Noni Hazlehurst finds her own place to call home
FROM Play School to A Place to Call Home, actor and presenter Noni Hazlehurst has been one of the most familiar faces on Australian television for four decades, and her popularity hasn’t waned.
IMAGINE being as famous as Noni Hazlehurst. Generations of Australian kids, their mothers and fathers, grandparents and babysitters know her — and want a piece of her.
With the mischievous smile that’s lit up a million television and movie screens, she laughs as she tells a story from years ago when she took her young children to a public pool.
“You see parents putting on their sunblock, lying back, and saying, ‘Look, there’s Noni from Play School over there. Go and play with her.’ And those kids would elbow my kids out of the way,” she says. “I’m very gratified that my work has touched people enough that they want to say hello.”
But she did tell them to bugger off, in her nicest Noni way.
Hazlehurst’s children (with her ex-husband, actor John Jarratt) are grown up: Charlie, 30, is a social media consultant and William, 24, a musician, actor and model. Both are based in Melbourne, and Charlie is getting married in January.
But Leonie Elva “Noni” Hazlehurst AM, 65 in August, is more popular than ever, thanks to her starring role in hit show A Place To Call Home.
The show, which the free-to-air Seven Network declined to renew in 2014, was resurrected in partnership with subscription network Foxtel after a campaign by viewers in which more than 9000 letters and emails hit the desk of Seven CEO Tim Worner.
A petition was set up to bring the show back, and Facebook group Save A Place To Call Home attracted almost 4000 members.
The show now screens in 140 countries, including the US on subscription streaming service Acorn TV, inspiring an ever-growing legion of devoted fans.
One such fan is Newcastle-based IT manager and part-time actor Peter Vernon, 48, who was watching the “horrible ending” of season two — in which all the storylines had to be clumsily tied up because of the show’s axing.
Vernon and wife Julie, 46, who works in real estate, were gobsmacked. Both adored the show and before the credits ended, they’d already set up a change.org petition.
Within the next few days, Vernon and Sydney actor Daniel Cooper, 40, had created the Facebook page.
“If you’d asked me four years ago when I was sitting there watching Noni Hazlehurst — an icon of Australian film and TV — if I ever thought I’d become a friend, or even get to know her, I would have said, ‘No way that could ever happen’.”
But this is Hazlehurst we’re talking about, possibly one of Australia’s most open and generous actors. Four years later, Vernon and his family are firm friends of Hazlehurst.
“Noni’s so down to earth, so accessible, so lovely. It’s just who she is,” Vernon says.
Every time the Vernons (including sons Tristan, 13, and Darcy, 10) go to Queensland on holiday, they visit Hazlehurst’s large house surrounded by lush gardens in the Gold Coast hinterland.
That’s right — Hazlehurst is the non-grandstanding kind of actor who invites fans to lunch in her home. She’s a one-off — unorthodox, temperamentally generous, ready to believe in good things and good people.
Everyone will tell you Hazlehurst has a heart as big as Australia.
HAZLEHURST was born to Ten Pound Poms George and Eileen (known as Lee) Hazlehurst from Blackpool, England, who fled a depressed post-war Britain.
With their first child and only son, Cameron, then 9, the couple arrived in Melbourne on the Ormonde in July 1951. Noni was born in Melbourne in 1953.
Before the war, both parents had worked as variety performers in music halls and on radio. They met when they were 19 and on the same playbill at a regional playhouse.
Their lives were recently revealed in a moving episode of SBS’s Who Do You Think You Are?, which featured Hazlehurst travelling back to England.
While Hazlehurst knew her father had been sent to India during World War II, she discovered he had worked for the BBC, raising the morale of the troops through an armed forces radio show.
She had no idea her mother had been left alone in England for many years, and had not seen her husband once during that time.
“For the first 18 months while Dad was in training, (Mum) travelled to wherever he was, which is how Cameron was conceived,” Hazlehurst says. “But then he was shipped out to India in ’42, where he stayed till ’47, two years after the war had finished.”
Hazlehurst knew she came from a long line of performers, but had no idea how illustrious her lineage was until the program uncovered it. Her great-grandfather Patrick Carmody, whose family had fled the Irish famine, was discovered doing somersaults for money on the banks of the River Thames, aged 6, and taken to the US, where he became known as “Little Bob”, acclaimed as the world’s most famous aerial acrobat.
His wife, who he later left for a showgirl, was also famous when she was younger and known as Kate Jullien, the finest female chariot racer at the Hippodrome in Victorian England.
“Little Bob” and Jullien had four sons (including Hazlehurst’s maternal grandfather Edward, the youngest) who became The Four Flying Julians — for a time, the highest-paid acrobats in the world.
But as Edward aged, he left the act and took up solo performing. Part of his schtick was playing the mandolin while turning somersaults on a trampoline.
Hazlehurst’s mother Lee and her sister Sheila joined their father’s act when they were old enough. Hazlehurst laughs at the memory.
“They were sort of the ‘ta-da’ girls while he did somersaults; they did tap-dancing and pantomime and variety,” she says.
IS it any wonder that when little blonde, curly-haired Noni — already blessed with that wondrous, face-transforming smile — showed a keen interest in the stage, her parents were both delighted and terrified?
“We were very much this tiny little family unit; we had no other family in Australia,” Hazlehurst says. “We had a sort of adopted family from the Church of Christ that my parents went to — Mum produced all the Sunday school concerts, Dad did all the singing.
“My first appearance on stage was as Little Miss Muffet, but I hadn’t seen the spider in costume, so I genuinely screamed and ran off the stage when the spider came on. I was about three — I freaked out completely.”
Hazlehurst was raised virtually as an only child because her older brother had left home by the time she was five.
Cameron Hazlehurst, 77, now retired to the Sunshine Coast, went on to become a distinguished historian at Canberra’s Australian National University.
“We called him the black sheep because he’s the only one in the family who didn’t go into show business,” Hazlehurst says.
Hazlehurst remembers her childhood as pretty idyllic “in a sort of Enid Blyton sense”.
The family settled in the Melbourne bayside suburb of Brighton — “long before
it became trendy”.
Dad George gave up entertainment (apart from a few gigs singing for the ABC Showband) and became a copywriter, while Lee was a full-time mother. Once they realised little Noni enjoyed performing, “they made sure I had piano lessons, ballet lessons, callisthenics”.
The family regularly watched English comedies on television.
“They were all people my parents had worked with — Tony Hancock, George Formby … ” Hazlehurst says.
She says her parents gave her great training in comic timing, as well as in various accents.
“My mother took me to see The Sound of Music with June Bronhill when I was about eight and she said she watched me the whole time and I was open-mouthed,” Hazlehurst says. “When I came out, I said, ‘I can play all of those parts’.”
By the time she left St Leonard’s Girls College, in Brighton East (then single-sex and now the co-ed St Leonard’s College) for a Bachelor of Arts majoring in performance and French at Adelaide’s Flinders University in 1971, Hazlehurst was ready for anything.
“I remember during Orientation Week (late director and academic) Wal Cherry had us in the theatre and said, ‘Only two of you will make it in the business’, and I looked around wondering who the other one would be,” she says.
As it happens, three of Hazlehurst’s cohort made it: the other two were screenwriter and film director Scott Hicks (Oscar-nominated writer and director of Shine), and former
Angels lead singer the late Bernard “Doc” Neeson. Since then, Hazlehurst has spent only six months “resting” in a 45-year career. Throughout her 23-year Play School career (from 1978-2001), she continued to act in ensemble movie, television and theatre productions.
“Play School was not my bread and butter — they only make 50 new Play Schools (episodes) a year, shared between eight presenters. It was more the hollandaise on the side.”
When she was inducted into the TV Week Logie Hall of Fame in 2016, everyone from Cate Blanchett to Jack Thompson to Ernie Dingo and John Waters praised her professionalism, warmth and kindness.
“Even the name brings a smile to your face,” Dingo says.
Blanchett says, “She’s one of the most fearless actors I’ve ever had the pleasure to work opposite.”
A roomful of Australia’s most-esteemed luvvies, famous for reaching for their hyperbole, couldn’t find enough superlatives for our Noni.
ULTIMATELY though, luvvies are not the ones who count when it comes to star power.
Increasingly, it’s fans who wield the whip, as shown by the saving of A Place To Call Home.
Television, movies and publishing power bases have all felt the tremors of change: the nexus has shifted, largely driven by social media.
Fan power catapulted Fifty Shades of Grey from an obscure fan-fiction site to a mainstream publisher who turned it into one of the biggest-selling books of all time. And more recently, in May, US Fox comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine was cancelled in its fifth season, but within 31 hours, fan power on Twitter encouraged NBC to pick the show up. Fans have muscle.
“Definitely social media changed everything,” Vernon says. “Before, if a show was axed, there would be a few angry letters to the editor; it was hard to get a group together. But our group grew so organically through Facebook.”
Social media has also broken down the old barriers between stars and their admirers, which is how Vernon and Hazlehurst became friends, after she responded to the Facebook page.
Vernon says social media also enriches viewing in other ways.
A Place To Call Home, in which Hazlehurst plays family matriarch Elizabeth Bligh, has sprouted spin-off groups — fans who meet dressed in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s period clothes of the series for lunches and charity dinners. Vernon and Julie have also visited the set several times, organised by Hazlehurst.
“Noni came in especially to have lunch with us and took us on a tour of the set. That’s just what she does. She looks after people. She’s a wonderful friend,” Vernon says.
But is the Australian showbiz legend interested in parlaying the great goodwill she has built for herself among Australian audiences into a more international following?
She laughs again — she’s got no real interest in making it big in Hollywood.
U nlike her peer Jacki Weaver, who reinvented herself in late middle age by playing psychotic characters, such as the mother in Animal Kingdom, Hazlehurst is not tempted.
She has done her time overseas. Once, after a show she did for Robyn Archer in London’s West End, she was offered the part of Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Bristol Old Vic.
“But it was 120 quid a week and find your own accommodation in the middle of winter, so I said, ‘No, I’m goin’ home. See ya’,” she says.
Hazlehurst would be happy enough to go to Hollywood if an interesting project came up, but she has no desire to live there full-time. She likes the Australian bush, hates cities and loves nothing better than digging around in her garden. Besides, she’s turned down more playing-against-type roles than you can poke a stick at.
“I don’t see the point in promulgating stories that make the world a worse place than it already is,” she says. “I’ve turned down more (roles) than I’ve accepted; I’m just not interested in putting those sorts of things out into the world.
“There’s enough bleakness and vileness out there. Personally, I’d rather tell stories that are contributing something to the sum of humanity, which is not noble, it’s just that I have no interest personally in going to those places.”
She admits there is still a large streak of Pollyanna in her.
And with that, Hazlehurst, with her house full of friends, and a dog called Murray, says goodbye before setting her mind to a pile of washing up.
A Place To Call Home; The Final Chapter starts on August 19 with a behind-the-scenes special at 7.30pm followed by episode one of Series SIX at 8.30pm on Showcase (or stream on Foxtel Now). The show is nominated for Most Outstanding Drama Series at tomorrow night’s Logies