australian television information archive

Georgie Parker: the flying nun

With two Gold Logies on board, Georgie Parker's career just keeps gaining altitude. Keith Austin meets a woman short on pretensions, keen on chocolate and big on laughs.

That nice girl Georgie Parker has won another Logie. Another gold one, no less. And here we are at Channel Seven's Epping studios to take a few happy snaps and have a bit of a chinwag. And here is the youthful-looking 37-year-old mock-sparring with a network publicity man while the photographer reloads: "Aw, get off, ya f——in' wanker!"

The aforesaid PR man is, it must be said, looking more than a little jaded after almost 48 hours of non-stop post-Logie news, views and interviews. Parker, on the other hand, is a sparrow-like bundle of energy, bouncing easily and noisily from set to interview, to her 19-month-old daughter Holly, to photographer and back again.

Though only 162cm tall, Parker is an exuberant thrashing of arms, earthy humour and a natural, bellowing laugh that would set off heart monitors if she let it loose in a real hospital. Yes, it's true; Georgie Parker's laugh could kill.

It is all quite exhausting to experience. Watching Parker slip into the character of Terri Sullivan, All Saints' goody-goody nurse and former nun tortured by Catholic guilt, is like watching a tornado being bottled.

It must be all that chocolate; on the two occasions we sit down during the day to talk, someone lobs up to hand her her "fix". "I eat chocolate every day," she enthuses through a mouthful of chocolate cake that had borne the legend "Congratulations. We're all Logie winners."

While the rest of the cast and crew celebrate their win with a special lunch in the waiting area outside the All Saints set, we have retired to Parker's minuscule dressing room, where she admits she has found this year's Gold Logie win a little easier to deal with than her first one.

Tucked up on the bench-cum-bed that takes up a large part of her private broom cupboard, Parker says last year was a real eye-opener: "It was bizarre. I'd won a Logie before but it didn't create the same interest. There are 23 other awards given out on the night, but all the attention and all the pictures go on that one.

"I found it very interesting and I found it a bit confusing because I've been doing this [acting] in a spotlight way since I was 24 and I'm 37 now. It was like I'd suddenly reappeared in another form, you know?" She laughs out loud. "It was like, 'Oh, there you are'. It was weird. Less so this year, though. I wasn't the new kid on the block so it was more manageable."

Despite all the attention—and Parker has been in the acting spotlight since her turn as Lucy Gardiner in A Country Practice in 1989—most of the stories written about her concentrate on her reaction to Logie wins or the characters she plays. We know little about Georgie Parker as a person.

"Oh, that's absolutely deliberate," she says resolutely. "My job gets the attention, not the life I lead. I'm not a glamorous person, I don't have an outrageous lifestyle, you know, I don't get really pissed and I'm not fighting my way into clubs and I don't go to the opening of a door. That's not the way I lead my life. I'm just not interested in that sort of attention on my personal life."

That life began in December 1964 in the relatively new northern Sydney suburb of St Ives. The last—and loudest—of three children born into the prestigious Parker furniture family, Parker remembers St Ives as "lots of red-brick '60s houses" among vineyards. "It was kind of semi-country, it was like Dural used to be about 10 years ago… yeah, we were right near all these vineyards. Of course, then they ripped them all out and put houses there.

"It was a very relaxed way to be brought up. We used to run down to the gully down the road and hang out with the kids down the street… I went to the primary school down the road, walked to school, did all that."

Then, aged eight, she was sent to Abbotsleigh, the private North Shore girls school: "The private school system on the North Shore is a fairly protective environment but I didn't have that kind of home, I wasn't raised in that kind of home—it wasn't the North Shore cliche."

Which is? "Oh, very middle class, neither here nor there, but desperate to be somewhere; everything is very neat… it seems to be a very conventional and restrained way of living but we had a fairly liberal household—not in the political sense. Our door was open to anybody who wanted to come in, my mum was a supporter of Amnesty International, my dad was a furniture manufacturer… we had good strong working ethics while still being interested in the world view.

"We also travelled quite a bit as children, got to see the world, which I think is one of the major things in thinking, 'Oh, the world isn't my suburb, the world isn't Sydney'. So I was lucky from that point of view."

Soon after she got to Abbotsleigh, however, Parker's non-academic bent became apparent. "Off with the fairies" is a phrase she uses. Despite that, she says it was a "great" school for her to go to.

"I never did any homework, I was, I was…" she hesitates and then continues "I was almost a congenital idiot as far as schoolwork was concerned. I couldn't rally any interest and I didn't know why."

She couldn't—she says with the confidence born of hindsight that her worried mother didn't possess at the time—remember her birthday or the order of the months in the calendar and yet when it came to memorising her first ever page of dialogue for a school play (Parker's role was a boy who wanted to be a policeman) she did it in a few minutes.

"My mum was like 'My God, she can do something! Just do plays, just do plays!' Abbotsleigh was good because it saw where your talent lay and the headmistress said 'OK, try your best at the other stuff, but just concentrate on that'.

"You didn't have to be good at things you weren't good at. Where your passion lies, concentrate at that. I was lucky to be at that kind of school. I was shocking at applying myself at things that didn't interest me. I still am."

At 13, a time when young girls are starting the awkward climb to womanhood, she was diagnosed as having scoliosis, or curvature of the spine (in her case, 42 degrees instead of an average of two degrees) and spent the next three years strapped into a fibreglass back brace to prevent the condition worsening.

Looking back, though, she says she has no negative feelings about those years at all: "The whole brace thing, the scoliosis, which I still have, the notion of being confined? I wasn't at all. It was a challenge… my family was amazing, my friends were amazing, I was never ridiculed.

"I wasn't interested in boys, I wasn't desperate to go to parties, not interested in drinking. So it wasn't holding me back in that sense. I think it helped that I was a really confident person. I've always had a sense of self-belief. I'm not one who's prone to neurosis." Then she laughs again and adds: "Of course that also has a negative in that I don't often reflect on what's happened… sometimes it's important to reflect, but I just charge ahead."

Shortly afterwards, Parker is called back to the set and the nanny appears with Holly, a cute blonde-haired toddler delighted to find the place festooned with balloons. She is soon happily engaged in peekaboo games with the waiting extras, who in turn are delighted to put aside their books, magazines and crosswords and alleviate the boredom.

Parker protects her family ferociously. She has been offered enormous sums by the glossies for family pictures of her, Holly and screenwriter husband Steve Worland, but Holly is firmly off limits. Our photographer does snap a Polaroid of the two of them that is no doubt now stuck to Parker's fridge.

Exuberant at the best of times, Parker is positively in orbit when she swings her daughter up into her arms: "This is a great age, a great age. She's running around everywhere, starting to speak—all those coins that were up in the air are falling into place. It's great. I'm very lucky."

It's a phrase she uses a lot. "I'm very, very lucky" she says about her experiences with scoliosis, about being able to have Holly come to work with her, about the career that has seen her employed almost full-time for more than 12 years—almost a miracle in Australian acting circles.

Before landing in A Country Practice, however, she spent six years plying her wares and keeping herself afloat with a series of jobs that included working in a video shop, teaching ballet and, on one memorable occasion, dressing up as Mickey Mouse: "I walked around supermarkets selling Warner Bros videos. It was FUN!," she hoots with tongue firmly in cheek. "That was a really revolting costume—so many faces had been in that mask!"

Was it this or uni? There is another huge laugh: "Oh no, no. I did the HSC, but I wasn't going to have anything to do with uni. I tried out for NIDA, twice I think, but I was not a mature 18-year-old and I wasn't suited to an institution at all. I tried it at school and it didn't suit me. It's invaluable for some people but it wouldn't have suited me."

Instead, she started doing day classes, weekend and 10-week workshops, drop-in classes: "I did that, a lot of co-op theatre and then I met my agent, David Brewster [who died last year]. He changed my life.

"You can be as talented as you want, but if you're not in the right room at the right time with the right people it's not going to happen. For some reason David had a belief in me, he pushed me in the right direction, which was good because I'm not a very ambitious person, I don't have a drive, I don't want to be… I don't want to go to America."

Which is just as well, because Australia loves her, it seems. A fact that still amazes the Most Popular Television Personality of the past two years: "Why do they single me out? I have no idea and I'm not interested in analysing it. Not that I don't care about it, just that you can get into that big wank territory where it's so easy to think, 'Yeah, why not, of course they'd single me out'."

For now, we'll see Parker strained through the character of nurse Terri Sullivan, at least for the next year: "They've got some really good things planned for the character. She's so constrained, censors everything she says and the other day I had to do a laugh because she's loosening up a bit—and I didn't know what her laugh was, especially as mine is so full on.

It was bizarre."

Soon after, the PR man, Jason, brings in coffee. Parker takes one look at it and shrieks: "My darling, thank you. I love you but that… is… just… shit! It looks like runny poo!"

Looks like a job for nurse Terri, then.

All Saints, Tuesdays, 8.30pm, Channel 7.

by Keith Austin
smh.com.au
May 11, 2002