Having just turned 60, Magda Szubanski is revelling in a happy place

″I can feel myself blushing!” says Magda Szubanski. “I was thinking, ‘Do I really want to talk about my personal life in this interview?’ But I don’t need to keep it a secret: I’ve been single for ages. I would love to meet someone and fall in love but for the moment, I am very happily a spinster.”

At first glance, this exchange seems unremarkable: as one of Australia’s most beloved comic performers, with a career spanning 35 years, Magda has grown accustomed to journalists asking about her romantic life. But it wasn’t always so. In 1992, a reporter from a women’s magazine pushed her to address “the rumours that you are homosexual”.

After brushing off the question, Magda cut the interview short and went home. Then the panic set in. As she recalls in her superb 2015 memoir, Reckoning, she became “overwhelmed with an emotional pain so extreme,
I felt as though I was dying … I slid down the wall of my hallway gasping and weeping; I banged my head against the wall and I pounded my skull with my clenched fist.”

The idea that one day, she could talk openly about her sexuality – becoming a role model for LGBTQI+ people and a pivotal figure in the fight for marriage equality – never crossed her mind.

“Back then, it was inconceivable that the public might embrace you for who you were,” Magda says, sitting in the boardroom of Nine’s Melbourne headquarters.

“When we dreamed about equality, it was almost in terms of a science-fiction fantasy.

“We assumed that we’d still get bashed and persecuted. The best we could hope for was that we wouldn’t be sent to jail; that we could find a pocket of like-minded people and live openly in our small little world.”

On April 12, Magda turned 60. For her, this milestone is a chance to take stock and reflect on all that’s good about her life. In many ways, she’s happier now than she’s ever been.

“There is a certain comfort that comes with age,” she says. “It’s not as though you have life all figured out, because there is still a lot to learn. Once you have some life experience under your belt, though, you feel like you understand things a bit better. You don’t have those raging insecurities you had when you were younger.”

To wit: when paparazzi snapped her swimming at Bondi Beach in 2011, her self-consciousness quickly gave way to a steely defiance.

“I wanted to cry,” she told Andrew Denton in a 2018 television interview.

“Then I thought, ‘F… them!’ I’m going to go down there with all the models and just be fat on Bondi Beach and they can get f…ed.′ It actually became really liberating.”

The downsides of ageing, she acknowledges, are the niggling aches and pains that announce themselves with growing frequency. These pale in comparison, however, to her gratitude for all the things her body does well.

“I’m more sporty than people realise,” she says. “I’m a good dancer – I love a bit of a boogie – and I’m a great hugger. That was hard for me during COVID because I love giving hugs and I know I’m really good at it.”

Having received one such hug at the end of our interview, I can confirm this is true. Magda’s warmth, honesty and vulnerability – three traits she shares with her most famous comic character, Sharon Strzelecki – have endeared her to generations of Australians from all backgrounds.

In 2003 and 2004, Magda received the highest Q-score (a measure of celebrities’ familiarity and appeal) of any local television presenter. Companies including Jetstar and Jenny Craig have paid her handsomely to star in their advertisements, while marriage-equality advocates confirm that her campaigning efforts were crucial in convincing a majority of Australians to vote “yes” during the 2017 postal survey.

“I’m more sporty than people realise. I’m a good dancer and I’m a great hugger – I love giving hugs and I’m really good at it.”Credit: David Mandelberg

All of which prompted some fans to question whether Magda is simply too nice to pull off her latest role – hosting a revived version of game show The Weakest Link on Nine.

The series debuted in Australia in 2001, with the late Cornelia Frances
as its theatrically villainous ringmaster. In each episode, eight contestants enter the studio as strangers, working together to bank the maximum amount of prize money by answering general knowledge questions. The aim is to build a “chain” of correct answers; at the end of each round, contestants vote to eliminate the person they consider the greatest liability.

It is Magda’s job to farewell evictees with the famous phrase: “You are the weakest link. Goodbye!”

“I liked The Weakest Link and like most people, I love Magda Szubanski,” one person posted on Twitter, “but I’m not sure how our national treasure is going to fit in the role of nasty host.”

Magda jokingly addressed such concerns in Nine’s press release, telling viewers: “I’ve pretended to be nice my whole career; now I finally get to play myself.” In truth, she has no desire to mimic what she describes as the “brutal” tone of the original UK series.

“This version is like a traditional quiz show combined with Survivor; the fun is in watching people scheming and conniving. It will be stern and strict and competitive and cheeky – but it won’t be cruel.”

“The world is in a different place compared to when the English version started,” she says. “I don’t think people are in the mood for something like that right now. This version is like a traditional quiz show combined with Survivor; the fun is in watching people scheming and conniving. It will be stern and strict and competitive and cheeky – but it won’t be cruel.”

Last month, the ABC’s Australian Story documented Magda’s volunteer work with 19-year-old Will Connolly, dubbed “Egg Boy” by media after he cracked an egg over the head of far-right politician Fraser Anning in 2019. (Connolly was protesting a tweet, posted by the then-senator in the wake of terrorist attacks on two New Zealand mosques, which asked, “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?“)

After meeting at a conference, Magda and Will became friends. As bushfires ravaged many parts of Australia in early 2020, the pair signed on as ambassadors for Regeneration, a program that helps disaster-affected communities heal through creative arts workshops.

“We’ve met some people who’ve been through drought, then bushfires, then COVID and now the floods,” Magda says. “Those traumas can manifest in so many different ways and it can really undermine people’s sense of identity.”

Her interest in this topic is far from academic – as Magda so eloquently explains in her memoir, her life has been shaped by trauma. Her maternal grandfather, for instance, lost 10 of his 13 siblings, all of whom died in circumstances resulting from extreme poverty, while her father, Zbigniew Szubanski, was an assassin for the Polish resistance in World War II.

Though Zbigniew was on the right side of history, he was not spared what Magda calls the “moral trauma” that such work entails.

“He never once let me win,” she writes in Reckoning, recalling the tennis matches she played with her father as a girl. “He showed no mercy … he was trying to cure me of weakness. In order to help me survive, he thought he needed to expunge normal human frailty.”

“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve definitely become more courageous.” Credit: David Mandelberg

Through years of therapy, Magda realised that her father’s exacting standards were motivated by a desire to protect his daughter: as a young man fighting the Nazis, Zbigniew had good reason to equate displays of vulnerability with the risk of death.

Therapy also allowed Magda to view the “shocking temper” of her Scottish mother, Margaret, in a different light.

“It was actually an expression of her anxiety,” she says. “The more I came to understand my mother, the more I loved her. I truly believe that understanding someone and loving them go hand in hand.”

Zbigniew died in 2006, while Margaret passed away in September 2017, barely a week before Australians began voting in the Marriage Law Postal Survey. Despite her loss, Magda continued campaigning for a “yes” vote.

“The more they [opponents of same-sex marriage] attacked us, the more my fighting spirit came out and I just knew I had to see this thing through.

“I absolutely gave myself time to grieve,” she says. “But life doesn’t stop when something like this happens. The more they [opponents of same-sex marriage] attacked us, the more my fighting spirit came out and I just knew I had to see this thing through.

“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve definitely become more courageous.”

The Weakest Link begins on Tuesday, May 4, on Nine.

Photographer: David Mandelberg. Fashion editor: Penny McCarthy. Hair: Keiren Street using Wella Professionals. Make-up: Nicole Thompson using YSL. Fashion assistant: Emmerson Conrad.

Magda wears, black background: “No Biggie” glasses by Le Specs; Louise Olsen “Hug Chain” bracelet from Dinosaur Designs. White background: clothing by Et Al; bangle by Dinosaur Designs.

This article appears in Sunday Life magazine within the Sun-Herald and the Sunday Age on sale April 18. To read more from Sunday Life, visit The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.