‘I’ve never felt weird about getting older’: Georgie Parker muses about her career-defining roles as she marks her 60th birthday
As she prepares to turn 60 this month, Georgie Parker recalls the characters that have shaped who she is – and the progressively debilitating condition she refuses to let define her.
Stellar
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In fitting style for an extrovert with enviably boundless energy, Georgie Parker isn’t just throwing a party for her upcoming 60th birthday.
Instead she will mark the milestone with something more akin to a festival.
“I’m having lots of little parties because I have a lot of different groups of friends, and I don’t want to have a party where I can’t talk to everyone,” the Home And Away actor enthuses to Stellar. “That way we can all have a chat and have an experience.”
While she loves performing on stage and has been a fixture on Australian television screens for more than 35 years, Parker insists she doesn’t actually want to be the centre of attention. “But I often am,” she concedes with a laugh.
“I’m naturally enthusiastic, or as [Home And Away co-star] Ray Meagher would say, exuberant. I have a lot of energy, so you end up getting a lot of attention. But that’s not what I’m after. I’m after just having a good time and hanging with my friends – and if everyone else manages to have a good time, too, then that’s great.”
Although Parker insists that she’s nothing like the procession of likeable ladies she has played, she imbues them all with her own optimistic spirit.
“Lucy in A Country Practice was quite eccentric,” she says fondly of the breakthrough role that saw her bounding on to screens with a rooster under her arm in 1988.
“Terri [of All Saints] was the good girl who tried to save her whole family by becoming a nun. She was a really interesting character, very different from me. I just loved finding her.”
As for Roo Stewart, the character she’s played on Home And Away since 2010, Parker says she’s “kind of a rough diamond”, adding that she’s stayed in that role longer than any other as it not only allows her to express her creativity as an actor but also to come home to her family at night.
“I love the crew, many of whom [worked on A Country Practice and] I’ve worked with since I was 22. It’s a very happy, tight-knit family, and that makes it incredibly enjoyable.”
Thousands of Australians have grown up watching the double Gold Logie winner’s work, but Parker isn’t a fan of seeing herself on screen.
“You can get too caught up in your head about how you look,” she explains of her decision not to watch herself in shows.
“That’s the last thing you want to be doing as an actor. You just don’t want to be thinking about how you’re looking.”
Which is partly why she feels so at peace about turning 60 on December 16, which she will celebrate while on a tour of Europe with Holly, the 24-year-old daughter she shares with her husband, screenwriter Steve Worland (he’s staying home to mind the cat).
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“I love getting older. I’ve never felt weird about it even though women are encouraged not to embrace their age or to lie about it. I’ve never understood that,” she says.
“I didn’t use anything on my face until I had to when I was 22. That idea of having a youth where you’re rolling around on bikes and falling over and scraping up your knees and all of that, it just doesn’t happen anymore. And that’s OK, every generation has their thing. But I think the current [generation] is missing out on being young and not having the idea of presenting yourself for approval.”
Parker adds that social media “has shifted the dialogue around women and their independence.”
Conceding that it helps some find a community or a space to voice their opinions, she says the counterpoint to having that forum is there being “a lot more misogyny”.
“In my youth, in the 1970s, even though there was more of a glass ceiling, there was greater freedom for women to be who they wanted to be and express themselves,” she says.
“Now I think women are held accountable for how they express themselves through social media. A lot of women, and I’m speaking very generally here, seem to be falling into: ‘I have to look like this’, and ‘I have to present myself like this’ through this platform.”
Furthermore, Parker is frustrated that women remain far more defined by their age than men. “There seems to be a whole different rhetoric around men ageing and women ageing,” she says.
“But it all means the same thing. We all end up in the same place.”
Parker, who has been married to Worland for 25 years, says she isn’t envious of actors such as Robert De Niro and Al Pacino who are welcoming children well into their 70s and 80s. “God, who would want that?” she says, scoffing.
Parker credits her pragmatism to being diagnosed, at 13, with scoliosis (curvature of the spine), and put in a back brace.
“I had to learn, or rather embrace, very early on, that how I looked was only the tip of the iceberg. And so I just sort of followed along that train of thinking my whole life.”
At the time, doctors told her she would have to abandon her plans to become a ballet dancer. Rather than wallow, Parker decided to try acting.
“Being told ‘no’ helped me strategise,” she says. “When they say you can’t do that anymore, I’ll go: that’s all right. I’ll find something else that I want to do. It just helps you become more flexible and more open to adapting.”
Her condition hasn’t just affected her mindset; it’s also had an ongoing impact on her physical health.
She has undergone a double hip replacement and now has an 80-degree curvature of the spine. “It’s something I have to deal with every day, and it’s ongoing,” she explains. “I can’t say it hasn’t been difficult, but I wouldn’t change it.”
While she hasn’t let scoliosis slow her down and is still maintaining a frenetic pace – she’s set to star in two theatre productions next year in addition to shooting Home And Away – Parker accepts that the progressively debilitating condition will one day impact her working life. But until then, she’s doing things her way.
“I just do what I can, and when I can’t do what I’m doing now, I’ll change what I want to do,” she says with a grin. And she intends to have a good time along the way, just like her similarly young-at-heart parents. “My mum has just turned 90 and Dad is 94, and they defy what it is to be any age,” she says proudly. “It really does come down to the person.”
Home And Away returns to Seven Network and 7plus on January 13, 2025. See the full shoot with Georgie Parker in the latest issue of Stellar, out on Sunday via The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), Sunday Mail (QLD) and The Sunday Mail (SA).
For more from Stellar and the podcast Something To Talk About, click here.
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