Annette Sharp: How Kate Fischer became Tziporah Malkah

IT’S difficult to pinpoint the moment Kate Fischer’s life started to slide off its gilt rails, Annette Sharp writes. Here’s how the former ‘It Girl’ reinvented herself as Tziporah Malkah.

IT’S difficult to pinpoint the precise moment Kate Fischer’s once incredible life started to slide off its gilt rails.

Was it when she won a national modelling competition at 14 and quit school at 15 to model in New York? Or when she realised her five-year relationship and engagement to future billionaire James Packer had run out of gas?

Or possibly when she cut herself off from her family and joined a kibbutz in America, changing her name to Tziporah Malkah soon after? Or was it further back when her mother, ambitious future politician Pru Goward, left two young daughters, Kate, eight years, and a sister Penny, six, in Adelaide and struck out for Canberra to make a name for herself as an ABC reporter in the Canberra press gallery?

Kate Fischer during her younger years.

Tziporah Malkah. Picture: Nigel Wright for Ten.

Goward’s first husband, academic Alastair Fischer, later complained Goward left him to raise their daughters alone for a year. The couple finally divorced in 1993 when Fischer was 10.

Beautiful, smart, funny and natural, Fischer first shot to fame in 1988 at age 14 as the winner of the hotly contested Dolly magazine cover girl competition.

The title came with a prize — a contract with top model agency Ursula’s — and soon after the dyslexic Fischer who felt she had never fit in at school — not academically, athletically or socially — was living out of home with her model agent Ursula Hufnagl in Sydney and offers of modelling work were rolling in.

Glamorous Kate Fischer at a function with her mother Pru Goward and Austrade chief economist Tim Harcourt.

At 178cm tall and buxom, the brunette was a natural fit for modelling and her beautiful face was soon emblazoned on the covers of Australian magazines. She was a Vogue Australia cover girl four times and also appeared on Elle, GQ and Black & White magazines before being painted for the Archibald Prize.

By 20, Fischer was the envy of young actors around the world when she was cast opposite British actor Hugh Grant in the Australian film Sirens.

The role, featuring the full-breasted and newly Romanesque beauty bathing nude in a Blue Mountains pond with Elle Macpherson, opened the floodgates to television work and suitors, first among them media heir James Packer, then 26.

During her five-year romance and later engagement to Packer, dubbed the “Prince and The Showgirl” by Australian media, Fischer remained in high demand professionally, for two years hosting cartoon show What’s Up Doc? on the Nine Network.

Kate Fischer graced the cover of GQ magazine in 1999.

Kate Fischer talks about her weight loss in 2001.

Actor and model Kate Fischer on cover of New Idea in 1997.

Model Kate Fischer on the cover of FHM magazine in 1999.

But after the end of their relationship in 1998, Fischer made a hurried retreat from the spotlight, possibly at Packer’s suggestion.

He made her a gift of a $2.7 million Bondi apartment, some hundreds of thousands of dollars in spending money and a $500,000 engagement ring. She later sold the apartment and lived off the proceeds.

In recent interviews she hinted she may have thrown the engagement ring into the sea.

As Packer’s new romance with swimsuit model Jodie Meares (later Jodhi) came to light, a rattled Fischer went to ground.

In a crushing blow, within 12 months of splitting from Fischer, in October 1999 Packer married Meares.

For the next decade, after a handful of attempts at resurrecting her career, the one-time “It” girl seemed to lose her way.

Expensive acting lessons in LA brought only minor parts and roles in a couple of B grade films.

She later told friends the end of her relationship with the Packer family meant doors that had been once open to her in Australia, had been closed.

“I was pretty much chased out of Australia,” she said.

“I felt, for the most part, people sort of despised me. I really didn’t feel like I got a lot of encouragement.’’

James Packer and Kate Fischer in 1997 during their relationship. Picture: Robbert Rosen

Feeling “muzzled”, for a decade she sought obscurity in the US, shunned media interviews, converted to Judaism and changed her name as she worked at reinventing herself.

Then this year, newly reinvented, she shocked longtime friends by signing up to Ten Network reality show I’m A Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!

Now newly renamed Tziporah and virtually unrecognisable following a weight gain of some 50kg due, she says, to an eating disorder she has battled with since she was eight, the woman who once answered to Kate is still, despite the ill-fitting singlet, shorts and work boots, impossible to overlook on the TV show — her warmth, wit and astoundingly frank admissions quintessentially Kate.

Kate Fischer in 2001. Picture: Who magazine

Tziporah Malkah today. Picture: Nigel Wright for Ten

But Tziporah is not on the program to be a frivolous decoration as Kate might once have been.

Tziporah is there for a reason, she wants to shed 20kg — after doctors told her she was morbidly obese — so that her bad back improves and she can go back to working in aged care.

More socially aware today, she also wants to raise money for charity.

She has known hardship in recent years and is harder because of it.

Tziporah Malkah as she appears in I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! Picture: Channel 10

After spending the past two years living in a women’s refuge in Melbourne, Tziporah is treating the show like a long therapy session.

Just as the relationship breakdown with Packer left scars — she hasn’t been able to sustain a relationship with a man and hasn’t had sex in six years — her relationship with her mother is still difficult.

She rates her mother, the NSW Minister for Family and Community Services and Minister for Social Housing, as an “excellent politician” who “loves her constituents” but said Goward was “unmotherly”.

Goward has admitted in interviews she felt “straitjacketed” as a stay-at-home mum, adding that she went a “bit balmy” raising her daughters and “wasn’t very good at it”.

Though Goward has worked hard on her relationship with her eldest daughter after Tziporah’s father moved to the UK, it would seem there is still plenty of work to be done before Tziporah slips free of her media chains once more and returns to the obscurity that she claims to now find “more rewarding”.