Director Rachel Ward
JOHN DONEGAN
At the dining table in her Sydney home – the one she shares with her husband Bryan Brown and their three grown-up children – Rachel Ward is reflecting on nearly 30 years of marriage. She says Brown survived it “by the skin of his teeth” and she’s so honest and blunt that you believe her, but then she offers these thoughts that Brown will undoubtedly cut out and put on their fridge. And who wouldn’t?
Brown is in New York doing a role in the US TV series The Good Wife, so Ward can talk freely. Thirty years of marriage – a huge achievement? “Don’t come much bigger,” she says. “Whether it’s an achievement or I made the right decision at the beginning, I suppose.”
Does she feel lucky in that way? “No, I feel brilliant. I’m amazed by my brilliance. How did I know that many years ago? And he turned out to be a great father and a good guy.
“We can make bad choices in those moments of passion, can’t you, where you’re not really taking account of the more sensible things about your potential partner. You go, ‘He’s got great eyes and a really nice pair of shoulders, I think I’ll overlook the rest’. But obviously I didn’t. Somehow I was taking note, I think. Or I just got lucky.
“You just have to rely on your instinct, don’t you? I do remember when I had children looking at him and going, ‘Whoa, I didn’t know he was going to be quite that good at all this stuff’. He really did his bit from day one. There was no shirking. I wouldn’t have put up with it, mind you, if he had. I come from a family where the guys never did anything so I had assumed, I suppose, that he probably wouldn’t either.”
Some guys. I say, put on an apron and boil an egg and then they want a tickertape parade. “That’s right,” Ward says. “Oh, he wants that too. You have to applaud every time he cooks a sausage. But he’s very good at doing the washing. I’ve got him very well trained. He’s more domestic than I am.” The perfect marriage? “It’s pretty good. It has its moments, I can tell you.”
Three decades after we first saw her in The Thorn Birds – the set where she and the man she has called her “blue-eyed barbarian” met – Ward has left acting behind and is now directing full-time. Her latest project is directing three episodes of The Straits, a 10-part series for the ABC featuring a crime family and various acts of arms trading, money laundering and drug running. It was shot around Cairns, the Torres Straits and Cape York Peninsula.
“It’s a part of Australia not many stories come from,” she says. “It’s fertile for stories and incredibly photogenic, real frontier country. It’s a no-brainer for telling stories from
up there.”
The story revolves around crime family patriarch Harry Montebello, his wife and their four adopted children, including three sons. Tensions arise when Harry wants his sons to compete for the right to replace him as head of the family.
“People love a family crime story,” Ward says. “It falls into the Sopranos and Godfather genre because there’s so much about the family dynamics going on.” She calls it “Sopranos
in thongs”.
Ward spent two months on location up north. “We’ve made a lot of all the exciting critters and creatures up there. It’s full of crocodiles and snakes and spiders and all sorts of fabulous critters that add a lot to the story.
“We’ve taken great advantage of the natural wonders up there; it looks a million bucks. It is another world – getting the turquoise colour of the water, the exoticness of those islands. It was wonderful. It’s what you love to do; go to a whole different world and find out about it and tell their stories.”
At 54, Ward is a striking woman and down-to-earth. She’s about as far from a showbiz poseur as it’s possible to get. As we speak, various of her children and their friends move through the house until she tells one, “Bugger off, you’re distracting me.” It seems like a great fun house to be part of.
She says she is more comfortable directing than acting. “I wish I’d done it a lot earlier. I am a much more confident director than I was an actor. I like the control. I like the way you have full responsibility for getting the story from script to the screen. I find that much more creative and more involving and satisfying than (the work) I do as an actor.”
She describes her career as a reinvention. “It gets to a point where you realise work was never abundant for me in Australia. I was always struggling with being an outsider; really, being English. As a migrant there’s always a part of you that’s an outsider. And now I’ve been here so long I’m now an outsider back home, too. So you get very much a sense you have one foot in both. I feel English when I’m here and very Australian when I’m back in England.
“I came here at a time when Australia was defining its voice, when all of those Australiana films and television were at its height. Strictly Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding. Colonial stories were passé. I would have done fine if I’d come 10 years earlier. I would have hit all the colonial stories.”
Despite having spent most of her life in Australia, Ward believes she has always struggled for acceptance.
“Like any migrant, you have to earn your stripes. The industry is small and people fight for the roles. You have to come up through the ranks. They’re not going to toss any favours to upstarts from England or America. America is very embracing of people from outside coming in to join the industry. They have a huge industry, they can probably afford to be. Probably most small industries are very covetous of
their industry.”
Ward and Brown have a production company called New Town Films. Even with their combined horsepower, it’s a long and often frustrating battle to get projects off the ground.
“Getting funding for film and TV is very competitive. You can do a lot of work and it doesn’t come to fruition. For everything that comes to light there’s a hell of a lot of other work that never comes to light. At least it’s not boring. It’s always incredibly thrilling when you do get a ‘go’ project.
“I’m quite dogged. It’s the only way to be. You don’t accept no for an answer. You just keep inching forward and eventually you annoy people enough that they say, ‘Oh, all right’.”
People might think Rachel Ward’s name makes doors swing open. “I wish. I’m sure I at least get a door open but it doesn’t guarantee me anything else.”
Since The Thorn Birds she has worked with Brown only once, on her 2009 feature Beautiful Kate.
“Quite tricky,” she says of directing her husband. “It’s kind of easier to work with people who give your authority the benefit of the doubt, where a husband certainly doesn’t. It wasn’t bad, we had lots of fun, but when you work with new actors they tend to honour the role of the director a little more than the seasoned bastards.
“Before they’ve had too much experience they imagine you are a vital cog. And sometimes that is debatable.”
Their daughter Matilda Brown is acting, writing and directing. “She’s done a number of short films now,” Ward says.
Was there ever a conversation about being wary of such a volatile industry? “No, there was very much a conversation in the household, ‘Don’t limit yourself by just being an actor, particularly as a woman’. It’s a short career and it’s a frustrating career and unless you’ve got a few other irons in the fire, you can end up extremely frustrated. Because good work is few and far between. You don’t want to be sitting by the phone dependent on everyone else.”
How does she look back on her own acting career? “Most of the material I did was not of a particularly high standard but it could have been worse.” She smiles. She doesn’t miss much about acting, and certainly not the part about being centre of attention.
“No, I’m really not comfortable with that at all. I so love not having everybody looking at me. I’m much happier behind the scenes. People often ask me to speak. I’d rather do anything than stand up and speak. They say, ‘It must be so easy for you, you’re so used to it’, but a lot of actors are shy. I’d much rather be the one doing the looking than being looked at.”
In 2009 Ward caused some ruffles when she said women actors should not resist nude scenes. “I just feel that as an actor you’re not demeaned by being nude because I think it’s part of your palette,” she says now.
“It’s a fine line because you never really know how you’re going to be portrayed or what’s going to look cheap, because it’s very much dependent on the filmmakers. It’s a very hard decision for an actor to make and there’s a lot of trust that can be taken advantage of. But I think there are some projects where to not be nude is coy.”
Ward emailed me later to clarify these thoughts. “I do not feel that endorsing feminine nudity in film conflicts with being a staunch feminist,” she wrote. “I am proudly a feminist in that I endorse complete gender equality, but I also acknowledge that men and women are not the same and our power lies in very different places. My position with nudity in film is that I acknowledge the power of female beauty and sexuality and how, like men in positions of power, (wealth or workplace) it can and often IS used to our advantage.
“There are many films (my film Beautiful Kate was one of them) where women get what they want by manipulating their sexual power. Sexual appeal, a beautiful body, is often the arsenal of women in pursuing what they want from a man, be it affection, promotion, money, whatever.
“To show the power of a woman’s naked body on the hapless, and often manipulated, male is very much more effective if we, as an audience, can see and empathise with
his powerlessness.
“As an actress I was uncomfortable dealing with questions of nudity mainly because there was this sense that sexual power was somehow dirty or cheap. I spoke out about nudity on film because I think this is erroneous to think of it like that.”
As I walk up the fragrant pathway of their stunning home overlooking Sydney Harbour I reflect on how happy and fulfilled Ward seemed. Maybe she’s right when she says she
just got lucky when she found the great love of her life. The rest she earned.
The Straits screens from tomorrow (February 2) at 8.30pm on ABC1.
The first screening is a double feature (episodes one and two together) then episodes three to 10 every Thursday night. From Friday (February 3) it will be on ABC2 at 10.30pm.