Anne Wills reflects on her remarkable life

FOR every person who seizes an opportunity which takes their life in an exciting new direction there is another who passes one up.

THE thing about lucky breaks is that for every person who seizes an opportunity which takes their life in an exciting new direction, there is another who passes one up and keeps doing the same thing for the rest of their days.

Anne Wills very nearly fell into the second category. If not for the persistence of a TV station manager who identified her infectious personality and saw her potential as a performer, there would have been no record-setting 19 Logies, no 47 years in television, no Willsy - just a nice young girl called Anne who was working as typist's clerk in the old Richmond Hotel in Rundle St.

Anne Wills had always wanted to be a star. But for all her exuberance, she was also modest and self-deprecating, so much so that when a call came out of the blue at the Richmond Hotel from Channel 9 program manager Rex Heading inviting her to come into the studios to audition as weather girl, she assumed it was a prank and didn't bother going in.

"So I was sitting at home after work the next day and the phone rang and it was this person claiming to be Rex Heading again," Anne says.

"I still didn't believe it and I asked him to give me the number for the station and told him I would ring him back, just to make sure it was legitimate, and I rang back and there he was. I realised that it was Rex, that he was for real.

"The audition was terrible. I had a cold sore at the time, I was trying to cover it up. I was so self-conscious. I had trouble with some of the words.

"There were no autocues or anything like that but I did it and went back to Para Hills where we were living at the time and thought that nothing would come of it."

But, the next day, she was told she had the job.

Even then, Anne didn't think she would be working in television forever. She gave herself six months in TV, after which she intended to return to her childhood home, a dot in the Pacific called Ocean Island, part of the Kiribati group of islands not far from Nauru.

Anne and her two sisters - the eldest Margaret and the youngest Susan - had enjoyed a completely idyllic if bizarre upbringing on this tiny tropical island.

Their father, Harry, was a soldier who fought on the Kokoda Track in WWII. Anne was born in Wangaratta in 1944, but when she was three her father and mother Queenie decided to move the family to Ocean Island, which was then a prosperous phosphate mine.

Harry's organisational military know-how held him in good stead and he ran the provisions store for the entire island, ordering all the food for its 300 European residents and the 1800 indigenous people known as the Banabans and the Gilbertese. Today, no one lives on the island, the British having stripped it of 90 per cent of its topsoil to take the phosphate.

Back in the 1950s though it was, Anne says, "like paradise on Earth".

"It really was the best place to grow up; beautiful beaches, so safe, so much fun. We were blissfully ignorant of the bad things which were going on in the world at the time," she says.

"There was a war in the Suez Canal and we didn't even know about it because it took us three weeks to get the papers.

"From the time we were kids my mother would make the three of us do concerts for the ships that were going back and forth from Ocean Island. Susan and I naturally fell into doing harmonies. It was how we started performing.

"I used to say to Dad I am going to be a film star, so I don't need to learn trigonometry or algebra, and Dad would say I needed it for a well-rounded education. I wanted to prove him wrong. I mean, how often do you need algorithms in the world of entertainment?"

When Anne was 19, her older sister Margaret married a man in Adelaide. The entire family decided to leave Ocean Island and follow Margaret to SA to start a new life.

They had barely arrived when tragedy struck with the premature death of their father while taking part in his first Anzac Day march.

"He got to the Cross of Sacrifice and just grabbed his chest and he was gone," Anne says. "I always thought thank God he didn't do it at home.

"My Mum and sisters and I would never have known how to cope. But I always thought if you could choose your death that's the way to go, with your medals on your chest and your mates around you. He was only 52."

Harry's death was the impetus for Anne to contemplate returning to Ocean Island. She thought that she could pick up where her Dad left off, doing administrative work and sending money back to her Mum in Adelaide.

But by landing the job as Nine's weather girl, Anne had unwittingly placed herself in the frontier of Australian TV when it was energetic and raw, when people had ideas - be they silly or great - and immediately set about bringing them to life.

The thing which had caught the eye of Heading was Anne's performance in the annual Telethon. She had decided to take part in 1963 as a way of making friends in Adelaide and to raise money for Minda Home. She raised $60 with her first performance and entered again with sister Susan in 1964.

"Rex was one of the judges and he remembered that I talked a lot, and when I wasn't talking I was playing poker with the other girls in the dressing room.

"When I started as weather girl they gave me no parameters or instructions for the job, other than telling me not to swear. They just told me to be myself.

"The luckiest part was that the newsreader was Kevin Crease, God rest his soul, who was just the world's loveliest man.

"He would say 'Now here's Anne' and he would have this smirk on his face and then I would throw back to him and there was always a bit of funny banter there.

"I was the first weather girl they had and Rex would tell me to undo my top button. I didn't realise until then that sex sells."

Anne soon caught the eye of Ernie Sigley who was hosting Wheel of Fortune and had been trying out different girls as co-hosts. He asked her to come on the show.

She recalls: "I came out and he said 'And now here's Willsy!' and he said 'How's things?' and I said 'Things are good Ernie, how are yours?' And off we went. I haven't been Anne since I worked with Ernie. It's been Willsy since 1965."

Anne's spontaneity and capacity to make people laugh and feel good was an invaluable commodity in these early days of television.

"It was so different from today," she says. "Now it's so pristine and everything is recorded but back then everything was live and you truly had to think on your feet if something went wrong.

"If the set fell down you had to keep singing. We were trailblazers because television only started here in 1959 and six years later I was on it."

Anne's TV career also dovetailed with her love life. Her boyfriend, Graham, had been called up in the national conscription lottery to serve in the Vietnam War. Nine's station manager knew about the romance and suggested to Anne that she join a tour with Lorrae Desmond and Johnny Mac to entertain the troops in 1969 and, hopefully, to meet up with Graham.

She returned a second time in 1970, this time with Susan where they were the headline act performing as The Wills Sisters. They visited almost every American and Australian base in South Vietnam, coming a little too close to the conflict on one occasion in the town of Ben Hoi.

"We went with Bev Harrell and a brother-sister singing duo called Ricky and Tammy, and it was all going well," she says.

"We had done a show in the afternoon in Ben Hoi and when we went to bed just before 8pm we came under rocket attack. This young American soldier came in and shouted 'Hit the bunker!', which is good if you knew where the bunker is.

"So there we all were cuddled up in our nighties in this bunker, trying to make ourselves as small as we could, and then I thought 'Oh God, where's Susan?' So trying to sound like I wasn't panicking I said in my quietest voice 'Are you here, Susan?' and I heard this voice say 'Yes, but I don't have any pants on', and our guitarist, Roy Wooding, says 'It's OK, Susan, you can wear mine'."

If the trip was meant to bring Anne and boyfriend Graham closer, it didn't really pan out that way. Firstly, it proved impossible to enjoy a romance in the middle of a war zone.

"It just didn't work out," Anne says. "The letters we wrote to each other were nicer than the real people. He was a gorgeous guy but we just didn't click. I remember once he ran his military glove across the top of the fridge and told me off for not doing the dusting properly. Our marriage lasted 3 1/2 years."

Anne would be married three times. The less said the better about her third marriage, to an Englishman called Peter, in a relationship which Anne describes as seriously troubled even though they remained married for seven years.

The true love of Anne's life was second husband Michael Fenwick, whom she met in 1976 and married six months later. In 1980, he was killed in a plane crash. "He loved flying and he was piloting a light aircraft coming back from Melbourne," Anne says.

"He left at 8pm and hit a wind shear, a downdraft of wind which threw the plane into the stall position.

"It went belly up and slammed into a mountain. He didn't know what was coming, a bit like my Dad. If you could choose the way you could go that would be it.

"I got so many letters from people - 40,000 letters - some of them from women who had had two husbands die so there is always somebody worse off.

"It was one of those moments where I felt really lucky to be in Adelaide, where so many people wrote to me, really wonderful touching letters of support. It helped me get through."

Anne was also helped through this horrible period of her life by the friendship of American soapie stars Susan and Bill Hayes from the US soapie Days of Our Lives, whom she had interviewed in 1977 when they came to Australia and passed through Adelaide on their way to Uluru.

They invited Anne to stay with them in Hollywood shortly after Michael died. She made several subsequent visits.

While Anne's private life was in upheaval in the wake of Michael's death, her professional life was on an upward trajectory. She had become a major celebrity on her own right - she was collecting Logies every year, and she had just started work on The Movie Show, giving her a chance to combine her love of film reviews with her passion for interviewing celebrities. She rates her work on The Movie Show and Movie Scene as the high point of her career.

"I just loved the fact that I had that latitude," she says. "It gave me a chance to see the movies but also to do all those celebrity interviews, fantastic stars like Robin Williams."

On the day we meet up at her city apartment, decorated with Oscar posters and Logies, she has just returned from Mt Barker where she has hosted a movie day for Wallis Cinemas, where she introduces movie classics from the golden years of Hollywood.

She shares her house with three cats which have the run of the place and sit on our laps as we chat. She is doing a regular radio spot on FIVEaa where she reviews the latest films.

She still can't get from one end of the street to the other without being stopped for a chat, and even gets pulled up by fans if she dares to leave the house without her trademark oversized earrings, many of which she has auctioned to raise money for charities.

Her longtime friend, agent Terry Lindblom, says that the reason Anne has endured is because she makes people feel good about life: "People love Willsy, she has made so many people in SA so happy."

For her part Anne feels that she is the one who should be thanking SA. "None of this would have happened if I hadn't ended up here by accident. I feel like I have been blessed," she says.