Cherry, the formidable director of Black Swan Theatre Company. They go back a long way, to Thornton’s first stage role with the Melbourne Theatre Company in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (2001). Thornton loves the fact that Cherry’s production of Streetcar uses the original text; she has been at pains to establish which stage directions originate with Williams and which were added by Kazan, adhering strictly to the playwright’s and making her own decisions about whether to follow the first director. The classic American repertoire is in Cherry’s blood - her father Wal pioneered this theatre in Australia - and she became interested in Williams with a production of The Glass Menagerie at UCLA. Cherry says of Thornton’s Blanche: “She has a lovely gentility, but there’s steel there, too. She’s got a beautiful, understated, dreamy quality. But there’s a real sense of tragedy as well.” My conversation with Thornton shifts to the idea of madness in the theatre. Thornton likes the way Blanche’s craziness allows the actor the flexibility to explore. “When a character is a bit mad, you can go deep very quickly,” she says. She talks about the central pas de deux between Stanley and Blanche, which leaves Blanche violated and fit for nothing but the loony bin, with a hushed gravity. “It’s all pretty nasty. I hope we can capture how multifaceted it all is. The way she behaves to him, there’s no excuse for it. She tries to belittle and patronise him.” She adds: “It’s Stella, though, who pulls the trigger.” Thornton is in no doubt that Stella knows Stanley has had sex with Blanche. “She knows it’s true and yet she condones the decision to put Blanche away.” Cherry and Thornton part company with the contemporary view that Stanley unambiguously rapes Blanche. “It is rape?” Cherry asks. “Or are they like magnets who attract and repulse one another?” Thornton makes no bones about it. She thinks Blanche wants to rape Stanley. Thornton has a way of talking that is womanly and mature (she has two grown-up children, Ben and Jaz), but she also has a girlish quality that most people lose in their 30s. It’s not simply the looks; it’s a particular openness that’s not afraid of appearing naive. She’s also confident playing Blanche a fair bit older than is usually the case. I ask whether her own experience of the death and illness of family members, of the consequent grief and worry, had fed into her preparation for this performance. Thornton is married to film producer Tom Burstall, whose mother Betty, the founder of La Mama Theatre in Melbourne, died last year. Thornton’s father, Neil, is seriously ill and in palliative care. “Real life does feed into the work,” she says. “I’ve had a really challenging last year and I think it’s given me insights I wouldn’t have otherwise had ... It’s all grist to the mill. It’s all in the nature of the work. Sometimes you derive joy from it, but it also takes you to dark places.” A Streetcar Named Desire opens today at the State Theatre Centre in Perth. |
RECENT REVIEWS
"Sigrid Thornton Shines In “The Effect”."
ARTS - AUG 22, 2014 - BY BYRON BACHE
The performances are spellbinding. But it’s Sigrid Thornton who’s the star here, and rightfully so. Her Lorna is a biting, wound-up, droll creation, and her reluctant unravelling is brilliant. The Effect is that rare beast: a rich, challenging play that’s as moving as it is intelligent. See it. Now. |
'A Little Night Music' Review
This summer night is a dream. A Melbourne production of A Little Night Music has Peter Craven in raptures. 20 May 2009
The State Theatre in Melbourne, more spaciously designed for opera with its 2,000 seats than its lustrous Sydney equivalent, was full last Thursday night. It’s likely to remain so for some time. Why? Because Sigrid Thornton was playing Desiree in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, and doing so with dazzling success. |
PRESS LIBRARY : DECADES OF SIGRID IN THE NEWS
EDITORIAL {COVERS}
FEATURE EDITORIALS
SUNDAY MAGAZINE FEATURE
By Maree Curtis
'Sorry. Sorry." Sigrid Thornton is apologising. Again. "Gosh, sorry. Do you mind? Thanks so much. Thank you." The photographer has asked two women enjoying coffee in the sunshine on the terrace of Melbourne's Stoke House restaurant if they would mind moving to another table so Thornton can have her picture taken. The women recognise the actor, of course, and far from being miffed at the disruption, seem quite chuffed to be a little part of the proceedings. As they settle themselves at a nearby table, Thornton is still apologising. Many celebrities view such incidents as their status-given right, requiring only the most perfunctory acknowledgement that people may be putting themselves out. Not so Thornton. She seems genuinely embarrassed to be the cause of such a fuss. Earlier, she apologised and thanked the restaurant staff who had to work around us as they set up for lunch. During our interview she apologised when she felt she wasn't articulating some point well enough. She started our interview with an apology. Sorry," she said as we settled ourselves on the comfortable booth chairs, in the large, sun-drenched upstairs dining room. "I'm a bit brain-dead this morning. "Understandable at 9am. "No, it's not that, I've had this thing, ah, uumm..." Bug? "Yeah, for about two weeks. It won't go away." Thornton has a disconcerting habit of uummming and aahhhing and correcting herself when she's talking. ("Aaahhh, I think that we, well I think that I.Yes, what I mean to say is. Yes. What am I trying to say?") She often stops mid-burble, laughs, and starts again. While this may be partly the result of bug-induced brain death, it soon becomes apparent that the problem is more to do with Thornton's desire to give thoughtful answers, to avoid sounding stale, glib or rehearsed. With someone who's been around as long as Thornton, it's hard not to go over old ground. A few days after we meet, I hear her interviewed on radio,answering many of the same questions we had discussed. Her answers, while consistent with those in my notebook, still sound fresh and are delivered with the same enthusiasm and warmth. That's the thing about Thornton, not only is she a real pro, she's also darned nice. Earlier this year, a well-known Melbourne newspaper columnist, searching for the archetypal example of a nice person to illustrate a point, chose Thornton. She heard about that. She thinks it's funny, sort of. "What does nice mean? It's funny what negative connotations the word nice conjures up for some people, bland connotations in some ways. But if you take it simply, in its purest form, I would far rather be associated with niceness than with selfishness, brutishness or megalomania." Never. "I think I am a fairly optimistic person and fairly genial by nature but, really, I am just muddling through like everyone else." She is also keen to stress that she is not perfect, another word often attached to her name. Still, there is a lot of evidence to the contrary: she is a much-loved and admired actor who has enjoyed an amazingly successful career (was she ever in a dud?) spanning three decades; she is a wife and mother, married to the same man for 23 years; there has never, once, been a breath of scandal about her; she is a vocal advocate for her local community and a World Vision ambassador; she is an active and passionate member of the film and television industry; she enjoys the respect of her peers; and thanks to the mega-successful ABC comedy/drama SeaChange, she is a sex symbol (think Diver Dan, think Max); and, she is beautiful (Steven Spielberg once said she had the most beautiful face he had seen). Not perfect, huh? "No, no, not perfect." Laughing. "Far from it. God forbid, in fact. How tedious would that be. I'm just someone struggling through everyday like everybody else. I do think that I am very, very lucky. I really have been very fortunate to have had around me for a long time now, a really earthed, sort of, uuummm ...." Thinking. "Aahhh, relationship sector. My nuclear family and my extended family are the most important thing to me." While she doesn't talk directly about her nuclear family - husband Tom Burstall, a film risk manager and son of filmmaker Tim Burstall, children Ben and Jaz - her conversation is heavy with oblique references to them. "Having children is the most exciting, challenging, exhilarating, difficult, exasperating thing you can do. The fact that we are living in a rather mad, dangerous and violent world hasn't been enough for me to make the decision not to have them. You must remain hopeful, it's also a beautiful world. "Having children is enormously difficult, but it is also so rewarding I can't verbalise it. Nothing else will give you such a very deep reward and anything worth having requires work. It's the same for friendships and marriage." She is the star of a hugely popular television series, she has enjoyed intimate relations (on-screen, of course) with David Wenham, one of Australia's sexiest leading men; she is keeping hunky William McInnes frustrated, physically and emotionally; and, with yet another love interest in the form of the suave Sean Micallef about to join the SeaChange cast, she's fighting them off. "I think the middle stage of life, between 30 and 50, is about a process of redefinition. When you are very young, you are not able to objectify, as you move into this stage you are better able to do that. It can be a painful experience, but there's no joy without pain. "(Professionally), any kind of definitive categorisation of an actor is restrictive. Not just age; you've got blonde hair and big breasts so you must be a bimbo, you're tall and got a big nose, so you can only play character roles. It's a challenge for any actor. In terms of my sexuality, I think I go with that brilliant person who said, 'youth is wasted on the young'. I wouldn't trade where I am. I wouldn't want to go back." After an almost 30 year career in film and television, Thornton's gestures and individual features are as familiar as those of an old friend. The elegant sweep of her neck as she turns her head, the firm set of the jaw we have seen so often in the feisty, independent women she plays, the pouty lips, the way her button nose and mouth crinkle when she smiles. With the morning sun in her face, she looks great. She is wearing black jeans, a red T-shirt, a grey cardigan, anolive-green jacket and a scarf. It's actually not that cold, but she's been unwell. As is the way with actors, and despite the bulky clothing, in person Thornton is much more petite than she appears on screen. She has arrived sans makeup (the makeup artist will be here before the photographer) and even more classically beautiful than her screen image. She is, somehow, more fragile. Her face is finer than you expect, her cheekbones sharper, and further accentuated by a new shorter hairstyle. The new do is layered and softly brushed back from her face with just a little bit of natural curl for body. It's less schoolmarmish, less lawyerish, less Laura. Not that Thornton flinches from her SeaChange character, Laura Gibson, the big city lawyer whose life falls apart in one day when her husband is jailed for fraud, she misses out on a partnership with her law firm and her son is expelled from school. Gibson packs up her life and her kids and heads for the mythical coastal town of Pearl Bay in search of she's not sure what. The show, now in its third season, is the ABC's most successful ever, regularly grabbing around two million viewers weekly. It recently outrated even the execrable 60 Minutes interview with Tracey Holmes and Stan Grant. Like many others, Thornton has spent considerable time analysing exactly what it is about SeaChange that has struck such a chord with audiences. It is too simple, she says, the think that it is just about running away from it all. "That's part of it, but it is also about finding a community. I think that's something people are looking for. It also explores some of the big (life) issues - love, death, sex - in a very simple, yet not simplistic, way. It has real depth, but even that's not quite it. "I like to think that Laura doesn't so much drop out as drops in to a more fulsome take on her own life through learning that relationships are very complex things. And the best relationships have the qualities of commitment and loyalty and honesty and these things are actually not short-term, but are born of long-term commitments to people." Given half a chance, Thornton can get way serious. While actors tend to have a fair handle on their characters, often inventing whole life stories to help them get into the parts they play, Thornton seems to have taken the process to heart. SeaChange, she says, touches the very deepest ideals we aspire to as human beings. "One of the other central themes is about the innate uniqueness of each human being. And how people don't really change very much fundamentally. They may undergo a metamorphoses, but their central being and responses stay the same." Phew! What a bonus that the show is also well made, well written, well acted and entertaining, otherwise it could have ended up terribly preachy. This story is printed by kind permission of Sunday Magazine. |
VIVE MAGAZINE FEATURE - "SIGRID THORNTON"
by Lisa Dethridge
Sigrid Thornton's screen image is an Australian icon - a kind of bridge between ourselves and our aspirations. Over a twenty year acting career, she's starred in successful Australian dramas such as The Man from Snowy River 1 & 2; All The Rivers Run; 1915; Boy in the Bush; The Far Country; Slate, Wyn and Me; Great Expectations and The Untold Story. Thornton lives in our minds as the essential Australian battler; from pioneering bush woman to her latest incarnation as a magistrate/career-mother in the runaway ABC hit series Sea Change. Just as Jack Thompson, Bryan Brown or Russell Crowe represent the all-weather Aussie male, Sigrid Thornton is his well-seasoned counterpart - tough but sexy; fuss-free but cultivated; the archetypal Australian heroine. In a screen culture conditioned to chew-up and spit-out young beauties, her track-record suggests she has that most valuable of show-biz assets; staying power. We had lunch recently to celebrate her current success and discuss what it takes to maintain position in the shifting sands of show-business. I first met Thornton in Hollywood 1990, when we were both embraced by the small, supportive clique of Australian writers, directors and thespians taking a crack at the big-time. In those days, she had the lead role in U.S. network TV series Paradise, a western saga which she helped steer to high-rating popularity. These were heady days. While the rest of us were consumed by the Hollywood shuffle - schmoozing; hustling; pitching and planning every career move as a strategic campaign, Thornton looked like a natural. Not only was she navigating the intricacies of the network system, she was also raising a small son and managing households in two countries. Despite all the pressure, Thornton never succumbed to the kind of affectations and "attitude" that often touched those who achieved success in Lotus Land. Everyone else may've been in power shoulders and nine inch heels but at the height of her Hollywood glamour-phase, Thornton would show up to parties in sandals and a jersey-print dress, looking fresh as a schoolgirl. She'd rather swap notes about our children than swap studio gossip. She seemed to stand outside the fray. Thornton may have looked cool under pressure but it's no surprise when she reveals that Hollywood represented a very steep learning curve. While shooting the Paradise series, she settled temporarily into a comfortable Hollywood Hills home with her husband, Tom Burstall and their son. The Thornton-Burstall house was a well known party location for buddies including Phil Noyce; Gillian Armstrong; Fred Schepisi; Deborah Lee Furness; Deborah Conway; Paul Kelly and other wandering artists. She remembers these days as "a great, wild adventure. Hundreds of people went through our parties. We had a crazy treehouse staircase in the back garden that climbed up a hill to the jacuzzi so we put up a sign "climb at your own risk" to protect ourselves from litigious guests who might fall over drunk and sue us." With a second child on the way, Thornton returned to the relative sanity of Australia, which she sees as the ideal place to raise kids. She and Burstall renovated two Victorian terraces in North Melbourne, combining home and office space around an internal brick courtyard and a jungle garden. In this bustling family home, kids definitely take priority. Furnishings are well worn and comfortable; with lots of woodwork; hand-carved chairs; woolly rugs; open fires and a big pot of curry on the stove. The Melbourne compound may be just as beautiful as her Hollywood spread but was it hard to leave the glamour of the high life behind? "Los Angeles was a terrific episode. Now we're in another phase. I don't miss it. I feel relieved to be raising my kids here in Melbourne." Thornton's main accomplice in all this is her husband, Tom Burstall. The two of them were childhood sweethearts and have virtually grown up together. Tom is a big handsome bear of a man, hallmarked by a wide, satyrical smile. He works works with film and TV producers as a completion guarantor, to monitor production and protect investor finance. He loves to play the kind of irreverent larrikin immortalised on film by his father, director Tim Burstall (Alvin Purple, Stork, Peterson.) At industry gatherings and parties, Tom will toss a loud joke at the most poignant moment of the proceedings. At the most decorous dinner parties, he is guaranteed to push the envelope of polite discourse with a cheeky one-liner. While Tom wreaks havoc, Sigrid usually smiles indulgently, serene as ever, as if he were a unruly child. To the outside world, they present an anomaly; a tricky duo of good cop-bad cop. Tom acts out all his naughty impulses while she plays it straight. "Tom as bad cop?" Sigrid considers with a slow smile, "I'd never attempt to put him in a nutshell but yes, he's tremendously mischievous and boyish... I don't know if I'm the good cop; otherwise I'd never get up to any hi-jinks." Thornton presents a polished public persona of sophisticated refinement and ladylike good manners but privately, she matches her husband for wit and irreverence. At a recent gal-pal bash for Deborah-Lee Furness, Thornton reduced several of Australia's top actresses, including Rebecca Gibney and Kerry Armstrong, to tears. The whole room was squealing in response to her very spicy, uncensored rendition of the old "lobster" gag by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Hardly the deportment, Thornton's ABC audience might expect. Thornton breaks into a hearty belly-laugh along with everyone else. She's illuminated by the kind of glow we all recognise and hope to attain; the kind of glow you can't apply from a bottle - success, after all, is a great tonic. As star of Sea Change, Thornton portrays a prickly working mother whose career and marriage collide. She's a slick city lawyer who ditches her faithless husband, moves to the beach, takes up a new career as local magistrate and tries to repair relations with her children. It's a no-holds-barred glimpse at what Thornton calls "the juggle;" the struggle to balance the rigours of marriage and parenthood with the demands of a career. Her juggling secret? "Some days you eat the bear and some days the bear eats you." In reality, the pressures on Thornton's are comparable to those of her on-screen character. Her shooting schedule - five fourteen hour days a week - would be enough to give anyone a breakdown, especially when caring for two school-age children. To cope with the stress, she's had to totally reorganise her household; bring in a nanny and put her personal life on hold. Being the star of a long-running series is more than an artistic responsibility; there's a business and a management angle involved too. So many hopes - of producer, cast and crew - are riding on the shoulders of the star, who is artistic lynch-pin of the operation. While the popular perception of TV stardom is all glamour and glitz, the job involves huge stress factors; with the key actor having to perform consistently well over a long period under extraordinary pressure. It requires immense focus, to envisage, develop and sustain a character over a period of months. Thornton is characteristically sanguine about this aspect of the job, "Fortunately I've been in the industry long enough to really pace myself. I don't have a sense of huge responsibility. I try to set a tone that's positive and optimistic and egalitarian; to inject fun into the work and into the people around me." Thornton's biggest luxury right now is artistic. She loves the huge scope provided by a twenty-six episode dramatic framework. "When shooting a feature, your approach to a role has to be concentrated into a short period. A TV series presents a very big artistic canvas; you don't have to say it all at once and can be more realistic, so the audience has to really get to know the character." "I'm very lucky because I've always played strong women," a quality she ascribes to the influence of her mother. Thornton spent two years in England as a child, then a year in New Zealand before her family settled back in Brisbane and she joined a youth theatre training program. "I checked in briefly at Uni but left when offered an acting job in Melbourne. I grew up in a high-powered intellectual environment. My mother taught women's studies and was a staunch feminist before the word was bandied- around. She chained herself to the bar of a city pub in Brisbane to protest the ban on women's entry. This actually resulted in women being allowed to drink in public bars. Back in the bra-burning days, I was taken to Women's Lib meetings. Our whole family were arrested during the anti-Vietnam demonstrations. I spent the night in Brisbane watchtower with mum. It was a very lively childhood." The story of Thornton's mother makes a lot of sense. A little of that stubborn; forthright and righteous female strength comes across in both Thornton's on and off-screen personae. In Sea Change, Thornton's wiry magistrate/mum snarls at her children like an impatient tigress and then stops herself; recognising the insecurity that drives her anger. A lesser actress attempting the same scene but not "reading between the lines" as Thornton puts it, may come across as simply bitchy and harsh. It's this feminine ambiguity and subtlety that comes across in Thornton's performance; endearing her to the audience; connecting us to ourselves. Some show-biz show-ponies demand limousines to protect their sensitive auras. Thornton however is a woman with her ego in check. She is approachable and no-nonsense. Predictably, we're interrupted at lunch by admirers who want to say "hi." She treats each with grace and good humour; the first distinguishing mark of a theatrical thoroughbred. Thornton knows how to maintain herself but not at the expense of her personal life, "Glamour is an adjunct to my work; not an end in itself. It's a part of my life but I don't hanker after it. I didn't become a performer for that. I can be enormously disciplined for periods but I'm too practical to spend twenty minutes on skincare or blow-drying my hair each day. I try to keep everything very simple. It's the same with wardrobe; I need something I can throw on at 6 a.m. and not think about it." Today, she dressed in one of her usual Italian tailored classics, a button-up pant-suit. No hat, no scarf, no trimmings. We discuss the influence of Jodie Foster, whose personal style was somewhat disorganised (jeans and tee shirts) until she discovered that Armani and Oscar went hand-in-hand. Thornton wears very little makeup; her hair's in a simple twist. There's no doubt the camera loves her exquisite bones; petite, well-proportioned curves and warm, deep-set eyes. She'd look good in a flour sac. Exercise? "Haven't done a thing for six months. When we're shooting the series it's a fourteen hour work day, there's no time to manage personal business of any kind and any extra time is spent with my kids. I do however get into some fast walking and pilates." As far as growing older is concerned, Thornton subscribes to the French approach. "The more a woman has lived; the more of her life experience she wears on her face; the more appealing she becomes. The older you get, you're more in touch with what you like and what suits you. You also care less about what other people think of your appearance, which is a very liberating experience as you become more confident about your own choices." Absolutely right. Which leads me to a very blunt, superficial question. What is the secret of Thornton's success? "Success is a fuzzy buzz word". To me it's about genuine ongoing career fulfilment, friends and family. In show business, unless you initiate your own work, you're at the mercy of the industry. If an actor's world view is defined by their position within the film industry, well it's a very limited world view, isn't it?". This story is printed by kind permission of Pol Publications, Vive Magazine This article is for one usage only and cannot be reproduced without author's written permission. |
GENERAL REPORTAGE
Sigrid Thornton unveils sandstone sculptures
| PHOTOS By Betina Hughes July 24, 2015, midnight. From The Muswellbrook Chrnonicle. IT was a beautiful backdrop: storm clouds rolling in, bright green grass and seemingly endless grape vines. And it is officially the new home for the Custodians of the Landscape sculpture collection at Two Rivers Wines created by international sculptor Ben Dearnley. Mr Dearnley worked at the Denman winery for around two months carving 25 tonnes of sandstone sourced from the vineyard. The artist said it was a better alternative than bringing in a pre-completed sculpture. He said the stones reflected the environment around them and will serve as a reminder to look after the land from which they came into the future. Mr Dearnley shared his journey with a host of friends and guests, including Australian actress Sigrid Thornton who was honoured to officially unveil the series. "I've had an absolutely fabulous time," Mr Dearnley said offering thanks to the winery's Brett and Linda Keeping for their encouragement, "and this project here demanded something a bit special." Mr Dearnley told the gathering it took a lot of courage for him to make a career change. After being a saxophone technician in London for many years, Ben Dearnley said he realised it was time to take the leap and do what he had dreamed of doing since childhood. The artist said the series of stones, now completed, took him on a journey he never could have envisioned at the beginning. In addition to the Custodians of the Landscape series at Two Rivers, Mr Dearnley also crafted one stone for special guest Sigrid Thornton and one for her mother, Merle. Ms Thornton told of her long family history with Denman and how she was grateful to be at the launch. "This is such a beautiful area," she said, "and [the official opening is] a lovely opportunity to visit Denman. "Ben has worked with, rather than against, the stones to create his own vision," she said. Ms Thornton said she was honoured to unveil the sculptures. "I feel very privileged to be asked by Two Rivers to open this exhibition. "[Denman] is a very special place for me." |
THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD - "Q Scores & The Sigrid Factor"
'The Sigrid Factor' is a phenomenon bringing financial relief to some of Australia's most stricken regional areas.
Thanks to a study by KPMG, it has been discovered that when Sigrid comes to town to film a new project, along with her comes a change of fortune as the ailing economy is boosted by both tourism and new permanent residents. Mansfield, Echuca and Barwon Heads have all reaped the rewards of 'The Sigrid Factor' enjoying upwards of 30% increases in population, millions of tourism dollars and vastly improved property values. All of which is hardly surprising when you taken into account the highly-respected Q Scores, which among other things measure the popularity, credibility and trustworthiness of talent. According to the current survey, Sigrid remains the highest-rated female personality in Australia - and that's three years after the last episode of Seachange went to air! |
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