Stage legend Robyn Nevin joins Doctor Doctor in a shock role

Having run theatre companies and performed on stage for nearly six decades, 78-year-old Robyn Nevin is enjoying a late career change. Following a memorable role in 2013's Upper Middle Bogan, she returns to the small screen in Doctor, Doctor.

A big fan of series originator Tony McNamara’s work, Nevin says the role “just came up”. By the time she joined the show, he had left to pursue work in Hollywood – most recently as screenwriter of The Favourite – but he visited the set while Nevin was filming.

Making a surprise entrance, Robyn Nevin shakes things up in Doctor Doctor.Credit: Tony Mott

Writer Katherine Thompson and producer and lead actor Rodger Corser (Dr Hugh Knight) helped her with background; the cast read-through and script fleshed out her character. “It’s fundamentally what you read on the page that guides you, of course.”

Nevin plays Dinah, mother of tearaway Harriet (Genevieve Hegney), who has skipped town and left Hugh to raise their daughter Eliza. No one knows Dinah is coming to Whyhope, least of all Hugh.

“The audience know what [Harriet’s] been through, she’s a pretty wild character... who’s cleaned up of course to have the baby. Those kind of characters are very disruptive and very wilful, as is Hugh really, so to be a mother to that is quite a job,” she says.

“[Dinah] is a grandmother so I think the audience will be sympathetic to her being there. And it’s the only grandchild she will ever have, if we’re depending on Harriet.”

After nearly six decades working in theatre, Nevin is looking at screen roles.Credit: Tony Mott 

At this stage, Dinah is not an ongoing character but "never say never". “They’re so inventive these writers on Doctor Doctor, they have very complicated plotlines, they’re constantly taking you around crazy corners.”

In some ways, it’s a return to Nevin's beginnings. She gave up theatre “when I was 20 with a grand flourish” and worked on ABC television in Hobart, which won her several Logies as popular presenter.

Nevin has appeared on screens big and small in the intervening years. She played a lead role in the AFI-Award winning Careful, He Might Hear you and on TV in everything from The Dismissal to Top of the Lake.

More recently, she was the uptight blue-blooded grandmother in the ABC’s Upper Middle Bogan. Nevin’s comic prowess was quickly apparent as the posh matriarch, appalled by the crassness of her adopted daughter’s biological family. A brilliant script by Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope provided her with rich material: “My grandfather worked very hard so we all could feel entitled.”

Despite being considered one of the country’s finest stage actors, she is not often recognised in public; Upper Middle Bogan changed that. “I was having lunch with Judy Davis and this grandmother came over to me and said, ‘My grandson would like to say hello, he’s 10 years old’. It was a very smart series and it reached a very wide age group.”

The cast of Upper Middle Bogan.

The original show has been picked up by US streaming network Hulu and it is being remade for US audiences by CBS. “And of course the reason we’re not doing series four is because Patrick [Brammell] went to LA and won’t come back – and we can’t do it without him.” She pauses. “Well, we should try, shouldn’t we?”

Actors in television and film spend a lot of time waiting around on set - setting up takes far more time than the filming. Rather than expend energy socialising between takes, Nevin prefers to read or listen to podcasts, largely about US politics.

About 18 months ago, she decided to devote time to screen work. The lead time for television can be as little as six weeks whereas theatre is often planned a year or more in advance. “I was always tied up, willingly and happily, to do plays on stage and run theatre companies. And then I had an epiphany … once we moved down to the country (in the NSW Southern Highlands) it became a very different way of living my life.”

Robyn Nevin as Mrs Higgins (left), with Anna O'Byrne as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.Credit: Chris Hopkins

Musical theatre has also beckoned. In 2017, she played Mrs Higgins in Opera Australia’s production of My Fair Lady. “It’s a small, brilliantly written very funny role. I didn’t have to cry on stage for the first time in decades, and that kind of made me think I can work in different ways.”

“I don’t want to do these plays that drag me through this emotional morass.”

The day after we speak, she is heading to Sundance for upcoming film Relic. The first feature from Melbourne-based writer/director Natalie Erika James, it was inspired by watching her grandmother disappear into dementia.

“What drew me to this absolutely was the script and then I met the director; the combination was a winner because [James is] so bright and so interesting ... It’s a film that looks at Alzheimer's through the horror lense. So it’s deeply personal for her and it’s a huge universal subject, something that touches almost every family.”

Nevin in 1978 in a shot from ABC publicity.Credit: ABC publicity

Co-starring with Emily Mortimer and LA-based Melbourne actor Bella Heathcote, she has not yet seen the film when we speak. “I really don’t want to in a way because I look so frightful. It’s not a vanity role.”

Despite a stellar career, Nevin still gets nervous. Interviewed in 2015, she said denial is her immediate response when a role is offered. “I can’t do this role because I am too small or I am too old or I’m too grey or I’m just not the right type, I’m too cold, I’m too tough, I’m too silly. I’ve got a million hoops I need to jump through. Then I walk tentatively into a rehearsal room and pretend I’m confident. It’s always terrifying. I never feel confident because I’ve got the lead role. My confidence comes from the quality of the writing and the quality of the people around me.”

Six years after moving to the Southern Highlands, Nevin and her husband, American actor and writer Nicholas Hammond, are relishing life in the country. On three hectares, they have two horses, three sheep and two dogs.

At this stage of her career, Nevin is discerning about work options. “I am picky, of course. I mean life’s too short – and my life’s getting shorter. I certainly don’t want to do any that I don’t want to do.”

Doctor Doctor airs on Nine on Wednesday nights.