The rise of Asher Keddie

HER childhood acting years clipped her confidence, but Asher Keddie no longer struggles with self-doubt.

Asher Keddie

ASHER Keddie is hot, according to a straw poll of all three men in my household. Don't take their word for it. She's up for a Gold Logie tomorrow night as most popular television personality and the million or so fans of Network Ten's comedy-drama series Offspring (me included) are counting sleeps (four) until Keddie returns for a third season of this quirky hit in the lead role of obstetrician Nina Proudman. So sure is she as the deliciously discombobulated doctor awkward at love that when I'm introduced to her on set I call her Nina, as if I've come to the mocked-up neonatal intensive care unit with a dilated cervix instead of a notebook and pen.

Viewers not yet hooked on Offspring might have seen Keddie over a decade ago in the Melbourne Theatre Company production of Hannie Rayson's play Life After George, or in Foxtel's critically acclaimed drama Love My Way (2004-07). Or they may have caught her more recently portraying Blanche D'Alpuget in the 2010 Hawke biopic, or Ita Buttrose in Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo, where she captured the magazine supremo's lisp and steely determination with the convincing authority we expect from legends like Meryl Streep. In January, when Keddie won Australia's version of the Oscars - an AACTA award for audience choice of best performance in a TV drama - she had a momentary brain snap. Was this gong for Nina or Ita? Her actor-musician husband Jay Bowen whispered "Paper Giants" in her ear as she waltzed towards the stage. The Logie nomination recognises both. Her portrayal of Ita struck such a chord with the public that Buttrose's own career enjoyed a resurgence. That's Keddie's magnetism. She's slightly built with the trim figure of a former dancer, highly intelligent, and yes, she's hot. She's also wired to pursue perfection like any alpha personality who pushes themselves beyond good enough.

We almost didn't connect for this interview. It was on one minute, off the next. There'd been a misunderstanding when an uncle whom I'd rung for insights into Keddie felt protective of her privacy. His concern collided with her exhaustion at the end of Offspring's hectic shoot, and our appointment was abruptly cancelled. I filed her under precious and prickly but she proves me wrong. She's instantly likeable and gregarious. It could be an act. That is, after all, her gift. But there's a lack of conceit in the way she acknowledges grim periods when her confidence crashed. Something happened to the freckle-nosed kid who'd larked around as an eight-year-old actress in outback shows starring greats like Jack Thompson and Rachel Ward - something that she's seldom unpacked publicly. "As open as I feel talking to you today I am a person who plays my cards closely to my chest," she warns.

Creeping public interest in her life pinches an emotional nerve. "Even though I'm a 37-year-old woman who has been doing it since I was eight years old, I feel as though I'm grappling with a new situation," she says. "Five years ago it didn't feel as though we were like Hollywood; I find it gobsmacking that we are now. I'm not entirely comfortable with it. I wish I was better at it," she adds. "I'm more than happy when people stop me on the street for a photograph when they say, 'God we love Offspring' because I love it, too. That's cool. What is not cool is being followed by paparazzi on a private holiday - that's frightening to me. It's a weird thing."

Childhood shaped Asher Keddie's artistic sensibility with exciting yet difficult challenges. Named after the British actress Jane Asher, it's tempting to imagine Keddie's mother, Robi, had the career of her daughter mapped out from birth. The former literature teacher christened her second daughter Bronte after the English novelist and poet and the two girls were kept busy. Bronte did gymnastics and Asher took ballet and singing lessons. "Someone was always scuttling us off to some activity," Keddie recalls of growing up in a middle-class Melbourne bayside suburb.

Her father, James, was a teacher too. He loved horses and took Asher on holiday trail rides. Her mother sometimes worked weekends to afford private school fees and the girls spent swags of time at their grandmother's house where they read voraciously and dived into a bottomless dress-up trunk. Keddie describes an atmosphere where creativity was encouraged, but the tempo quickened with serious purpose from the age of eight. She's hazy about the chronology and how she got an agent. Her mother's vague as well but she thinks a friend who ran a children's talent agency wanted a cute blonde girl for a fruit juice ad and it went from there. Within a short time Keddie had scored parts in television mini-series filmed on location in Alice Springs and The Grampians. In 1985 she appeared in Five Mile Creek, Glass Babies, Palace of Dreams, and Fortress. A year later came Last Frontier. "I can't remember doing the first audition. I remember a lot of things about that time. I remember things just changing," Keddie recalls. "I started working quite heavily, quite quickly. They were long shoots so essentially I lived in a hotel room by myself for 16 weeks. This would never happen now."

She has "some really weird memories". At nine years old she recalls being alone in a Sale motel room watching the Stanley Kubrick thriller The Shining until she was so scared she couldn't get out of bed to go the bathroom. "I have some not-so-happy memories of wanting Mum, you know really wanting Mum and Dad and my little sister because I have always had a pretty adventurous spirit and I was pretty confident as a young kid but I can remember very vividly there were a couple of times when Mum and Dad were driving away and I was hysterical. I felt utterly lost and really, for want of a better word, wrong, and abandoned. It's still with me."

Actress Beth Buchanan was one of the children cast in Fortress. Two years older than Keddie, she was lucky to have her mother, Jo Buchanan, accompany her as live-in chaperone and tutor for the school-age actors. Her recollections are much rosier but she hasn't forgotten Keddie's distress as her parents departed after a weekend visit. Jo Buchanan kept a maternal eye on the children. "A lot of the stuff that happened then wouldn't happen now," she says of conditions for child stars in those days. "It would have been hard for Asher. She was only young."

The experience tested her. "What it's done to me or what it gave me was a great deal of emotional strength. What it also did was perhaps create that self-protectiveness that I still struggle with. That kind of childhood made me strong and determined and able to stay the distance because I had to look after myself. I just had to, so it was pretty tough." But she got to ride horses and jump fences without a helmet, nurturing the passion she'd inherited from her father. Then she'd return to school, juggling television scripts with maths homework until her parents put their foot down. They enrolled her at St Michael's Grammar school in St Kilda, which is known for fostering the arts, but instead of participating in plays and musicals, she froze. "I became incredibly shy. Maybe it's what those years did to me. I went back into high school and I had absolutely no idea who I was or where I fitted in, where my place was within a group of friends. I think what happened was I just lost so much confidence. The confidence actually just disappeared and I became so ... socially inept is the only way I can describe it, all through my 20s. I'd grown up with adults. That was my path and that's what happened. It's cool now but it wasn't cool for many years, it was anything but cool. I was petrified. I didn't want anyone to look at me, I didn't want anyone to see me," Keddie says. She rushes headlong towards the memory of a Year 10 monologue she had to deliver for her drama class. "I can still remember," she sucks in her breath tremulously reliving the ordeal. "I self-sabotaged so fiercely that I didn't choose it until the night before I had to perform it and I chose something completely inappropriate. It was an old man, an old homeless man delivering a soliloquy. What was I thinking?" Of course, she pulled it off. "So they wanted me to be in plays but I couldn't bring myself to do it."

School contemporaries remember her best for what she's become since she left. Bruce Sampson, who tutored her in maths, never imagined she'd make it as an actress. "If you'd asked me then I would have said, 'Not a hope in hell, really'." His impression of her potential matches more or less how she thought of herself. "The less I worked, the more my confidence decreased. Then I got to 18 and thought, what am I meant to do? Am I meant to be an actress, because everyone thinks that I will be, or do I want to work with horses?" There was never any talk of her going to university. "There was just an expectation that I'd be an actor, so I kind of rebelled against that for a while. I thought, 'Why didn't you encourage me to do something else? I've got a mind. I could have gotten into medicine if I'd worked harder.' I really felt as though I'd sold myself short."

She doesn't bear any grudge against her parents, who divorced when she was 19. She adores them both. Her mother, Robi Lawrence, has re-partnered and lives in Perth near her youngest daughter Bronte; her father stayed in Victoria. Lawrence remembers that teary farewell on the set of Fortress. She says she got 1km down the road before announcing to her husband, "I can't do this. I can't leave her." So they drove back and Robi stayed with Asher for a few extra days. "I was very vigilant after that," she says. "But what do you do?" she asks. "We were very torn. She so wanted to do this. Do you put a dampener on it and squash a child's dream?"

Keddie's career moved in fits and starts after she had left school with small guest parts in TV series until theatre's enthusiastic embrace steadied her. Outsiders who saw her on stage knew her talent would propel her to giddy heights long before she could admit it to herself. In her early 20s she won a role in the 1998 MTC production of Patrick Marber's Closer. "It was the first time she'd been on stage," recalls the director, Bruce Myles. "You just knew then that she had whatever 'it' is, that very elusive thing that you know immediately you see it. She was kind of ferocious in the way that she attacked this role, which was a killer. She seemed fearless. She just kept on getting better. It was as if she'd been on stage for 20 years."

Keddie had no formal training. Her uncle, Richard Keddie, a film producer who made the Hawke telemovie with his niece in the plum role of lusty Blanche d'Alpuget, believes the theatre developed her skills and creative resolve. Not only did she meet her husband in the cast of Cyrano De Bergerac but she also strengthened her nerve under the guidance of MTC's artistic duo of Simon Phillips and Kate Cherry. "It was the turning point for me," Keddie says of this time. "My love of performance kicked in. I regained my confidence. Once it would have been terrifying to me that you couldn't hear a pin drop but I learnt to really get off on that. I worked with the best actors in the country."

Cherry, now artistic director of Perth's Black Swan State Theatre Company, says we're lucky Keddie has stayed in Australia. "We knew she was an extraordinary acting talent. She's got the ability to enter into the tragedy of something but she's also a brilliant comedian. She pursues an emotional truth in her work sometimes at the expense of herself. It will only be a matter of time before she's dominating our screen. She's brilliant."

Cherry wishes selfishly she could lure Keddie back on stage to perform the classics - Tennessee Williams, Chekhov - but is nonetheless grateful for her muscular contribution to the revival of Australian television drama. "She's one of the lionesses of her generation."

If success is born from hard work, prodigious talent, excellence and the freakish confluence of classy writers, directors and producers, then the planets have aligned for Keddie. Along with an ensemble of actors including Kat Stewart, Claudia Karvan, Dan Wyllie and Deborah Mailman, she's been nurtured by the visionary producers John Edwards and Imogen Banks who are responsible for a raft of critically acclaimed TV dramas: The Secret Life of Us, Love My Way, Paper Giants, Offspring, Tangle. Their next project is the remake of Puberty Blues. "Keddie is a consummate professional," Edwards says. "She is unforgiving of coasting, unforgiving of laziness; she is a real delight because you get her heart and soul."

Dan Wyllie, Keddie's co-star in Love My Way, recalls their first scene together where her bittersweet character Julia gave birth. It was a breakthrough series for both young actors fresh off the stage. "I respected her work ethic. The depths she wanted to plumb, laying herself emotionally bare," he says. Love My Way was dark and angsty. Offspring is sexy and funny.

Edwards developed Offspring with award-winning writer Debra Oswald, who was sick of seeing CSI-style series with corpses on slabs. It's not so much what happens to Nina Proudman and her clan that distinguishes this show from rival family dramas. The characters bounce around the predictable terrain of relationships, babies, love, sex, food, music and real estate. But the story shifts deftly from hilarity to heartbreak with inventive use of fantasy sequences and internal monologues as Nina wrestles with the unspoken thoughts and neurotic fears that plague us all. She overthinks everything. "You're not white-anting this relationship with your brain are you?" snaps her sister Billie (Kat Stewart) in the first episode of the new series. "I feel Offspring has a great point of difference to anything I've worked on or watched," Keddie says. "It offers the audience entertainment on a level that is thought-provoking and revealing about our own self-deception in life."

As Keddie paces the linoleum-lined corridors of the hospital set, blocking scenes on the final day of filming, she strays effortlessly beyond her brief as a performer. "This feels too repetitive," she tells director Kate Dennis. "I feel like we've stood here like this over the crib too many times before. Let's try this," she says, offering an alternative that pleases everybody. "And why not cut the dialogue," she suggests. "It gets in the way of the story. We're family. We don't need to say those things. It's unspoken. We can say it with a glance from the doorway." Dennis, who directed Keddie in Love My Way, gets it immediately. "She has an unusual and very solid understanding of film-making and the technicalities," she says of Keddie's reach. "Asher works very much from the gut. She just works really, really hard to make it true." Oswald, who won a 2011 NSW Premier's Literary Award for the Offspring script, is thrilled to have Keddie head the cast. "She's an extraordinary actor. And that's not me just being puffy. She can switch modes from funny, to emotionally shredded, to being a serious professional woman. We bounce tones around all the time and she pulls it off."

Offspring thrives on family entanglements. Mr and Mrs Proudman are separated but they pull together in a crisis and there's no shortage of cyclonic surprises in the weeks ahead. Keddie says she loves this aspect of the show. "I admire families who can co-exist. The idea of interdependence is so much healthier than co-dependence." A secret of her partnership with Bowen is the freedom they give each other. "I make myself do that so I don't feel all at sea when I'm alone, particularly in this industry, where I spend a lot of time alone in a hotel room or my flat in town. I don't want to feel full of anxiety and desperation. I've had enough of that growing up. I want to feel strong and standing on my own two feet. He's completely the same. It's really important to us to give that to each other. It's a very unique partnership in that way. I'm proud of it. I feel as though my entire family and social network is of a like mind. We don't have to grip on to each other too tightly."

The morning after Offspring's wrap party, Keddie schleps into the Network Ten headquarters in South Yarra spared a hangover. Her blonde hair is swept into a loose ponytail and the black jeans are tucked into knee-length tan leather boots that could be straight from Nina's wardrobe. "How's Matt doing?" she enquires of her on-screen heart-throb Matthew Le Nevez, who plays the anaesthetist Patrick. The tightness between them is inevitable given the intensity of weeks in each other's pockets. Two days earlier, Keddie had been lying in bed at 11pm in character with her phone cupped to her ear talking Le Nevez through a scene. "It helps us hit the right tone," she explains. They chase authenticity. She doesn't like endless takes. She prefers a big conversation first before the cameras roll. "I want it to be grappled with so that we're not quite sure if what we're delivering is right otherwise I don't know that it has the electricity required to entertain. If there's no creative rub I get bored."

Her paralysis during late adolescence goes part of the way to explaining her present dominance. She did a spell of therapy when she felt stuck and she's conquered the drag of anxiety and doubt. Pleased with the fruits of her labour she's thrilled to be skiving off for a week's holiday and grateful for her sanctuary outside of Melbourne where she rides the five former thoroughbred horses that bring her peace. "I can't be anything other than honest and true with the horses because they just walk away if I'm anxious. They are a great gauge for where I'm at." She took up riding after Love My Way when work was sporadic. The rekindling of this love of horses led her and Bowen to lease a property at Woodend, an hour's drive from Melbourne. "I wasn't working much at the time so I joined a horse rescue organisation and we'd get up at 4am and feed ex-racers in the middle of this really dark winter. Some of them needed a home so we took them in."

The ticking of her biological clock is something she shares with Nina, the 30-something obstetrician, but we don't talk about babies. She's sick of people asking. She's an aunty to her sister Bronte's two children and for now her personal life couldn't be richer. "I spent many, many years living in the future in my mind. For the first time I really like what my reality is and that is such a relief. I feel excited every day about challenging myself to live in the moment. I'm not always good at it. But I'm getting better at sitting still and enjoying that and it seems to be opening up more opportunity for me personally and professionally. If it comes down to spending another three months in the country between gigs I'm so happy to do that."

She loves plodding around the local town in muddy gum boots and daggy clothes. If she was Nina she'd be so dreadfully suspicious of this contentment she'd be daring disaster to strike. "Watch out, you may actually be happy," Nina thinks to herself at the start of the third season as she weighs up whether she's experiencing an "unfair amount of happiness for one person". Self-sabotage is integral to the plot of Offspring. Keddie is glad she has finally outgrown that perversion.