She should know. As anyone who’s been her guest will attest, she’s a formidable host. A journalist once asked her what made for a successful party. The answer, delivered with tongue firmly in cheek, came quick as a whip. “French champagne and famous people.”

Well, she should know. Big parties, small cocktail gatherings, smart dinners, al fresco Sunday lunches in summer, often arranged around a famous visitor — she’s hosted ’em all. During her marriage to property developer and, latterly, restaurant entrepreneur Leon Fink, she lived in a splendid house in Wallaroy Rd, Double Bay, once owned by Gregory Blaxland and wife Helen, pillars of post-war Sydney society.

She herself is an artist and possesses an exceptional and highly personal sense of style.

Born Margaret Elliott, she was educated at Rose Bay Primary then Sydney Girls High before enrolling at East Sydney Tech to study painting. A considerable beauty, she was enthusiastically courted by fellow students and members of the Sydney Push, a loosely constituted, left-leaning cohort of artists and intellectuals whose number included Robert Hughes, Frank Moorhouse, Clive James, Lillian Roxon and Germaine Greer.

Greer remains a close friend of Fink, who on account of her striking looks was known as “the Venus of the Push”.

To earn a living, she trained as a teacher and taught art — “briefly!” — at a slew of schools all over Sydney, including Kambala Rose Bay, and Dover Heights Domestic Science School. Her idiosyncratic personal style must have sat uneasily with an educational institution dedicated to instructing young girls how to cook and be good little housewives.

One day she was summoned to the headmistress’ office. Bracing herself for a dressing down and possibly dismissal, she turned up and was told not to wear so much mascara.

She married Leon in 1961. He bought a house in Chelsea and they lived the London life for a couple of years. Their first child, daughter Hannah, was born there in 1963. Returning to Australia they relocated to Melbourne where son John, now head of the Fink group of restaurants, was born in 1966.

While she made good friends there, Melbourne was not greatly to her liking. Years later, when I was appointed artistic director of the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts, and was about to relocate from Sydney, I asked Margaret what it was like living there. “Like preparation for the afterlife.”

Another son, Benjamin, a well-known musician, arrived in 1969.

With motherhood out of the way and restless for some form of artistic expression, Fink made her first foray into film production. She had seen David Williamson’s early play, The Removalists at the old Nimrod Street Theatre in 1971.

Impressed, she bought the film rights and in 1974, after sifting through directors (rejects included Fred Schepisi and Ted Kotcheff who made the classic Wake in Fright), she shot it with a cast that included Jackie Weaver and Kate Fitzpatrick as well as Chris Haywood, all three of whom had appeared in the stage production.

Although critically acclaimed (and retrospectively well-regarded) the film was not a commercial success. By way of consolation, an AFI award for best actor went to Peter Cummins.

Fink has always been an avid reader. High on her list of favourite books was Miles Franklin’s 1901 Australian novel, My Brilliant Career.

That might be an apt description of Fink’s own career as a film producer, as her film version is one of the best loved Australian movies of all time. Not only did the film do brilliantly, it launched the international careers of its two stars, Judy Davis and Sam Neill.

“It’s something of an irony,” says Fink, “that Judy’s performance was overlooked.” Although universally lauded and showered with a cluster of AFI awards, there was not one for Davis’s incarnation of Franklin’s heroine, Sybylla Melvyn. The film was shown at the 1979 Cannes Festival as Australia’s official entry, and at the New York Film Festival and was named Best Film at the AFI Awards. To ensure its longevity, the film has been digitised at considerable government expense, screening at Parliament House in Canberra last week.

“I hit the jackpot with Career,” says Fink.

But she feels her contribution to its success is insufficiently acknowledged and director Gillian Armstrong gets more credit than she deserves.

“I made all the decisions that a director usually makes. I’m not a normal producer,” she notes, adding, “Not normal in any way, I should say.”

For Fink, the triumph was a career-defining moment. But it also coincided with a divorce. The Woollahra mansion was sold, the era of big parties ended and Fink moved into a small but exquisite heritage cottage in Darlinghurst.

The French champagne has made way for jugs of stiff, party-starter martinis, scrumptious chicken sandwiches and big bamboo baskets of Chinese dumplings. The famous people, the movers and shakers, all remained.

There followed more films: For Love Alone, based on another Aussie novel, Christina Stead’s 1945 bestseller, and Edens Lost, a three-part part TV series based on the work of expatriate Australian writer Sumner Locke Elliot.

Fink describes the fallow period between 1988 and 2005 as a “hiatus”, and there is a hiatus too in our marvellous meal at the heavily starred Firedoor restaurant as a charming waiter presents a tray with 16 hand-thrown pottery sake cups.

We have chosen the chef’s menu with wine selected by chef Lennox Hastie, and one of his pairings is vintage sake. Hastie is the open-fire wizard whose aged beef roasted over exotic woods, olive, cherry, orange, plum and ironbark has had critics ululating and is unsurpassed in this city.

But to Fink’s hiatus, from which she came roaring back with another feature film called Candy, directed by Neil Armfield and invited in competition to the Berlin Film Festival in 2006.

Fink’s nose for emerging young talent, conspicuously demonstrated in My Brilliant Career, was again in play with the casting of the 26-year-old Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish as leads.

Fink feels she established a special bond with Ledger. “What a good sort. I was in love with him.”

She recalls how he was to shoot a steamy love scene with Cornish but baulked, telling Fink: “Sorry I fucked up. I’m so in love with Michelle that I couldn’t do it with anyone else.”

At 85, Fink maintains a daunting social schedule but leaves serious time for her grandchildren.

Her myriad friends sustain her. With her close friend, pianist and music director Max Lambert, she makes an annual trip to Tasmania which she loves. “Whenever I see Max I feel better.”

She reads continuously (Trollope is current favourite) and goes to the theatre. She thought Justin Fleming’s Dresden in the tiny Kings Cross theatre recently was “marvellous”, and describes Fleming as a “terrific playwright”.

I ask how she’d describe herself. Unhesitatingly she replies, “Lucky.”

Firedoor

23-33 Mary St, Surry Hills

Lunch

Purple potato, cultured cream, smoked mussel

Cobia, blood orange, shiso

Octopus, smoked potato, nduja

King George whiting, charred cabbage and leek

Beef chuck, barletta onion

Smoked white chocolate and rhubarb bombe