Actress's life proved the player is the thing

OBITUARY: Monica Maughan. Actress. Born Tonga, September 15, 1933. Died Melbourne, January 8, age 76.

OBITUARY: Monica Maughan. Actress. Born Tonga, September 15, 1933. Died Melbourne, January 8, age 76.

MONICA Maughan, one of Australia's great actresses, died last Friday at 5.30am at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne. She was 76, though until her death she remained flirtatiously vague about her age, often to the pleasure of her friends. "I've always lied about my age, so there's no point in trying to make me exact, no point at all," she liked to say.

"I loved the reticence about her age," says her friend, actor Peter Carroll. "She believed you never told anyone your age because if you did producers would think of you in a certain way; it was always important to know where you fitted into an industry."

Unlike many performers, Maughan always delighted in being an actor. She carried no shame in being merely a player, a greatly versatile one who never wanted to lose her waywardness.

"She was not only a consummate performer but a great force in the theatre," Carroll says. In her performances she was always alert to the moods and needs of those in whose company she found herself. But if her gift was an ability to close the gap between part and self, she could also be reticent when it came to her own life.

"We knew she was very ill, but she wouldn't discuss it," says her long-time friend, Melbourne actor and teacher Joan Parslow. "So we never asked."

Her agent, James Laurie, says she had been fighting a form of cancer for more than a year. "She never really told me what it was but she was still working in the theatre through that period; her death happened very quickly."

Maughan appeared in more than 100 plays, 18 feature films, even several ballets, and in just about every popular show on Australian television, including Prisoner and the ABC's black comedy miniseries The Damnation of Harvey McHugh, for which she won AFI and Logie awards. She also won accolades for her roles in A City's Child (1971), Tear from a Glass Eye (1998), and for Flying Doctors (1985).

Born Monica Cresswell Wood in Tonga to Australian parents Harold, a Methodist minister, and his wife Olive, she studied French at the University of Melbourne. There she appeared in student plays and revues with contemporaries Barry Humphries and Germaine Greer, making her debut opposite Humphries in The Front Page in April 1954.

She landed her first professional stage role in 1957 with John Sumner's Union Theatre Repertory Company, which later became the Melbourne Theatre Company, in Ring Round the Moon.

"She took the stage name Maughan -- it was totally made up -- because her father had become highly prominent in the Methodist church in Melbourne," says her close friend of many years, actor Douglas Hedge. "Monnie wasn't a churchgoer."

She starred in a national touring production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for the UTRC and played many other lead roles, becoming a favourite of the Melbourne company's loyal subscription audience.

When I was an inexperienced young actor, I worked with her in several productions, and was awed at the way she absorbed ideas so quickly. After conferring with directors she simply transformed, altered, changed her thinking. Sharp and perceptive, she missed nothing. She had extraordinary stamina, too.

I remember Sumner's production of The Crucible in 1968, in which we both appeared, Maughan pregnant and playing the demanding role of Elizabeth Proctor. One night, feeling unwell, she had the presence of mind to rush off stage several

times during an interrogation scene and vomit into a rain bucket before returning and picking up the cue as if nothing had occurred.

"When I was growing up in the early 60s in Sydney the MTC was the company," Carroll says. "It was the home of big performers, like Frank Thring, Zoe Caldwell and, of course, Monica Maughan. She had a big presence, a warm presence, and a very big technique. She was a busy performer at the start, able to wring every last bit out of what she did."

These Melbourne actors were always "the big kids", Carroll adds. "And we admired them because they were always true to themselves, audacious, pushing boundaries and not afraid of the unexpected." That has changed, and an actor such as Maughan is especially mourned.

"These days everything seems so correct -- form-filled, health-and-safety observant -- but with actors like Monica, a kind of fullness was given out and it was reassuring to watch them as a young performer."

Maughan was rarely out of work. She was due to begin rehearsals in June for the title role in a new play at Sydney's Belvoir St Theatre, Gwen in Purgatory, to be directed by Neil Armfield. The play by Tommy Murphy is an existential comedy about an African missionary in the wilderness of Australian suburbia: an old life in search of a graceful ending.

The irony would not have been lost on her. Her droll, oblique observations were a feature of the way she approached her work.

In a tough, sometimes resentful industry, Maughan's capacity for benevolence, emotional support, bounty and resolve was legendary.

She was active in the former Actors Equity, which is now part of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance.

"Monica was a formidable defender for fair play and pay for actors and she stood up to managements who abused these precepts," says veteran Melbourne actor and director Malcolm Robertson.

Carroll remembers how, gravely ill, Maughan flew to Sydney late last year to see him in a matinee performance of Opera Australia's Peter Grimes. "She looked terrific but obviously she was acting. The way she played it was simply that people mustn't know and you must just go out and do it."

A private funeral is being held today, and a public memorial later this month.

Maughan is survived by Rowland Ball, whom she married in 1968, their three daughters Ruth, Susannah and Olivia, and four grandchildren.