Julia Morris opens up about life on the right side of normal

BEING rejected by Hollywood was tough, but Julia Morris soon found out it was nothing compared to her husband’s battle with breast cancer.

Julia Morris (For Weekend)

JULIA MORRIS became invisible in Hollywood.

It’s hard to imagine anyone as effervescent, confident and outspoken as Julia fading into the background anywhere. But in LA, Julia’s acting coach advised her no one would see her potential until she either lost weight or piled on the pounds.

By Tinseltown standards, Julia found herself in no-woman’s land ‒ too big to play a love interest and too thin to be the funny girl.

In Hollywood there is no room for normal. And they don’t come more normal than this mother of two.

Julia arrived for her interview with Weekend wearing Birkenstocks, after a morning spent enthusiastically vacuuming the car.

She’s also wearing size 14 trousers, she tells me proudly, because she felt the 12 left too little to the imagination.

“I think I am more like a size 13,” she admits, laughing. “My weight is up and down.”

The past few years have been much the same. There was the unsuccessful tilt at Hollywood and a last-minute invite to appear on a reality show that unexpectedly opened the door to her breakout role on House Husbands.

And just as her career was finally taking off, her family was rocked by cancer. But Julia, 46, has taken it all — the good and the bad — in her stride, thanks largely to her trademark sense of humour.

Her husband, Dan Thomas, may have bought her the title of Lady Morris on the internet as a gift, but there are no airs and graces about the Gosford-raised girl who’s equally at home on the Logies red carpet as she is in a room full of business people when hosting a corporate event.

Julia says it was Dan’s support and encouragement that enabled to chase her dreams around the world — from London to LA and back home again — while he cared for the couple’s two daughters, Ruby, 7, and Sophie, 5.

“I absolutely couldn’t have done any of this without Dan,” she says.

“He said, ‘Baby, you go and chase your dreams. We will get mine later.’

“I refuse to feel guilty (about being a working mother). Dan won’t let me.”

While looking after the girls, comedian Dan has busied himself with writing and, now that they’re both in school, is almost ready to chase his dreams too.

The couple first met through mutual friends over margaritas and karaoke while Julia was living in England. Welsh-born Dan impressed her with his magnificent rendition of Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger.

Julia credits him with holding the fort at home so that she could go to work. Acting success didn’t happen overnight — Julia slogged it out on the international stand-up circuit, performed on London’s West End, wrote a book, had a crack at reality TV and studied acting in LA for two years.

It wasn’t long after Julia finally found her niche with House Husbands and the hosting gig on a revamped Australia’s Got Talent that Dan was diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer. The news came just before Christmas in 2012.

Dan had already been reassured by his doctor that the small lump on his chest was harmless. A biopsy had even showed the mass was benign. But a different surgeon later suggested Dan have the lump removed while he was under the knife having a hernia repaired ‒ just to be on the safe side.

As fate would have it, that “harmless” lump turned out to be cancer. Within 24 hours of hearing the terrible diagnosis, Dan was again on the surgeon’s table undergoing a double mastectomy.

“It was quite the baptism by fire,” Julia says.

“But we were lucky. There was no chemo. No radiation.

“There’s not the same sense of loss as there is for a woman losing her boobs but there’s still the same fear.

“People ask what it was like to hear the news — well it was every bit as awful as you imagine.

“When I first told people (Dan had breast cancer) they would laugh. They thought I was joking. A lot of people thought men don’t get breast cancer.”

Though she is fiercely protective of her husband’s privacy, saying: “It’s his story not mine. He’s the one that had cancer, not me,” Julia acknowledges sharing some of the details of Dan’s illness have been important in raising awareness about early detection of breast cancer for men. She adds that former NSW premier Nick Greiner’s decision to go public with his breast cancer battle has also helped the cause.

Even before Dan’s diagnosis, breast cancer awareness was a cause close to Julia Morris’s heart. She raised almost $200,000 for the National Breast Cancer Foundation when she won Celebrity Apprentice Australia in 2011.

She also credits the reality show, which pits celebrities (at varying ends of the fame cycle) against one another in a series of corporate and PR challenges, with kickstarting her acting career at the ripe old age of 44.

She says the Apprentice job came at the 11th hour — one week before shooting began — leading her to suspect another celebrity dropped out at the last minute.

As the family’s chief breadwinner, Julia would fly home to Australia from LA every few weeks to do a swag of well-paid corporate gigs.

It was during one of her stints back home that the offer of Celebrity Apprentice came.

Competing against Pauline Hanson, Deni Hines and Warwick Capper allowed Julia to finally show Australian audiences her serious side. Unlike Hines, whose reputation was tarnished by a series of catty confrontations with beauty queen Jesinta Campbell, Julia managed to be strong without being labelled bitchy. No mean feat for a woman in the reality genre.

Not only did she win the series, but the experience finally allowed her to show the Aussie audience that she was capable of a lot more than the broad comedy she had been known for in the 1990s TV series Full Frontal.

So impressive was her turn on the show that Nine bosses sat her down and essentially offered her a buffet of TV gigs and ultimately the role on House Husbands.

Seizing her first big acting opportunity also meant yet another move for Julia and her young family, leaving LA for Sydney and then ultimately Melbourne, where the series is based.

“I said to Dan I think we would be really silly not to ride this wave,” she says.

“I just sensed that something had shifted. I was getting booked for more corporate gigs. There was just more interest.”

Julia’s screen husband, actor Gary Sweet, says ambition is one of the traits he most admires about her and that she had approached her role on House Husbands with the same gusto that a mature-age university student showed their extra reading assignments.

“I didn’t know much about Julia before House Husbands,” Gary says. “I knew she was funny and that anything she seemed to enter she would win (Julia has won the reality singing series It Takes Two as well as Celebrity Apprentice, but has ruled out going for the trifecta by doing Dancing With the Stars next).

“She’s keen on winning which is not that dissimilar to me. She’s ambitious and I mean that in the best sense of the word. She’s determined and she’s very clever.”

Gary says Julia is hugely popular with the cast and crew because of her boundless enthusiasm. And — though she’s still relatively new to the acting game — Julia has well and truly held her own alongside Oscar-nominated actor Rachael Griffiths who has joined the series this year, he says.

“I don’t have any G-rated stories about Julia — they’re all R-rated,” he says with a hearty laugh.

“She’s just a joy to be around. Underneath all her bluster is a deeply caring, generous and kind woman.”

Gary says Julia’s success at reality TV hasn’t reignited his desire to give it a crack. He laughs when he says his “awful” stint on Dancing with the Stars was enough for him.

“There’s no chance I would do that again. As an actor you get to create a character — absolving you of any personal responsibility for making a d — k of yourself. There’s nowhere to hide with that (reality). I was awful,” he says.

Not so for Julia, who is shameless in her desire to entertain people — on and off the small screen. Before hitting the reality jackpot in 2011, Julia Morris spent two years on the audition circuit in LA.

She recounts her experiences there without even the slightest hint of bitterness. Not only does she accept how the game works, she seems to relish her own rejection because it now provides great stand-up fodder.

“I kept getting to a certain point in the (casting) process and that was it,” she says.

“My agent told me I was essentially invisible to the casting agents and that I would either need to lose weight or put weight on if I wanted to make it.

“It’s always awesome when someone tells you things like that about yourself.

“But she was right. I lost some weight. She also suggested I grow my hair long and go back to my natural colour (brunette from blonde).

“Lots of people make so many changes along the way — new hair, even surgery — and then they still don’t get the work.”

Julia says the highlight of her Hollywood experience was auditioning for Cameron Crowe, the director behind such hits as Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire.

“Sadly I didn’t really have a chance because they went in a different direction with the role (in We Bought a Zoo) — it went to an African American man (J.B. Smoove),” she laughs.

Julia says she was surprised to find herself auditioning for roles alongside actors who had already made it. She recalls sitting in rooms waiting to audition alongside Peri Gilpin of Frasier fame and Laura San Giacomo, who famously played Julia Roberts’s best friend in Pretty Woman.

Hollywood has a short memory. And only A-listers can pick and choose the roles they want. For Julia and the rest of the actors who live in Hollywood every week is casting cattle calls — where actors are repeatedly scrutinised by panels of experts to land even minor roles on TV or film.

For people made of less steely stuff, receiving such regular and pointed criticism could be soul-destroying. Not for the Australian who happily boasts of having a healthy enough ego to not let a little thing like her looks, age or even the constant rejection stand in her way.

Even when she was at her heaviest, Julia says she never felt that people treated her differently.

In the 1990s a far more voluptuous version became a household name through roles on Full Frontal, In Melbourne Tonight and Beauty and the Beast. Back then everything was bigger — her dress size, her acting and her self-confidence.

Julia says she “adored” Hollywood and all its foibles and hasn’t ruled out returning there one day.

While she has always been happy to live a gypsy life, she acknowledges that her two daughters are getting to ages where taking them away from their schools and friends is a more difficult proposition.

“Dan and I have the same sense of adventure,” she says.

“It was much easier when the kids were little. Now they’re in school it’s much harder to uproot them.

“I think we could still move pretty easily between three cities — London, Melbourne and LA — because we have made so many close friends in each of those places. But starting somewhere new again would be tough. It’s hard to make friends when you’re in your 40s.

“It’s easy for me. I go off to work. It’s Dan and the girls who have to make a whole new life there.”

She adds that she wouldn’t want her girls to spend their teenage years in image-obsessed Hollywood and end up becoming “tank-top and lip gloss girls”.

“We were at the playground one day when one of the Kardashian sisters was there playing with her little boy and the paparazzi were there swearing and shouting,” she says.

“They didn’t care there were little kids there. It was awful.

“I have always been very protective of my girls. I don’t take them to movie premieres. There are no photos of them posted on the internet or on Facebook.

“They know I am on television and have started to ask questions like, ‘Is he famous?’ about friends, as if being famous is better.”

For Julia, who is looking forward to spending her holidays holed up in the house watching Jennifer Aniston movies, fame is now ironically the very last thing on her mind these days.

“I am going to be like (the recluse) Howard Hughes ‒ without the jars of urine,” she jokes.

House Husbands returns on Monday at 9pm on Channel 9.