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City Homicide: articlesThe many faces of NoniShe's played tormented mothers, tough cops and junkies, but Australia's "honorary aunty", Noni Hazlehurst, will need all of her role-playing skill to master her latest assignment. OVER the summer, Noni Hazlehurst has been hosting the Saturday breakfast slot on ABC radio 774, fitting 6am starts into a heavy rehearsal schedule. "I really enjoy radio, it's very stimulating," she says. "You don't have a character to hide behind, you just have to work out which bit of Noni is going to come out that day!" She recalls an interview with musician John Mayer when she was sitting in for Richard Stubbs. "He's a really interesting guy who must get bored with the usual inane, banal questions. Off air he said to me, 'You're really smart'. I said, 'Well, I'm 56, mate, if I haven't learnt something by now I never will!' " When we meet her at the Melbourne Theatre Company's new Southbank headquarters she has just had a photo session for the Channel Seven cop drama City Homicide. "They start shooting on Monday, so I'll be doing some of that while the play's running," she says. Changing gears is part of Hazlehurst's life. Having spent the morning as City Homicide's uncompromising boss, Detective Superintendent Bernice Waverley, the bit of Noni we're getting now is the actor rehearsing for the mysterious American play Madagascar, which opens this week at the Arts Centre. The work, not to be confused with the children's animated film of the same name, is a brooding, intriguing tale of three characters in the same hotel room. A review of an American production called it a "poignant sonata of grief". MTC director Sam Strong has called it "a chamber piece with epic dimensions". "It made me laugh and it made me cry," says Hazlehurst, explaining what instantly attracted her to the script. "That's what I look for when I go to the theatre, something that reminds me that essentially I'm the same as everybody else, that there's something that unites us in a sense of humanness. "I find so often when I read a script that I'm just not moved to feel or care about the people. This made me care about these people, and care about us all - that's the epic nature of it. It's partly mystifying, partly clear, it's got a complexity that I really like." The playwright, J. T. Rogers, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, has a reputation for edgy scenarios - his most recent play, The Overwhelming, is set during the Rwandan genocide. "Sam (Strong) has met him," says Hazlehurst. "He talks about him in glowing terms. From this work, though, I'd hate to be in his brain. Everything is just so layered, it's like Bach, several themes working at once." Marion Potts, the recently appointed artistic director of the Malthouse Theatre for 2011, who directed Hazlehurst in her last MTC outing, Grace, says Hazlehurst has a special link with her audience. "Noni has an unerring instinct and an emotional availability that gives her extraordinary control over an audience," Potts says. "She can calibrate her performance to such an extent that she holds you at an objective distance - at the very moment she's tearing your heart out. And if that weren't enough, she's incredibly funny, warm and generous." She'll need to be at the top of her game for Madagascar. "At one stage early on, [co-star] Nicholas Bell described it as like climbing up soft sand, it's so elusive," Hazlehurst says. "You've got three characters who are in the same room but not at the same time - as an actor there's nothing to bounce off other than the audience. It's a really challenging piece for the actors." Hazlehurst's family spans four generations of showbiz, back to her English maternal grandmother, who toured Australia in a J. C. Williamson show, The Varsity Girls, in 1906. "She performed in Melbourne. I don't know where, but I do know she thought Australia was horrible, full of spiders and snakes. In summer in all those corsets, she wouldn't have enjoyed it at all." Her parents in turn worked in vaudeville before World War II with the likes of Tony Hancock and George Formby before emigrating, despite the warnings, to Australia. The work expected was prodigious. "My mother used to scoff when I had four weeks' rehearsal for a play," she says. "When she was doing rep [repertory theatre], they'd be putting one show on at night and rehearsing another in the daytime!" The showbiz parents realised their daughter had inherited a similar talent and set about gently nurturing it. "They didn't push me to do anything professional, which I was very grateful for. My mother used to produce all the Sunday school concerts at the Brighton Church of Christ. Dad and I used to do There's a Hole in My Bucket; that was a show-stopper! "And I was raised on a television diet of variety: Morecambe and Wise, The Danny Kaye Show, Red Skelton, Dean Martin and IMT [Graham Kennedy's In Melbourne Tonight]. My dad was in advertising then and did some live ads on IMT for Graham." She recalls a show she attended where Kennedy decided his main guest was so interesting he sent the others home and just interviewed her for an hour and a half. "There was an orchestra and dancers, it was all live and they weren't frightened to try things." Some actors are household names. Hazlehurst is that and more, at one point in the interview describing herself as "a kind of honorary aunty" in Australian homes. That's partly because of familiarity - she has been on our screens since the 1970s. It also reflects some of the roles she's taken on. For 24 years she presented Play School. "I really think it's the job I'm most proud of," she says. "It's the job that taught me the most about communication and how to treat the camera as one person. It was interactive television, the two or three-year-old watching does answer you back. It was wonderful!" Before Play School, back in 1974, was the saucy adult soap, The Box. "I did The Box for nine months. Before that I was one of the comedy team in The Ernie Sigley Show. That was launched to great fanfare, sacked after six weeks!" Parts in the Crawford cop dramas, Homicide, Matlock Police and Division 4 led to another milestone Australian series, The Sullivans, where Hazlehurst played Lil Duggan, who with hubby Bert kept lodgings with Mrs Jessup in World War II Melbourne. "The Sullivans was enormous because it was the first long-running expensive series made here, it was Packed to the Rafters times 10. It was on every day and we got to the point where we'd almost run out of the war. We had to make a week of the real war last for months. We were making endless cups of tea, we'd be examining a battle from every angle." Her film career took off playing the lead role of Nora in Monkey Grip, Ken Cameron's adaptation of Helen Garner's tale of love and drug addiction. "That gave me a different kind of recognition," she says. "It was a great experience for me, I got to go to the Cannes film festival where we were in the Un Certain Regard section. And I enjoyed every minute of it; (Nora) was a great character." More film and telemovies followed, including Waterfront, Fran and The Shiralee, before, having had children, she and her husband at the time, John Jarratt, invited Channel Seven's cameras into their Blue Mountains home for the lifestyle show Better Homes and Gardens. "I made a conscious choice to do lifestyle television for 10 years because I knew small children do not cope with you being away all the time, and why should they? It wouldn't be fair to them to be dragging them around behind me. I talked to Cate Blanchett a lot about this, and I think that's one of the reasons why she and [husband] Andrew have decided to make Sydney a home base. When the children are one or two it's not such an issue, but when they're school age …" The past decade has seen her break back into films, with gritty roles in Little Fish and Candy that contrasted strikingly with everybody's aunty from Play School. Still, the struggle Australian films face getting an audience worries her. For one thing, she thinks the stories tend to be too simple. "We should be making films like The World's Fastest Indian and Death at a Funeral, films that had low budgets and tight, highly, highly developed scripts. I think we make our scripts too soon. I can't see the point in making a film that's not ready to be made, it's just nonsense." And you have to be very careful with subject matter, she says. "If Little Fish, with Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving and Sam Neill, couldn't turn a buck, it's got to be the subject matter that's an issue. I personally am not interested in going to the cinema to see what I can see down the street." "You look at a rundown of the (Australian) production slate and invariably it's apocalyptic, road movie, depressing, coming of age, just as the slate of television is cop, cop, cop, hospital, hospital, hospital. "So there've got to be other areas of interest we can kindle enthusiasm for, but again it's that fear of the unfamiliar. As someone once said: 'Never be afraid to try something old'!" At the Australian Film Institute Awards two years ago, she was introduced with a series of clips from different films. All showed her sobbing. "People think if you can cry on cue, you must be good!" she says now. At the time, she walked on stage and exclaimed: "Somebody, please, give me a comedy!" Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope promptly did, putting her in their ABC series The Librarians. "It's nice doing something light and frothy. I've cornered the market in anguished mothers. That's why I like playing Bernice Waverley [in City Homicide]. She gets to shout orders and dress people down. It's unusual enough to have a woman in her 50s in a position of authority in Australia, let alone on television!" And what about her role in Madagascar - where does that fit in on the sobbing spectrum? "Well, she is an anguished mother, but this play is not just an unrelentingly grim evocation of tragedy. We had a company run last week and they laughed in all the right places - so it is funny!" Madagascar opens at the Arts Centre on Wednesday. In her own words HOMICIDE "I don't remember much about the role but I do remember I was in trouble, and looking at that face I can understand why." MONKEY GRIP "It was one of the few (Australian) films of that era where none of the women wore corsets and there were no sheep." PLAY SCHOOL "It's the job that taught me the most about communication and how to treat the camera as one person." CITY HOMICIDE "It's a real joy to have this character who's a commanding presence, not just to fill in when the boys need a female."
By John Mangan |
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