Paula Duncan talks Prisoner, Spray n’ Wipe, and shooting Ray Meagher
Paula Duncan has been a fixture on Australian television for five decades. But what is the actor most known for?
Confidential
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She’s one of Australian television’s most familiar faces over five decades yet Paula Duncan laments the biggest role she is known for is her least serious.
Prisoner, Cop Shop, Number 96, Neighbours, Home and Away, Richmond Hill, The Young Doctors and Mother and Son are just some of her vast acting credits.
The 72-year-old though is often asked about “being typecast”.
“And I say, which one?” Duncan told Confidential.
“It has been really broad. And then Spray n’ Wipe, darling, I can’t outlive that. It doesn’t matter what I’ve done.”
Duncan, whose sister is late actor Carmen, recalls being issued an Order of Australia in 1997 for her contributions to various charities over the years.
“I remember the day I got my Order of Australia, which means more to me than my seven Logies, I have to tell you,” she said.
“I remember Marie Bashir (former Governor of NSW) putting the medal on me and saying, ‘congratulations’. And she said to me she thinks of me for all of the wonderful charity work that I do and all the stuff that I’ve done within the industry but the thing she remembers me most for is Spray n’ Wipe. And I could have cried that that was what I was remembered for the most.”
Self-deprecating, Duncan added: “I think I am a bit like the old chair in the loungeroom. They get rid of everything else and refurbish the loungeroom but there’s this old chair that stays. I am the old chair because I have been in everyone’s living room so much and still am out there. I am still auditioning and hopefully a film is coming off this year.”
Duncan meanwhile played Lorelei Wilkinson in Prisoner.
The cult show was set around the fictional Wentworth Detention Centre women’s jail and ran over eight seasons and 692 episodes. It was later reimagined as a hugely popular series for Foxtel and BINGE.
Duncan will reunite with some of her former castmates, including close friends Amanda Muggleton, Peta Toppano and Barry Quin at the Partners In Crime Prisoner The Escape event on February 22 at Rydges Hotel in Camperdown.
Sandy Gore, Carole Skinner, Maria Mercedes, Ian Bradley, Anne Lucas, Robert Summers and Desiree Smith are other cast involved.
“That was my claim to fame in Prisoner was stabbing Ray Meagher’s character Ernest Craven so many times,” Duncan explained.
“He was the master guard and I think that is what people remember me for, if not for the fact I took on my daughter’s personality and did very strange things like singing nursery rhymes and all sorts of peculiar things at peculiar times.”
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