Sigrid Thornton opens up about the joy of ageing and her acting future

She’s been the darling of the Australian stage and screen for almost 50 years, and at 61, Sigrid Thornton continues to push boundaries and stand her ground.

Sigrid Thornton is having her hair cut. It’s just a trim, but she talks to the hairdresser on the set of her latest television series with such enthusiasm you would think she was having the most fun in the world.

It’s the same when she breaks off from her interview with Stellar to chat to the young woman who plays her granddaughter in the upcoming show. And again when she greets the Uber driver taking her home from her day’s work.

Chitter-chatter, chitter-chatter – on she goes, with all the vivacity and good humour of a woman who clearly enjoys collecting stories as much as she likes telling them.

She was the same days earlier at our photo shoot, where she was clearly just as interested as she is interesting. “Sorry,” she says, as she settles herself into the car. “Now, where were we?”

“Some people never recover from trauma and drama, but others are able to turn it around into something positive.” (Picture: Damian Bennett)

At almost 62 and with a back catalogue of film, television and theatre work that would be the envy of any actor, Thornton is a doyenne of Australia’s acting community.

Yet while her roles form part of the nation’s iconography and have earned her awards spanning five decades, she exhibits none of the self-satisfaction or diva antics that are often displayed by those with half her talent.

Rather, like a bowerbird, she works at collecting tidbits and insights from everyone she meets, weaving what she’s learnt into the characters she plays, growing her understanding of the human condition and reinventing herself time and again so that her work – and therefore life – is never static or stale.

“My natural intensity might be a bit full on for some people and therefore open to misinterpretation,” she admits, going on to explain how her curiosity to understand people and their instincts has helped her shape so many of the groundbreaking characters and independent thinkers she’s played.

“I try to listen and learn from people every day. It really can be the person who’s changing the light globe who might have the best idea.”

She pauses. “People who know me know that I mean no harm to anybody but that intensity can be a handicap, and has been at various times, both with acting work and in my personal life.”

Thornton is certainly not the girl next door, onscreen or off it. Her career hasn’t followed the well-worn Home And Away-to-Hollywood trajectory and while director Steven Spielberg may have once said she was the most beautiful woman in the world, her looks have never been her currency. Thornton laughs when reminded of the endorsement.

“Physical beauty is really not the main game. We all need to work on what’s happening on the inside.” (Picture: Damian Bennett)

“He’s lovely and I love that quote,” she says. “It does make me smile, but physical beauty is really not the main game. We all need to work on what’s happening on the inside.”

As she embarks on her sixth decade of acting, Thornton tells Stellar she’s excited for this next phase in her working life and, after playing notable roles ranging from prisoner and police detective to frontier heroine and magistrate, is embracing her latest one as an obstetrician in forthcoming TV drama Amazing Grace (premiering after the Australian Open on the Nine Network), which is set in an unconventional birth centre at a major city hospital.

“I’ve brushed around the sides of doctors but I haven’t played a hard-and-fast medico for a long period of time,” Thornton says, before revealing that in preparation for the role, she immersed herself in the world of babies, labour and midwifery by binge-watching the documentary series One Born Every Minute.

While the new drama revolves around childbirth and new motherhood, it’s also about complicated relationships across the generations. “I just love the fact that it’s a big-hearted show,” she tells Stellar.

“We do revere the spectacle of human birth. When a baby comes out into the world, you can’t actually believe there was a baby in there. It’s always miraculous.”

She suspects the new show will draw comparisons to Network Ten’s hit series Offspring, but also thinks it is right for this moment in our history.

“We’ve been through an incredibly tumultuous time on the planet and we’re still in it. I think there was never a better time to be absorbing a show about new births and new cycles of life. These are issues that are constantly life-affirming.”

“As I get older and mature more, I’m getting to know myself a lot better and that’s one of the great joys of life.” (Picture: Damian Bennett)

While the pandemic has decimated the creative arts industries for much of the year and Thornton laments the government’s decision to double the fees for arts degrees across Australian universities – “It’s devastating, irrational and diminishing” – her own career continues to thrive.

Thornton landed her first professional role at the age of 13, after taking acting lessons to boost her confidence, and has since managed to straddle both the mainstream and the fringe.

She became a household name in 1982 thanks to her starring role as Jessica Harrison in The Man From Snowy River, and could have parlayed the international attention into a predictable if unchallenging career.

Instead she mixed theatre roles such as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire with hit television shows such as Prisoner and Wentworth, the miniseries Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door and, of course, her convention-defying role as Laura Gibson in the wildly popular late ’90s smash Seachange.

More than 22 years on from the original series, which won her a Silver Logie for Most Outstanding Actress, she’s still credited with kickstarting a widespread cultural yearning for a simpler life. Demographer Bernard Salt even coined it the “Sigrid factor”, in reference to the corners of the Australian map that had prospered after Seachange showcased the sort of lifestyle they offered.

But you don’t grow up the daughter of radical feminists, as Thornton did, and not yearn to push boundaries around how women’s stories are told. Her character in Amazing Grace, for instance, has a lover but doesn’t need a man to complete her life.

Thornton tells Stellar she believes the reinvention of television through streaming services has brought about a new era of storytelling. “We have to keep exploring the possibility of new archetypes,” she says.

“We’ve been through an incredibly tumultuous time on the planet and we’re still in it.” (Picture: The Man From Snowy River/Alamy)

“We need to be very aware of reflecting a real society. There may have been a time when television had a role of simply reinforcing old paradigms but we’re in a new era and there’s an incredible push to explore the possibilities of new paradigms.”

Her professional life is deeply fulfilling, and personally Thornton is in that golden phase where her children, Ben, 35, and Jaz, 29, are grown up, her 44-year relationship with her producer husband Tom Burstall is flourishing, and her trailblazing mother is still kicking goals in her 90s.

“We’ve had COVID to deal with, so it’s much more challenging,” says Thornton, whose Melbourne home is around the corner from that of her mother, Merle Thornton, a feminist icon and academic who garnered headlines when she and friend Rosalie Bogner chained themselves to the bar of Brisbane’s landmark Regatta Hotel in 1965, insisting that women be allowed to drink alongside men.

Thornton says she remains enormously proud of her mum. “She’s just turned 90, she’s recently written a book and she’s just received an honorary doctorate from The University of Queensland.”

“I’m learning that it’s a bit of a waste of time to devote too much energy to everybody else if you’re not looking after yourself.” (Picture: Amazing Grace)

As for her marriage – Thornton met Burstall at a party when she was 18, and they had already been together for 13 years before they got married, largely to make living in the US easier – she says they’ve been “lucky” in their relationship.

“We like doing everything together and we really enjoy sharing our lives. We’ve always got each other’s back and we’re best friends. I think that’s the fundamental key but I don’t think that’s an easy thing to find, which is why people struggle with it.

“But for us it hasn’t been a great struggle to share life together.”

Thornton seems like the sort of woman you could ask anything and she’d give you a completely candid answer.

She talks openly about having seen a psychologist, has no judgement about the bizarrely youthful faces of many of her Hollywood contemporaries, and says that she’d like grandchildren, but points out, “It’s nothing to do with me!”

Ask her about ageing and she’s briskly matter-of-fact: “I think everybody worries about it, don’t they? I think we just need to get on with being as fit and as well as we possibly can, and make the most of every day. I don’t think we should be obsessed.”

Sigrid Thornton with her 90-year-old trailblazing mother, Merle. (Picture: Supplied)

In fact, she sees getting older as a gift; an opportunity to learn and understand more. She’s discovered, for instance, that she deeply values openness and the way it allows relationships to flourish.

She also cares enormously about the planet, champions the growth in the number of male feminists, and is dismayed at how we care for our elderly. And she’s keen to share what she believes is the standard female mistake: namely, putting yourself last.

“I’m learning that it’s a bit of a waste of time to devote too much energy to everybody else if you’re not looking after yourself,” she adds. “I think it’s been very useful to learn to stand my ground a bit more.”

She’s also now more prepared to make mistakes and step more readily into the fray, she says. Likewise, the emotional dexterity she’s shown as an actor has been replicated in her willingness to address some challenging aspects of her past.

“It’s very valuable to understand the aspects of our lives that we might consider to be negative, and see them in light of the usefulness that they’ve been to us.” She realises she’s speaking intensely but ploughs on.

“Some people never recover from trauma and drama, but others are able to turn it around into something positive.”

Sigrid Thornton stars on the cover of this Sunday’s Stellar.

If acting is a means to explore different characters, it has also afforded Thornton an opportunity to deeply understand herself. To that end, she’s increasingly comfortable with what she’s found.

“As I get older and mature more, I’m getting to know myself a lot better and that’s one of the great joys of life.”

So too, she laughs, are “mundane” things such as walking in nature with her partner and their dog. “That makes me extremely happy – I know that sounds like nothing but it’s not nothing. I’m satisfied with extremely simple things.”

So, like one of her most memorable characters, could she be on the brink of making a sea change? “I really value being in the natural world,” she says, laughing. “It’s not on my list at the moment but I’d never say never – to anything.”

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Originally published as Sigrid Thornton opens up about the joy of ageing and her acting future