Beloved Aussie actor opens up on the ‘Sigrid factor’
Australian actor Sigrid Thornton has a vast catalogue of stage, film and TV work including on Prisoner, SeaChange and The Man from Snowy River. Read what she hopes to do next.
Fiona Byrne
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The beloved Australian film The Man from Snowy River has taken Sigrid Thornton on the ride of a lifetime.
Although she has a vast and impressive catalogue of stage, film and TV work including SeaChange, Prisoner, Wentworth, All The Rivers Run, The Last Outlaw, Underbelly and Peter Allen: The Boy Next Door, to her name, for many Thornton will forever be the feisty Jessica Harrison on the back of a nuggety stock horse with Tom Burlinson, galloping across Victoria’s alpine ridges in the iconic movie.
Released in 1982, Snowy was a box office success in Australia and the US and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 1983 Golden Globes – Gandhi won. An actor of note before Snowy, the film carved a place for Thornton, and Burlinson, in Australian cinematic history.
The pair helped bring the film to fans and a new audience last year as part of The Man from Snowy River in Concert.
The live-to-screen experience debuted in Melbourne with the Bruce Rowland score played by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra as the film screened, before embarking on a sold out national tour.
The Man from Snowy River in Concert is returning for two encore performances at The Plenary on August 3 with Thornton and Burlinson again involved.
I sat down with Thornton to discuss the legend of Snowy, working with Kirk Douglas, her Indiana Jones moment, her time in America’s ‘wild west’, the ‘Sigrid Factor’, and the ‘jewel’ that was SeaChange.
Fiona Byrne: The TV drama Homicide in 1973 is credited as your professional acting debut. How did your career start?
Sigrid Thornton:From very young I had already chosen this work (acting) and to that end I was attending workshops. We lived in the UK and New Zealand for a time and when we got back to Brisbane immediately I wanted to join drama workshops.
The best gig in town was the Twelfth Night Theatre which was run by a wonderful woman called Joan Whalley, who was a very interesting, bright, ambitious and creative artistic director.
She ran those workshops and I did them from about the age of 9 until I left Brisbane at 17.
In the course of that I was cast by Crawford Productions. They used to do these talent scouting expeditions and they were run by a woman, who is still a very close friend of mine, Loretta Crawford, as she was back then.
They would travel to all the capitals to find new faces and I happened to go to an audition and got a job a couple of weeks later down in Melbourne.
I would travel to Melbourne a couple of times a year for roles on their shows.
FB: The roles started coming and have never stopped.
ST: I was 13 when I did Homicide. I did the whole gamut of Crawford Productions shows. I did Homicide, Matlock Police, Division 4, Cop Shop, The Sullivans, Bluey; everything that was available, I managed to score some sort of role in.
That was my film training because they were all shot single camera and were shot like mini features. They were often very inventively approached because there was a whole new generation of filmmakers coming up. That was my training, I trained on the job.
FB: The Man from Snowy River has become a legendary Australian film. Were you the first person cast for the film?
ST: I was the first person cast, which was wonderful. I had already been cast a few times by (Snowy director) George T Miller, because George came up through Crawfords as well.
I was working with George on a mini series called The Last Outlaw, which was about Ned Kelly.
I came off Prisoner to do The Last Outlaw. At one stage George took me aside and said ‘We are doing this film, would you like to play Jessica?’, so of course I said, ‘Yes’.
I did not know much about it when he first pitched it, not that he had to pitch it very hard because I was bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and very happy to work on anything and everything that would give me more experience, little knowing what Snowy would become this behemoth.
FB: What was your experience working alongside Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas on Snowy?
ST: As a triple A-list star, Kirk was probably the first of his kind. He was a veteran not just actor, but producer and director at that stage, so he came in with a certain set of expectations about how things might be and the Snowy group were new kids on the block, certainly in terms of features.
I think that Kirk was pretty keen to put people through their paces and Kirk had a very healthy sense of self, let’s put it that way.
But, he was a workhorse, he was a workaholic, and his knowledge was second to none and to me he was very generous with his knowledge, and I got on very well with Kirk.
I was a young woman and Kirk was a man in his 60s, so it was a good match in that respect.
There was no competition on the set, there was nothing to butt heads about. Some of the stories that you may have heard either did not happen to me or I was not around for them or they did not affect me because I had a different relationship with him.
He was a very high energy man, an incredibly forceful personality, and he would be awake at 3am or 4am and would not hesitate to ring George (director) and say ‘I have an idea for today’s scene’, which would have been, I imagine, quite challenging, but Kirk would have been very used to someone saying, ‘Oh yes, what is the idea Kirk? Let’s have a look at that’.
FB: What about Tom Burlinson who played Jim Craig, Jessica’s love interest?
ST: We met and there was an immediate bond and friendship and chemistry. There were a number of alchemic elements on that film.
FB: Snowy filmed in April/May 1981 and was released in 1982. When did you know you were part of something special?
ST: When things come together, for want of a better description, alchemically, on a project such as this, that is when it sings and that is when the audience are more likely to want to carry that music with them.
I think that is what happened on Snowy. Everybody was there for the right reasons and it was a really good combination of people.
It was an important project and everyone was giving it their all, but we did not understand how long the legs would be, we did not understand the life that the film would go on to have and to what extent it would resonate with Australians and further afield internationally.
Many people did not know we had such majestic beauty in the alpine regions so close to Melbourne.
The landscape was one of the characters in the film, as was the music. Bruce Rowland (composer) really captured the romance and the sweeping beauty of the environment. It is wonderful people can see and experience that music being performed by orchestras with the film now, as is happening with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
FB: Tell me about the US TV western Paradise and the role written especially for you.
ST: The show came to me through a producer by the name of David Jacobs. David was also the producer of Dallas and Knots Landing. He knew my work presumably from Snowy and the mini series All The Rivers Run which had screened in America.
He sent me the script (in 1987) and then we got on the phone and he said, ‘I have made this role Australian for you, can you come and do the pilot?’
It was like a cross between Gunsmoke and Little House On The Prairie.
In those days the ratio was 1 in 20 (pilots being made into a series), so the odds were against it getting up, but I went and had a little adventure and did the pilot. Then lo and behold it got up.
So off we (her husband and young son) went. We went for a short period initially and then we bought a house there and settled in, not necessarily for the long haul.
I think we always knew we would be coming home, and indeed we did come home to have our second baby.
FB: I’ve heard you were approached for a key role in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
ST: It is true to say they did inquire about me for Raiders of the Lost Ark 2. Nothing ever came of it. I never did (audition) and it sort of went away.
FB: But you met Steven Spielberg.
ST: There was a period when I met with some very interesting people (in LA) and it was very exciting. I met Steven and I am very happy to say he was an exceptional human being.
I was so relieved to meet a man whom I so admired and to discover he was everything I hoped he would be. He had the excitement for life of a child, but a wisdom far beyond his years.
FB: Have you ever second guessed not giving Hollywood a real crack and instead moving back to Australia after Paradise ended in 1991?
ST: I have never had regrets. People often ask me do you regret coming back to Australia? Not in a million years, because I just have never had any hesitation about raising our children (Ben and Jaz) in this country.
FB: We must talk about SeaChange (1998-2000), in which you played Laura Gibson. How did that come about?
ST: It came to me by virtue of rumour, initially. I knew there was a show being made and when I heard about the storyline – city magistrate moves to the countryside – I thought ‘Oh, oh yeah’, but as soon as I read the pilot script I just really wanted that role.
The writing was just superb; nuanced, layered, detailed, beautiful characters and enormous possibilities.
FB: Did the production just snap you up immediately?
ST: I think I auditioned four times for it. I was not their first choice by any means, on the contrary, I think I was not an obvious choice for them.
I suspect the preference would have been to find someone who was not recognisable for any other work – a new face – so I just bloody well wore them down.
I just kept coming back. I had to work pretty hard for that and I was very fortunate that they eventually decided, ‘OK, you have got it.’
FB: Why did fighting for that role mean so much?
ST: It was a reinvention for me at the time. I was associated at that time still with crinolines and corsets and that really had never been my active choice, it was simply a measure of the way in which the industry had come up and what was being explored.
It is the same today. Unless you are making your own work your career tends to be defined by what writers are writing about and the sociological circumstances at the time.
It was a real opportunity to do something very different.
The other thing that was really attractive was the fact that it was comedy/drama, which I love.
FB: How do you feel about “The Sigrid Factor?”
ST: That was Bernard Salt, bless you Bernard. Bernard, a demographer, devised this theory (in his book The Big Shift) that wherever I did a show the real estate would go through the roof, and that was hilarious.
I’d love to sit down with Bernard and have a coffee and talk about that one day. It was a very gracious thing to say.
FB: Talk about influence, SeaChange became the name for a social shift in the early 2000s.
ST: That is something that SeaChange did feed into. There was a movement of people moving to the country.
That was probably already happening a little bit, but it increased that desire to explore another type of community life.
It was a time when people were thinking about the fact that our city life was in a state of degeneration, in the sense that people were losing touch with one another and losing touch with a sense of community in the city.
I think it tapped into that discussion and those feelings.
FB: Do you have any mentors?
ST: A woman who really changed my life was Elizabeth Kemp who was an extraordinary acting teacher.
She was an American teacher, (coached Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga and Hugh Jackman) but I worked with her here in Australia.
She was a particular guide and she had a very unusual approach to the work.
I kept in touch with her until she died (in 2017) and working with Elizabeth really did change the way I think about my life and my work in very positive ways.
FB: Do you have a favourite project among everything you have done?
ST: SeaChange was definitely a highlight for me for lots of reasons, not just the quality of the show and the role, but it was also at a particular time of my life when I could be at home most of the time with the children, who were of a certain age when it was still very important for us to sit around the dinner table in the evenings.
It was a sweet time of life. It is its own little jewel for me and that not to diminish anything else that I have done.
Another peak experience was playing Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire on the stage and I recently played Arkadina in The Seagull (on stage) in Sydney.
I have been fortunate to have been given the opportunity to play a great number of strong women. I hope that continues and I trust it will.
The Man from Snowy River in Concert with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Sigrid Thornton and Tom Burlinson is on at The Plenary, 2pm and 7.30pm, on Saturday, August 3.
Tickets: mso.com.au
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