Why Amanda Keller won’t be typecast as ‘the harpy’
AT 56, Amanda Keller is more in-demand than ever, refusing to fit a mould she says is ‘such a boring, one-note thing’ and relishing her time in the sun.
Stellar
Don't miss out on the headlines from Stellar. Followed categories will be added to My News.
AMANDA Keller is flitting around her new kitchen, making tea, showing off her fancy new bar fridge and pointing out her folly of buying plates that are too big to fit into her new dishwasher.
Barry Du Bois, her co-host on The Living Room, helped design the new kitchen with its Shaker-style cupboards and long island bench — but neither could have foreseen that the popular TV and radio host would have even less time to cook than pre-renovations.
As if starting each weekday with three hours of breakfast radio, hosting a Friday night lifestyle show and making appearances on a slew of other programs, including The Project and Have You Been Paying Attention?, was not enough, the 56-year-old presenter has now signed on to co-host the upcoming reboot of Dancing With The Stars.
“At the beginning of the conversation, I was thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t take that on — that’s massive,’” says Keller of hosting the revamped series, which was once a ratings juggernaut for the Seven Network, and will now be given a new lease of life on Network Ten.
“But by the end of the conversation I thought, ‘Oh, gee, that’s a great one. I’ll definitely do that.’ It’s like The Living Room — the world is hard and we need something light, colourful and exuberant.”
MORE STELLAR
Madeleine West: ‘The truth about my marriage breakdown’
Carrie Bickmore: How to explain death to your three-year-old
Keller could be describing herself. For more than 35 years, she has avoided being typecast, with a versatility that has taken her from science and comedy to popular culture and lifestyle.
She possesses the Holy Grail of TV talents — intellect, wit and heart — all rolled in a dusting of dagginess to which audiences relate.
As her long-time friend and former colleague Andrew Denton tells Stellar:
“She’s funny without being a smart-arse. Genuine without stacking it on. Cool without shooting for it.”
As she sits in her kitchen full of kitsch — a plastic shark jostles for space with an illuminated rhino head, an oversized porcelain strawberry and glass-fronted cupboards full of royal wedding memorabilia — Keller is in her prime.
Her Sydney WSFM radio show with Brendan “Jonesy” Jones has topped the FM breakfast radio ratings, The Living Room has won the Logie for Most Popular Lifestyle Program for the fourth year running, and the children she feared she’d never have are now strapping teenagers trailing mud, textbooks and wry senses of humour.
She also recently celebrated her 28th wedding anniversary with husband Harley Oliver and is as enthused by her fresh insight into long-term relationships (more on this later) as she is with the stunning gold topaz ring now sparkling on her engagement finger.
“I’m busier now professionally than I’ve ever been,” she says, sipping lemon and ginger tea from a floral-patterned cup.
It’s 11am and she’s already been up for seven hours, sandwiching a chat with Stellar between our cover shoot and juggling publicity demands with her DWTS co-host and fellow Gold Logie nominee Grant Denyer. (For those wondering, no, she isn’t the least bit bothered he beat her to the gong.)
Whereas the former incarnation of the show typically featured the female host positioned in the green room while her male co-host anchored proceedings, Keller says she and Denyer will have equal footing.
“Grant has said we’re 50-50 on all of this. I won’t be speaking to the girls about their dresses.”
And who would she like to feature on the show, considering there are a few former politicians with time on their hands?
“Mmm, maybe Mark Bouris so I could flirt with him. Let me think, who else would be on my flirt list?”
Keller has always got on well with men. Whether it’s appearing with Ray Martin on Midday, her TV and radio forays with Andrew Denton, her 13 years on radio with Jonesy, or her role alongside Du Bois, Chris Brown and Miguel Maestre on The Living Room, she has always held her own.
“I haven’t wanted to play the role of the female who stops the man being naughty or takes the moral high ground,” she says.
“I don’t want to wrist slap because it makes you sound like a harpy and it’s such a boring, one-note thing.”
In the modern media where women are often pigeonholed with a persona ranging from drum-beating feminist to simpering sidekick, Keller defies such designation.
As Denton says, at heart she’s still the daggy girl he met at college. He remembers her having “Thompson Twins hair and earrings that Circus Oz must have lent her”, though he points out that she no longer irons her kaftans.
“Other than that,” he says, “she still has the wickedest laugh and a ferocious black sense of humour. She’s also loyal and sentimental and gets instant crushes on the most unlikely men… paging Barry Manilow.”
Keller laughs and confirms she and her childhood friend Melanie still call themselves “Mrs Manilow” when they call each other. As for her success, she attributes it to authenticity — “it’s the new black” — and “that little sprinkling of fairy dust that somehow gives you more than the sum of your parts”.
She also genuinely likes the people she works with.
“Jonesy and I are old friends — working together is like ice-skating. When we’re annoyed with each other, we run over each other’s fingers, but we know the rhythms.”
Keller laughs at headlines claiming the pair have “dethroned King Kyle” Sandilands: “I guess there’s a rivalry, but it feels nice to be rewarded as we work so hard.”
She’s also close to her co-hosts on The Living Room. Keller has a particular bond with Du Bois, who has been battling the return of cancer. They met at a function several years ago and soon realised they shared parallel lives in their struggle to have children.
“We just got each other,” Keller recalls.
“I learn a thousand life lessons from him every day — the way he lives in the moment and is so generous with people. They say love is a doing word and Barry just lives that.”
The warmth is mutual, with Du Bois pointing out they’re “like a couple of dolphins. We don’t have to talk to know what each other is thinking,” he says.
“She’s the most honest person I know and has more integrity than anyone I know.”
Keller’s two sons, Liam, 17, and Jack, 15, were hard won. She chronicles her and Oliver’s struggle to have a child in her memoir Natural Born Keller with such candour it’s impossible not to be moved.
Along with the injections, the general anaesthetics for egg harvesting and the long periods of waiting to learn that yet another embryo had failed to take, her recollection of a radio prank gone wrong is searingly painful.
As she recounts the episode nearly two decades on, Keller’s face still drains. She and Denton were on holiday from their Triple M Sydney breakfast show and Jonesy was standing in when a caller phoned in to a regular segment called The Rumour Mill to report that Amanda Keller was pregnant.
Having been assured by a producer that the call was funny, Jonesy put it to air only to be told by the caller that she had seen Keller coming out of an ultrasound clinic. Before long, friends began calling the radio host to ask if she was expecting.
“I was apoplectic,” Keller says.
“Those IVF cycles were so hard and to have that stab come from inside the camp — from the people who should most protect us — was devastating.
It was a perfect storm of something falling through the cracks. Jonesy wrote me a letter to apologise, but I didn’t have the words to respond.”
The friendship survived, but Keller’s eyes still fill with tears as she recalls the years where she and Oliver had to accept they might never have kids.
I’m busier now professionally than I’ve ever been
Even now, as the boys come hurtling in after school, she pauses and thinks back to when they were just an impossible dream.
“I look at those hairy legs coming through the door and I just can’t believe it.”
She recently went to a university open day with Liam and is coming to terms with her sons growing up.
“We first saw Liam when he was just eight cells. Now he’s this fully formed thing. I feel I’m at the end of it [parenting] and I want to hold on to it.”
Keller has long refused to buy into mother’s guilt.
“I’ve told them that if something matters to them, they have to tell me and I’ll drop everything to be there.”
She grins: “You know, something like their wedding day… If I’ve got a free morning I might pop in.”
That’s not to say it’s all smooth sailing — she struggles with the relevance-deprivation feelings that strike many parents of teens, recalling how one evening recently her eldest neglected to tell her he loved her when she said goodnight.
“I tried not to be needy, but I came back downstairs and told him that when I say, ‘I love you,’ he’s supposed to say it back. He told me he wasn’t a robot, but I explained that sometimes I just need to hear it from him.”
As for her relationship with Oliver, 11 years her senior, she says she has a fresh appreciation for enduring relationships after reading Alain de Botton’s novel The Course Of Love.
“As he says, we celebrate the beginning of relationships and the break-ups, but it’s that long haul in the middle that is rarely written about and never gets made into films. There are not enough accolades for surviving the long haul.”
The pair clearly adore each other but, after 28 years, Keller says she doesn’t examine the relationship every day. She recognises Oliver’s mood might be totally unrelated to her and tries not to pick a fight after a glass of wine.
She also accepts she often comes in after a morning on the radio and bosses her husband about like he’s staff.
“My pace is bang, bang, bang, and I’ve got a list of things that need to be done. I need to take a breath and change pace when I’m coming into the house.” So, does she do that? She smirks: “No, I don’t.”
Amanda Keller co-hosts the Jonesy & Amanda Breakfast Show, 6am weekdays on WSFM, and The Living Room, 7.30pm Fridays on Network Ten.