How Claudia Karvan discovers there is more to her than she thought
Actor Claudia Karvan was blown away by what she learned from the genealogy program Who Do You Think You Are? – surprised by the many traits she has inherited from her ancestors.
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Claudia Karvan thought she knew who she was.
The Bump creator was a rule-following self starter growing up – no easy feat for someone who spent her formative years at the back of a Kings Cross nightclub run by her mother and stepfather. She laughs that she was not dissimilar to Absolutely Fabulous’ good student, good daughter Saffy in the famous Brit TV show with the eccentricly opposite mother – in fact, that was her nickname.
“Everyone called me Saffy,” she admits with a smile. “That was me, absolutely.
“I was naturally self-motivated,” she says of her youth. “That was just something that I was born with, that just came with me.
“But, actually, my mum was reading her diaries recently and she found this and sent it to me and I thought it was so funny what you’re attracted to as a child.
“When I was nine years old, apparently I came into my mum’s room and she wrote: ‘Claudia at one stage came sidling out with the top off the shoulder, scarf around the neck, my sunglasses on and a cigarette hanging out of her mouth – she put one hand on her hip and slurred ‘Who said women have to be housewives’,” she says, laughing as she recreates the moment. “If there was a snapshot of like ‘Okay, well, that’s my ancestors.’
“What would I have known at nine? Why was that something that appealed to me? I don’t know where that came from.”
As a woman who has been chasing the holy grail of stories her whole life, Karvan has found them in spades – because today she knows where that came from. The respected and acclaimed film and television actor, mum to Audrey, 23, and Albee, 18, and turning 53 next month, is blown away by what she learned about herself by tracing her roots in the new season of Who Do You Think You Are?
The Love My Way star will kick off the SBS series next month, and her ancestry plays out like the script of a movie. She traces the life of her father’s mother Lou, the glamorous grandmother she thought died before she was born, only to find out she was alive for 13 years of her life, and never came to find her.
Lou’s paintings hang in Karvan’s home, so it made sense to hear she was an artist – but what shocked her was hearing she painted and exhibited her art as a solo artist, against the backdrop of the Greek Cypriot struggle for independence from Britain.
“Wasn’t she wild?” she exclaims of the woman she never knew. “I sort of imagined that she might’ve been quite demure and a bit of an expat, and had a hobby on the side where she’d do a bit of painting in a sweet little art class – but she was an absolute goer.
“Having your own sellout one woman show – I was, like, what the hell?”
Another mystery was that of a photograph of a woman in a fur coat. Travelling to London, she traces her paternal line back to her two times great-grandmother Fanny Adamson – the beautiful unknown woman in the fur coat, who grew up in the cold confines of an orphanage for girls. That leads her to Fanny’s son – her great-grandfather, Major James Bedwell, who was one of a specialised group of soldiers known as “balloonatics” – who manned kite balloons, on the lookout for enemy planes. He survived being shot down in flames but suffered the post-war trauma of living with horrific memories, and Karvan is brought to tears when told he took his own life.
She knows the toll mental health has had in her family – her father Peter Robbins had schizoaffective disorder – a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar – before he died in 2022. Her brother Rupert has schizophrenia. Both men shaped so much of Karvan’s life – and there is an “ah ha” moment to think that mental health was an issue even three generations past.
“That was a shocking story wasn’t it?” she says of her great grandfather’s suicide.
As for her grandmother’s absence from her life, she says it will always be a mystery – but one that may make more sense now.
“My dad had schizoaffective disorder and bipolar so I’m assuming that her relationship with him was really fraught, so it would’ve been very difficult to have a relationship with me,” she says. “She never came out to Australia to meet me or to meet my brother or to see her son, so I can only imagine it was a strained relationship due to mental health issues.
“That’s how I’ve placed it together.
“I’ve spoken since to my cousins who knew her and they loved her, and she was a great grandmother to them, and they used to go for holidays with her to Malta and places like that, and she was she was a real character.
“She had really strong opinions and she was tiny and loved a drink and loved a party.
“I guess a part of me always felt like I’d really missed out on something because I didn’t meet my paternal or maternal grandmothers.
“But now I’ve been filled in on both their lives, I feel like even though I haven’t been there, I carry their DNA – I didn’t need to meet them.
“It’s very comforting – really very nurturing.
“The whole experience was a gift.”
Turning to her New Zealand-born mother Gabrielle Tohill’s family, Karvan is searching for where that strong, wild streak in her mum comes from. And she finds it, in Central Otago on the South Island, where she discovers her Holden ancestors – Charles and Esther, who came from England in 1868 chasing gold. They become successful publicans with a large brood, and Esther, her two times great-grandmother, was a feminist – even back then.
She even signed a petition that played a central role in New Zealand being the first country in the world to give women the vote.
“If you look at that petition, there’s no other woman in her town that signed it,” Karvan says in awe. “So it wasn’t just like one of those petitions that everyone signs – she was a standout. And she was Moses Holden’s wife, and he’d had an affair and she survived that big marital drama.
“I just could never have predicted I would posthumously meet those extraordinary women. The orphan and the hat maker, and the seamstress and suffragette, and the painter and the business woman.
“I just had no idea. And now I feel like I need to work hard to make these women proud, to carry on their legacy.”
She says it explains a lot.
“And I didn’t expect to find that consistency of resilience,” she says.
“Like if I had a dollar for every person who said to me – how are you so sane? Or have commented on my resilience – I feel like I took credit for that myself,” she laughs.
“You know because I do yoga and I went to school and I’m disciplined … and I’ve been taking credit for it all this time – but it’s actually got nothing to do with me. It’s all my ancestors – it’s the DNA I inherited.”
That concept that the show explores – the discovery of who you are based on where you came from – is a powerful thing. More powerful than Karvan had imagined, if she’s honest.
“When they asked me about what did I think was nature versus nurture, I thought about 50-50 – but I lied because in my mind I actually thought it was more like 80 per cent nurture and 20 per cent nature – that’s what I thought.
“And now I’ve done the show, I think it’s more even.
“I think you inherit more of your traits than what you get from what happens in your lifetime and the work you can do on yourself – and it makes sense too, because as a mother, as a parent, you parent your children very similarly, but they respond so differently.
“They just come with their own playbook.”
She says the ancestors that she met – the women and the men – were all people of action, but what she found surprising was they were “quite respectful of law and order, structure and rules and organisation” – because the generation of ancestors she knows in her own life are quite rebellious in comparison.
“But I respect rules and I always wondered where that came from because I’ve had quite a punk and eccentric upbringing,” she continues.
“The psychological insights are really gratifying, really thought provoking.
“Yeah, definitely,” she says when asked if characters like those she’s found could make their way on to screen in some form. In fan favourite series Bump she plays a grandmother – an eccentric, strong-willed, vocal and passionate one – perhaps like her own she never got to meet.
“It’s a collaboration so we all share our stories in the writers’ room and then I get to carry them forward, but definitely I bring facets of my own personality and interest and passions to my work because it just makes it a lot more fun – otherwise work is very boring,” she laughs.
“One critic – I think she even gave us five stars – dubbed the show urban fantasy in a sort of a pejorative way – and she’s right. It’s the way I would like to be, and the way I would like the world to be. So I guess that’s what spurs me forward and that’s what inspires me to contribute to the stories. I’m a magpie you see – I just look for glittery things everywhere all day and deposit them into little cocktails that are swirling around and then they come out in some surprising way somewhere.
“So I’m always gathering inspirations in stories and I’m sure one of them will pop up somewhere for sure.
“I mean Moses Holden – what a great name – I’ve gotta name a character Moses.”
Karvan recently completed production on the fifth and final season of Bump, which she co-created and co-produced – her lead role in the series earnt her a nomination for an AACTA Award for Best Lead Actress in a Drama and a Silver Logie Award Nomination for Most Outstanding Actress.
And Bump fans will be happy to know Karvan, as the show’s beloved Angie, will be back on screen for A Christmas Film, set before she passes away. Karvan and some of her castmates have just spent three weeks in Colombia, South America, where they will shoot the special in June. But the jet lag is worth it.
“I’ve been up since 4 this morning,” she says.
“I’m just adjusting back to the Sydney time, but I’ve still got that afterglow ofColombia, that’s for sure.
“To just be pulled out of your reality and see the way other people live – because you get so used to the way we do things in Australia – and we’re actually an unusual society.
“It’s so vibrant over there.
“They’re such resilient people. They’ve recovered from decades of a guerrilla movement, paramilitary narco trafficking – and they’re so welcoming and it’s just a whole new chapter in that country’s life.
“It was very exciting to go there. I encourage everyone to go to Colombia right now.”
She says, overall, it’s a great time in her life.
“My son is 18 and my daughter is 23 – and I actually met my daughter in Colombia, She’s just done four months travelling around Central America with her boyfriend and all her friends – it’s almost like a new backpacking route for her generation. And she has just been thriving.
“So passionate and learning so much, and she’s just been on fire.
“It was like travelling with a friend for the first time – I didn’t feel like I was her mum all the time. I felt like I was a mate, and that’s the first time that happened so it was very special.
“It’s the hardest work you’ll ever do,” she says of parenting. “But also the most rewarding.
“And you can’t put it off, you can’t avoid it.
“You’ve gotta do the hard work and then reap the rewards – but also, you’ve got to enjoy it at the same time, while it’s all happening.
“It’s psychological warfare,” she laughs.
As for the rest of the year, in June they go back to Colombia to shoot the Bump Christmas special, and she can’t wait.
“Then I’ve got another show in development which is really exciting – that may even go at the end of the year, so that’ll be another series.”
On top of that, she has three other things she’s developing. “Creatively I’m feeling very juiced up,” she says.
But this one, for her, was personal.
“It’s also universal, so everyone can take away historical lessons from it – but also very intimate insights into where you come from and why you think the way you do, or where particular traits have come from,” she says of tracing her past.
“So, for me, even though I’ve loved the show, I agreed to get involved and do it – but I did fear – and sort of expected – that I would find it a little bit boring.
“I thought I’d be looking at a whole lot of dusty, crinkled documents and a hundred names on a tree and I’d be like ‘Yeah, fascinating, wow thank you’,” she jokes.
“So my expectations couldn’t have been further from the truth.
“It was like putting on a mask and you are literally walking in the steps of your ancestors so I sort of went from feeling like I won’t have any connection or emotional engagement … and then cut to ... I was like one of those nauseating soccer mums just squealing with excitement, barracking on my ancestors as though they were my soccer team.”
She describes it all as a simultaneously humbling and empowering experience.
“I feel incredibly empowered from learning about them, and I also feel like it’s a great journey to have taken with history because I feel like a lot of historical stuff you have sort of an amorphous vague (idea) and you can draw very broad stereotypes about a race or culture or class – but having done that episode I now go ‘wow’ – I don’t see it with big, broad, vague, sweeping conclusions," she says.
“It’s just in sharp relief that I’ve seen the buildings that those people lived in, I’ve stood in them.
“I’ve read their words, I’ve seen their handwriting.
“It’s just amazing to have your assumptions turned on their head – and it was a really good reminder to just stop making assumptions because it’s so hard to get out of that habit that we all have.
“It was really reassuring to be reminded that all my assumptions were completely wrong and I’m an idiot,” she laughs.
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