COMMENTS AND
TASTERS
About the biography
• Novelist Alex Miller, twice winner of the prestigious Miles Franklin
Award for Australian literature, wrote:
It is a work of great cultural significance and high literary merit.
• Elspeth Ballantyne, warder Meg Morris in Prisoner and Sheila’s
long-term friend, said: I bought the book
as a kind of duty to the memory of Sheila. But I simply couldn’t put it
down. Helen, you really got her. You captured her in all her moods and complexity.
• Scott, the twenty-something TV producer on Bert
Newton’s Good Morning Australia, commented: What a great read. It was as much a page turner as ‘The Da
Vinci Code’.
Friends remember a ‘bonza Sheila’
Sheila’s last birthday party
– desperately ill and still full of life
Roland Rocchiccioli, concerning Sheila’s enormous popularity: “There I would be,” she once said (tending her beloved garden in front of her house). “With a hat pulled down over my eyes, bending over, with my backside pointing to the road, and cars driving by would shout out, ‘G’day Lizzie!’ They even recognized my arse!”
Colette Mann: She could be so funny. Sometimes the Prisoner
scriptwriters gave us ridiculous scenes, and if she was in the mood she would
play it so over the top she had us in fits of giggling. At other times she
would turn on the script like a death adder and state, “What rubbish.
I’m not doing that.” But I mainly remember how much she taught me
about acting.
Fiona Spence: She was a big character, a life force. There was nothing
grey about Sheila. She went in boots and all. But all her life she was
extremely loyal to the people she loved.
AND TO GIVE YOU A
TASTER, HERE ARE SOME EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK
Aged ten - a swift
and daring convent girl
The nuns gently urged their pupils towards self-restraint. Sheila tried. She
did her best to sit properly with her back straight and her knees together, to
be docile and ladylike. But it was hard and sometimes Sheila could not help
herself. She had an irresistible urge to test her limits, and the limits of her
caring guardians. For instance she desperately wanted to see what would happen
if she ran away from the dreaded ruler. She was often sent to receive a smack
so the opportunity came soon enough. Class by class, the girls broke ranks and
rushed to the windows to watch her race around the schoolyard. She set the
whole school laughing, especially when she outsmarted her pursuer by vaulting
over the tennis net. She had to meet her punishment eventually but the fun had
been worth it….
A lover of parties,
even during the war years in
The blackout every night as well as the long working hours meant that
night-time diversions were limited. But Sheila and like-minded Phyl made their
own entertainment, often partying with the soldiers from a nearby camp who were
frequent visitors. Sheila in her twenties was gorgeous and sexy. She was also
impulsive. By nature she lived in a way others only learnt to do in these
uncertain times—for the day, moment by moment, on the edge. War had blown
apart the usual order of things, and as for sexual boundaries….
Hamming
it up with Frank Thring in the jinxed Scottish play
In February 1962 Sheila gained a lead role in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Traditionally thespians have approached this play of witchcraft, murder and
moral descent with trepidation. Many will not even mention it by name in any
theatre and call it ‘the Scottish play’ or ‘that Scottish
play’. Sheila’s old mate and party rival, Frank Thring, back from a
stint in movie epics, played the title role. She played his wife. It is a
remarkable role for an actress and soon Sheila was living with Lady Macbeth day
and night. Philip watched in surprise as his mother cooked with her script
beside her and a wig with long black plaits on her head. He had never seen her
do that sort of thing before.
The costumes replicated tenth-century dress, the time of the historical
Macbeth, and to save on costs in this age of shoestring theatre they were made
of hessian and fake fur. Sheila’s niece Pamela watched the production
from the front row. She was amazed at how much Macbeth spat over Sheila as he
emoted, and wondered how her aunt could put up with it. Frank Thring did get on
Sheila’s nerves, in part because he was always fussing about how he
looked in his uncomfortable makeshift costume. She fixed her annoyance on one
thing—his nail polish, saying it spoiled the play’s authenticity.
It was only clear polish but he refused to remove it. Sheila snapped, rather
unfairly because Frank had not changed, ‘I think he’s forgotten he
isn’t hamming it up in
Sheila as Lady
Macbeth, Union Theatre,
Fainting her way out
of tight corners
Sheila loved showing off to her retinue of friends in Prisoner. She would expose
them to the full power of her voice. She demonstrated how even in her sixties
she could still get her leg up and behind her head yoga style. She showed them
how real actors should faint or fall down dead. The others egged her on. A new
person would come down to the Tunnel and they would say, ‘Go on Sheila.
Do it again. Show so and so…’ And she obliged, although she was way
past her prime.
She had developed her talent for realistic faints and death drops back in the
‘Oh, there you are at last, you silly bugger!’ Sheila cried full
volume. But it was not Barry. It was a woman who looked rather like him as
Edna—his mother or perhaps an aunt. Sheila stopped in embarrassment. Then
she conveniently fainted. And so her faux pas was forgotten.
The AFI award as
Sheila’s finale
Sheila recorded an interview from her hospital bed for the ABC
television’s 7.30 Report. She was asked about Prisoner of course. Sheila
summed it up with her familiar irony, and a subtle admission perhaps of what
she had made of her life. ‘It’s a bit of a contradiction. And you
can say that again, slowly. I set out from
Nevertheless the climax of Sheila’s life, in all of its heroics and
drama, assumed Shakespearean proportions. On Thursday 3 October 1991 –
just one week before her death - the Australian Film Institute held its gala
award night at the Sydney Opera House. Philip flew up to represent his mother
and, he hoped, to receive the prestigious Best Actress in a Leading Role award
for her feisty character Martha in A Woman’s Tale….
Sheila and Paul Cox,
director of ‘A Woman’s Tale’