| Larry Schwartz |
| The compelling aspect of a performance by actor Jacqueline McKenzie is her ability to convey the truth to an audience. ON SCREEN, you see her flapping arms defiantly on the edge of the West Gate Bridge, clawing at the air and cawing like a gull. Then she’s there with you at a South Yarra hotel, waving her hands mid-interview in exuberance. It’s tempting to confuse the actor and the roles. So immersed does she seem, you might think she lets herself become Kate, the impassioned schizophrenic in `Angel Baby’. But Jacqueline McKenzie is under no illusions about the fine line between reality and filmic fiction. “Otherwise I would be in a hell of a lot of strife.” Because she had been on location on Rottnest Island, Western Australia, playing a dying lawyer in a film called `Under the Lighthouse Dancing’, McKenzie was unable to attend the annual Australian Film Institute awards presentation late last year. She made it to Melbourne recently for a special ceremony in which the AFI honored its first simultaneous winner of awards for best actress in a feature, `Angel Baby’, and television drama, `Halifax f.p.: Lies of the Mind’, in which she plays a young woman faking a multiple personality disorder. McKenzie was playful but polite at the presentation. You do not get the sense that she was as bowled over by the achievement as those among the film industry and media there to celebrate her success. “It’s wonderful to have the awards,” she says. “But, by the same token, it was back then and (I’ve) gone to here and there since.” Perhaps they are more than that, an acknowledgement that, at 28, McKenzie has captivated critics and audiences as few before her and is now hailed as “the fresh, new face of Australian cinema”. The night before we met, I’d belatedly caught up with `Angel Baby’ in a Carlton cinema and came to the interview with this powerful, sometimes harrowing, romance still vivid. So I half-expected dishevelled and doomed Kate to appear when the doors swung open to admit her at the hotel bar where we had been asked to wait. Foolishly, of course. No more did the elegant figure in floral black skirt, black top and black beads tight about her neck resemble Kate than she did Gabe, the epileptic lover of a skinhead neo-Nazi leader in `Romper Stomper’. Or, for that matter, any of several characters she has played. Vanessa, wife of a mentally unstable runaway in `This Won’t Hurt a Bit!’ (1993); Viola, daughter of a man who manages a 1950s Indonesian rubber plantation in `Traps’ (1994). Gary Sweet, who played opposite her in the mini-series, `The Battlers’ (1994), told me how hard he had to work to prepare for his roles. He lacked the spontaneity, he said, of the more intuitive McKenzie. She, however, insists that she has to work just as hard. There was too much activity and noise to improvise effectively on a set. “If you were struggling for thoughts or ideas of how to play a scene you’d be pretty stuffed.” Hence the hours of research for `Angel Baby’: lengthy discussions with a psychiatric nurse, extensive reading and, at director Michael Rymer’s insistence, a visit to a Melbourne centre for people with mental disorders. She had gone along with misgivings. “I was actually scared of the people. I went in and they were really friendly and welcoming, offered us food or cigarettes if you wanted one, ” she says. “It did break down a lot of fears that I thought I’d already broken down by my research.” With this particular film, there had been an added pressure to get the characterisation right. “I did feel an ethical and perhaps social responsibility to portray these people . . . as truthfully as we could.” A need to take viewers past preconceptions of mental disorder. “The main message is that these people have the same thresholds of love, hope, hate, whatever, as we do and they are people, not animals.” Her special gift is the ability to play characters as varied as the hue of her reddish hair that sometimes seems to change with every frame of film. EACH part she plays rings true. So compelling is her performance in `Angel Baby’ that you feel at times too close as the camera takes you relentlessly on. You are the voyeur, watching someone so vulnerable; so intimately exposed. As the camera lingers about her body in love-making with Harry (John Lynch), you do not look away. It’s the sensual fire between the doomed couple that draws you in. McKenzie seems to be resigned to the camera’s intrusion. Still, she wonders at her failure, when `Romper Stomper’ opened, to warn her parents. They were mortified by the rough sex with the Russell Crowe character, Hando. `Romper Stomper’ was her first appearance in a feature. It was adjudged best film at the Stockholm International Film Festival in 1992 and McKenzie honored as best actress. She has seen the film twice, she says, on one occasion with her head in her lap. “I might see it one more time when I’m 80 and over it. To see what my pert little bottom looked like when I was 16.” (She was 23 when the film was made). She is an obsessive worker, irked by the disrespect of a crew member flipping through `TV Week’ while she tries to act, impatient with the inexperience of `Under the Lighthouse Dancing’ director Graeme Rattigan. “It was a really difficult shoot,” she says. “It was a first-time director. Not that that’s always a problem . . . But it’s very, very difficult to work under those circumstances. ” McKenzie expects a director to take a firmer hold of proceedings. “I mean, we were very, very fortunate that he had such confidence and trust in the crew and the actors. But at the end of the day you do need that help. You have to have one unified dream. ” A barrister’s daughter, she remembers an idyllic childhood on Sydney’s north shore. Until her early teens, she lived in the tiny riverside suburb of Henley. “We had a waterfront there, an old sort of rambling house. It was an incredible place to be brought up.” Later, the family moved to the less posh side of monied Hunters Hill and she attended Wenona, a private girls’ school. Her earliest audience was neighbors overhearing her singing from a cement platform on a disused septic tank in the back yard. “Yeah! I used to sing a lot. I sang all the time. “Everything. Anything. Maria Muldaur. Gordon Lightfoot and a lot of early Barbra Streisand stuff . . .” Then came singing lessons with a professional teacher and, a year after a failed audition in 1987, studies at NIDA. “Her Brilliant Career”, a film industry magazine recently trumpeted. There has been a measuring of McKenzie against the tempestuous Judy Davis. The way the blokes are glibly reckoned against Mel Gibson. In an industry forever casting up its next big thing, McKenzie clearly has that special presence, sensuality, not to forget talent and mastery of craft. How big will she make it? That depends. Maybe not in a conventional sense. She has other interests. She hopes to direct some day and, between projects, is researching and writing a film she won’t discuss for reasons, she says, of “insecurity”. Then there is the life she has missed out on in the pursuit of career. “I’ve only just entered into a relationship now with a guy. I’ve got a boyfriend now. I just haven’t had time before . . . I just have absolutely gone headlong into work. ” She laughs when revealing her age. “You’re going to tell me all my friends are married. You’re right. And now they’re getting dogs. I’m getting cards saying, `Dear Jack. Love from Helen, Mark and Stanley.’ Stanley is the dog. I love it though, it’s great.” McKenzie is close to family and friends. She couldn’t wait to return after filming in WA. “I fled back on the first plane so I could have a swimming lesson with my one-year-old niece and, you know, see some of my friends . . .” Nadia Tass, who directed Ben Elton’s `Stark’, is a mentor. “She’s just one of the most incredible women in Australia. She’s a wonderful director and incredible technician. She’s got so much get up and go, drive. She’s ruthless about her time in a good way and completely professional . . .” More than that, she admires the way Tass balances the demands of work and family. “I look at that and I think well, I mean, look at Demi Moore and she’s got it all too.” At this point, she mimics the husky-voiced American. “Myyynd yew she’s got tetrillion dollars. I don’t know. I don’t think I have to make any great decisions yet.” The Sunday Age, 07-Jan-1996 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 