Kate Ritchie: ‘Puberty wasn’t kind to me’
IT’S been almost 30 years since “Australia’s little sister” arrived in Summer Bay. But as Kate Ritchie tells Stellar, it was only after she left Home And Away that real life took over.
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KATE Ritchie agonises over decisions, so she thought long and hard about leaving Home And Away. She had braced herself to miss the people, the camaraderie, and even the long, structured days. But one thing still took her by surprise when she finally decided to cut the cord in 2008: she didn’t realise how much she would miss Sally. “She is the one thing that cannot exist anymore,” says Ritchie.
The actor began playing Sally Fletcher, the youngest of Tom and Pippa’s five foster children, when she was eight. And because she spent 20 years so entwined with the character, disentangling herself has been a difficult, confronting and lonely process.
“As long as I can remember, Sally Fletcher brought so many wonderful things to my life,” Ritchie, now 39, tells Stellar. “People wanted to meet me because of Sally, or I won awards because of Sally, or I was invited to great events because of Sally. When you don’t remember your life without it and all of a sudden that doesn’t exist, you wonder, ‘What is it about me that is attractive?’
“It’s been a very long process of trying to work that out — it was about finding my own identity. And what I realised is, ‘No, Kate brought wonderful things to my life.’ I had to finally realise Sally was a result of me, not the other way around.”
Armed with that newfound confidence, Ritchie is now blossoming. It has been 10 years since she left Home And Away, and she has spent the past 12 months cementing her success in two new industries. The Nova FM drive radio show she hosts with Tim Blackwell and Marty Sheargold recently won its second consecutive Australian Commercial Radio Award. She has also written another children’s book, which will be released next year.
But Ritchie’s most joyful role is as mother to three-year-old daughter Mae, the only person in her life who neither knows, nor cares, about Sally Fletcher.
Back in 2006, Kate Ritchie was astonished by her first Logie nomination. “I thought, ‘This is not what I do, this is what [fellow Home And Away alumna] Melissa George does.’”
Old habits die hard; when Stellar approached Ritchie to appear in its penultimate issue of 2017, she had the same reaction. “[I wondered], ‘Have they made their way down the list of people and reached me?’ When great things come to me, they catch me by surprise. And they are wonderful.”
Ritchie has been famous for almost 30 years, but hers is an unusual fame. Debuting on a hit soap as a child meant she became the nation’s kid sister, a role that brought fewer flashbulbs but more genuine affection, and inspired a protectiveness from viewers that still lingers. At times she felt trapped by that, especially when her co-stars were off being glamorous. But now, she is deeply grateful. “It has,” she says, “been my saving grace.”
Ritchie wasn’t ever the type who yearned to be in the spotlight — she just loved acting. Nor was there any hint of stage parent in her mother Heather, whose first reaction to her father Steve’s suggestion that they enrol their drama-loving daughter in a kids’ acting agency was, “Why would you want to do that? You know what all those people on television are like...” (Although Ritchie hastens to clarify her mother had never met a television personality at the time.)
Steve, a police officer, enrolled her anyway. Ritchie suspects he hoped it would give her confidence. “My dad was incredibly shy as a kid, and perhaps even in his adulthood,” she says. “He’s not that way [now], but maybe four kids force you not to be so shy — in fact, I know Mae has done that with me.”
By the time she was six years old, Ritchie had landed a role on the mini-series Cyclone Tracy. Two years later, she was playing one of the city-born foster kids brought by Pippa and Tom to the idyllic beach hamlet of Summer Bay, with the series premiering in mid January of 1988.
The young Ritchie was hard-working, well-mannered and talented, remembers Ray Meagher, who plays Alf Stewart and is the only original cast member still onscreen. “She was such a natural little girl and such a natural actress,” he says of the co-star he first met on the set of the show that will mark its 30th anniversary next month. “There were no airs and graces.”
Then adolescence hit. “Puberty wasn’t kind to me,” Ritchie recalls. “I certainly wasn’t an Indiana Evans [her waif-like Home And Away co-star], or a young model type. I was incredibly well-endowed, and I think they thought the best thing to do would be to throw a big T-shirt over that and pretend it’s not happening.”
Puberty is difficult for everyone, but few knew teenage embarrassment like Ritchie. In one scene, Sally had to announce to a room full of adults and several crew — much less the entire nation — that she was wearing a bra. But there were no racy storylines. Says Ritchie, “In hindsight, that is what I love about Sally: that she wasn’t cool. She didn’t have the cute boyfriend.
“Of course, when you are 16 and you are watching Melissa George and Isla Fisher and Tempany Deckert grace the cover of TV Week... of course that’s challenging to one’s identity and ego,” she admits now. “But it was the best thing for me.”
She didn’t get the same kind of attention, but she was just as loved. “The number of women who relate to me, who come up to me in the supermarket and are pushing a pram and say to me, ‘Oh my god, I got my bra when you did,’ that makes me incredibly happy. I would like to think that people are not only connected to that part of me but they can still see that that is me.”
Ritchie’s decision to leave was difficult but there have been no regrets — not even when she missed it so much that she felt pangs of envy when another actor sat on Sally’s couch. “I felt as though something had been ripped from me, like that security blanket. Maybe I never really realised the joy I got from being someone else.”
She likens Home And Away to a first love, one that will always be special but shouldn’t be revisited. “You want to run into them again and hold them and tell them what they did to you and that they made your life... but you realise it needs to be neatly packed up and put on the shelf.”
As one great love ended, another began. His name was Stuart Webb, and he played for the St George Illawarra Dragons rugby league team. They’d met before — Ritchie came from a football-loving family — but reconnected at the races in 2008. Such was the interest in their 2010 wedding that magazines were said to have offered $500,000 for exclusive pictures, but the couple declined, preferring to foot the bill and preserve their privacy.
Webb retired from football in 2009, so the pair were embarking not only on a life but also similar journeys of self-discovery together. Webb worked in mines in Helensburgh, south of Sydney, for a few years — “He would be 500 metres underground,” says Ritchie — before retraining as a chef. He is now studying charcuterie, the creation of meat products such as sausages, terrines and pâtés.
“He has done incredibly well,” she says. “A bit like me, he did something for a very long time, not because he chose it but he was good at it, and it worked well and it paid the bills, and then it ended. Then you have to work out who you are without that.”
The change wasn’t quite so stark for Ritchie. Her acting career continued in shows like Underbelly, for which she was nominated for an AFI Award. But she has worked most consistently in radio, where her acting experience has helped. “I do think there is still an element of playing a character,” she says. “It’s incredibly heightened in [the studio]. Yes, you are exposed, but it is so instant and then it’s gone.
“When I first did radio, I had to realise that I needed to speak up without a script. It has taught me some wonderful skills. I am not there yet, but it’s a great learning curve for me.”
Co-host Tim Blackwell believes she’s a natural. “You spend a few hours a day in a room with someone for four years you get to know them pretty well,” he tells Stellar. “She’s either loving the radio show or she’s still a really good actor!”
Ritchie is still an actor at heart, though. “I would jump at the right gig tomorrow,” she says. “I don’t want to say that I don’t take [radio] as seriously, but I don’t think it’s as charged with emotion... I don’t think I am as connected to it.”
She has finally reached the point where she can be proud of her achievements, too. “I need to give myself more credit for what I have done,” she says. “I was taught to be humble to a fault in some ways. I do find it hard at times to pat myself on the back because I have been trained to play everything down, [thinking] ‘This is not special.’ It’s not special, but it is special to me.”
Ritchie remains one of Australia’s best-known faces — which comes with joys but also challenges. She holds such fascination that, like her close friend and fellow Home And Away graduate Bec Hewitt, she regularly sees speculation about the state of her marriage and fertility splashed across tabloid headlines.
“It doesn’t hurt my feelings, not anymore,” she says. “I think in the old days it did. There’s no point in getting bogged down about what other people think is happening in my life. The only positive in having the magazines write about my love life is that I know the Hewitts are getting a week off.” The two laugh about it when it occurs. “It’s me this week! They got you in your tracksuit, did they?” mimics Ritchie. “You have to have that attitude about it. You cannot take it to heart.”
Ritchie’s greatest joy, daughter Mae, turned three in August. “Having children is a wonderful distraction from yourself, and also opens up a brand-new world that is far greater than anything,” she says. “I would love to have more children. [Mae] just wants to talk to kids and interact with them, and she is so loving and so caring that I hope she has siblings — other little people to look after.”
Ritchie is unsure how she would feel if her daughter wanted to follow in her footsteps and become a child actor. She jokes she is pointing Mae towards paediatrics instead. “Home And Away was a unique environment, this cocoon, and so nurturing and lovely,” she says, turning serious. “Not everywhere is Home And Away, so I couldn’t be guaranteed she’d have the same kind of experience as I did.”