Gina Liano’s naked ambition

UNLIKE some female lawyers, Gina Liano refuses to dress demurely. Indeed, she vows she won’t sport hairy or unbronzed legs even when she’s dead.

Barrister Gina Liano bares all for the camera as she refuses to bow down to tradition.

NOT long ago, Gina Liano appeared in court, armed with a blaze of green eye shadow and the click of high heels. She confronted a horror story: an injured infant, an accused man and a hopeless mum.

Here, in the family division of Victoria’s Children’s Court, Liano the barrister is a fixture for a daily rollcall of society’s secret shame files. She probes the abuses of the most vulnerable. Her defence from the details is to forget the names as fast as she can.

Liano, known to most Australians as the sultry star of Foxtel’s The Real Housewives of Melbourne, shows no cleavage in court. No bare shoulders or open-toe shoes. She arrived here, in fulfilment of a long-held ambition, well before a TV audience embraced her big hair and bigger attitude.

Gina with the Real Housewives of Melbourne gang. Picture: Ian Currie

She bowed to courtroom customs, but was not about to nod to some of its sillier traditions. Most female lawyers seemed beholden to the boys’ club culture. They deepened their voices and pulled back their hair. Liano spotted hairy legs which, she vows, hers will never be, even when she’s dead (they’ll be bronzed, too).

Liano would be a woman “because I didn’t know how to be anything else”. As an opposing counsel puts it, she would be a “good listener and a tough fighter”. Liano, as with her other guise in a trash-talking TV show, would be who she was.

A single mum, she would weigh compassion against need on the question of severing the bond between child and parent. Liano recalls the 20-year-old woman, intellectually impaired and living on the street. “The poor darling, I felt sorry for her, she was quite violent and aggressive,” recalls Liano. “She wanted her baby back.”

“I’m not saying the other girls are vacuous, but I think the fact that I’m not comes out pretty quickly.”

Of late, Liano has appeared in court only as her higher profile duties allow. Her motto dictates how she divides her time, and “failing to prepare is preparing to fail”. A clotheshorse, always glad for a spot of “panelbeating” (teeth bleaching, spray tans, etc), she’s now an empire builder, too.

Australia has two “Ginas”: the mining magnate of Hancock heritage, and the lawyer turned pop-cultural diva. This second Gina has expanded the more scholarly ambitions of her youth. Delicacy and decorum define her legal work. Her TV work, the result of chance opportunity, invokes no such dedication. Together, however, the seemingly mismatched strands of Gina Liano have opened a vision that reinvents how mature women look and behave.

“I try not to take on board what is being said about me by the other girls.” Picture: Cameron Grayson

She has distinguished herself from a contrived coven of potty-mouthed, well-to-do women on The Real Housewives Of Melbourne largely because of her professional background. “I’m not saying the other girls are vacuous, but I think the fact that I’m not comes out pretty quickly,” she says.

Liano was neither villain nor victim in the first few seasons. Perhaps emboldened by media polling that repeatedly confirmed her inflated popularity, she casts herself as a new breed of role model. She sells the pursuit of perfection as a series of sound bites that combine bark, boldness and more than a smidgen of vanity. She stands out because she’s different.

Liano debuted on the big stage aged 47. Her touchstones are the ordinary fractures and fears of family breakdown and health scares. Her talking points are battle lines and scar tissue.

The week Liano ran the maimed infant case, she also did a photo shoot for a jewellery range and hosted an online charity auction for the garments she wore on ROOM.

‘Bloody hell, I’ve been running this rape trial. Now I’ve got to sit with Pettifleur and talk about what her teeth look like …’

During season three of the TV series, she ran a trial during the day and filmed at night. The case involved the sexual abuse of a young girl. Inevitably, her day job bled into her TV work.

During filming with Pettifleur Berenger, a fellow cast member whose makeover between seasons may have included the sharpening of her tongue, Liano borrowed from the courtroom to offer advice. “Raise your argument, not your voice,” she told Berenger.

It had been a difficult day, says Liano now. “I remember saying to production, ‘Bloody hell, I’ve been running this rape trial. Now I’ve got to sit with Pettifleur and talk about what her teeth look like…’”

Yet this unusual collision of grittiness and glamour sits easily with her. She follows no rule book. The 50-year-old spills home truths and chutzpah that she traces back to her dispatch of a school bully at the age of 12. Liano is a cancer survivor and an independent spirit. If she stands apart from the screeching and squawking of RHOM she also finds more innovative invective.

Gina Liano’s public profile bloomed at the age of 47. Picture: Adam Yip/The Daily Telegraph

“You need to snap the f*ck out of it,” she told Berenger earlier this year. “I’ve had enough of your indulged bull-f*cking-sh*t … you’re gonna cry. And f*cking sulk and carry on …”

The marketers leapt on the selling points: both her autobiography and her second perfume, launched this month, are called Fearless. Once crippled by post-natal bouts of panic, she now turns fear on its head, she says. Fear is her “great motivator”.

Liano also uses the term fearless for her cover photo shoot for Stellar. The poses — “glamorous but not raunchy” — fall outside her comfort zone. But she steels herself. After three seasons on the small screen, she believes her audience knows her as a “woman of substance”.

“If I was in my 30s I probably wouldn’t do it,” she says of the Stellar shoot. “But I’m 50 and, if I do a glamour shot, I think it can be quite inspiring for women of my age.”

Here’s someone who never stops moving, bar the odd “pyjama day” she gifts herself.

Being the centre of attention requires no practice. A week after the shoot, Liano sits furthest from the door at a restaurant in the wealthy suburb of Toorak. Her bronzed skin radiates against the collective pallor.

Her jokes against herself dent the vampire TV casting. A deliberative choosing of words blends with a natural warmth. She sparkles and bounces — the rings and earrings certainly, but also in a cascade of thoughts and words. Here’s someone who never stops moving, bar the odd “pyjama day” she gifts herself.

Liano grasps the power of the anecdote — a planned book will recount her sayings, based on her experiences. She’s sharp — her one blank stare, over two hours, is in response to a cheeky query about the blind pursuit of fame.

Liano has not given up on a Judge Judy-style TV show.

Personal assistant Josh Cunial is more than an accessory. There’s a shoe and clutch collection, she plans more jewellery offerings, as well as an evening wear and skincare range.

Liano hasn’t given up on a Judge Judy-style pilot and will probably go back for the fourth season of Real Housewives, a worldwide franchise. Her ambition is naked enough — if Australia can’t accommodate it, she says, she will reluctantly head to the US.

Liano has an unfair advantage over other Real Housewives members. The profane onscreen rants belie a more measured approach. She offers welcome equanimity in what she calls a “dysfunctional sisterhood”. Viewers rushed to her defence when cast members ganged up against her.

Here, in offers of warmth and support, Liano discovered the power of the audience. It “ran my case” on social media, she says, of which she reads everything. Now she is accosted by people seeking her help. They reach out (hospital visits, cries for help), she says, because they feel she will understand. Their trust can be daunting, she adds, because she is not a trained counsellor.

“That was my point of reference. At 50, where are you going to be? Who are you?”

The TV role similarly sounds like work, as though the price and the reward are intertwined. “I try not to take on board what is being said about me by the other girls, because I don’t always value their opinions,” she says. “I also question their motivation for a lot of things and their purpose, but I don’t want to be judgmental at the same time.”

If Liano has something to sell, there’s plenty she wants to tell, too. Hers is a life forged by hardships, tracing back to “maniac” nuns at a Catholic boarding school as a six-year-old. Her parents divorced when she started high school. As a kid, bouncing from school to school, she figured out that she would not be defined by a man.

Liano’s mother left the home when she was about to begin Year 12. Liano had wanted to be a doctor, then a lawyer; in the end she got into an arts degree course. Later, as a young mother, she embarked on law.

Liano is rarely spotted with a hair out of place. Picture: Cameron Grayson

She adapted because she had to, driven by an unusually mature vision. Liano speaks now of “performing” in public, but her keen sense of appearance predated her first meeting with reality TV casting agents — in a pale-blue jewelled dress with a gold keyhole chain neckline — by decades.

At about 18, in a supermarket, she saw an immaculately groomed older woman. She wore high heels and a hot pink jacket. Her hair was done. Liano thought, “That’s her, that’s who I’m going to be.”

“I thought of who I wanted to be when I was 50,” she says. “That seemed to be a number that kept coming up. What do you look like? What do you feel like? What are you wearing? That was my point of reference. At 50, where are you going to be? Who are you?”

She is the proud Italian mother of two young men (Christos, 26, and Myles, 20), and the partner of businessman Dean Giannarelli, who (perhaps sensibly) doesn’t want to appear on RHOM. She is also the survivor of bowel cancer at 36. She joked about colostomy bags by Prada or Gucci and rose early, embracing each day as though it was her last. She lost her hair during chemo, but kept her nails buff and heels high throughout.

She bows to old-fashioned chivalry, such as men standing when women walk in the room.

Her sisters, designers Bettina and Teresa, followed their mother’s fashion flair. The three siblings ran businesses of which incarnations continue today. They grew up in ritzy Brighton and attended private schools. The money flowed intermittently. For Year 12 at Star of the Sea College in Brighton, Liano relied upon a hardship scholarship.

When she was invited to give a speech at the school in 2014, she extolled the wonder of teachers and the courage of (most) nuns, whom she describes as “the pioneers of the women’s movement”.

Liano believes in “commonsense equality”. She bows to old-fashioned chivalry, such as men standing when women walk in the room. “I want that acknowledgment because I’ve just spent three bloody hours blow-drying my hair,” she says. “And putting my lipstick on and smelling nice.”

With sons Christos (left) and Miles. Picture: Julie Kiriacoudis

She lists her experiences as others might character references. “Being around the block a few times” is a bullet point. The irony, which Liano acknowledges, is that her platform was built on such a flimsy TV premise.

Her cousin Mara Ray, a lawyer, advised Liano against accepting the RHOM offer. The other cast members had husbands and fallbacks. What if this show — which amounted to a series of catfights — ended Liano’s legal career? Producers and editors could manipulate and humiliate. There was something else, Liano says, which sounds surprising: no desire for fame. She spent 19 hours with her lawyer poring over a 72-page contract. “I was a bit of a pain in the arse in the end,” she says.

Finally, as Liano stood undecided over the unsigned forms, she rang Giannarelli. Would the demands of TV damage their relationship? He told her to do it.

Now there are no regrets. Just lots of engagements. More speeches on bouncing back. More perfumes, perhaps, more shoes. Frankly, as much Gina Inc. as the public wants.

Where will it end? Who knows, Liano says, except that she will keep fronting up to court — celebrity duties permitting — to fight the battles that society doesn’t want to know about.

Fearless by Gina Liano is available exclusively at Chemist Warehouse

Originally published as Gina Liano’s naked ambition