EIGHT DECADES IN THE SPOTLIGHT
During her long and rich career, Lynne Murphy was equally at home on stage, in front of the camera or behind the radio mike.
Lynne Murphy 1923–2020
Born in Melbourne in 1923, Lynne Murphy’s love affair with the theatre began at age 17, when she saw a production of Twelfth Night at Bryant’s Playhouse in Darlinghurst, Sydney.
This inspired her to start taking acting lessons from Beryl Bryant and she soon began appearing in small roles with the company.
It was through a colleague there that Lynne discovered theatre producer/director May Hollinworth and her amateur group, the Metropolitan Players. Hollinworth was to have a lasting impact on the aspiring actress, who began in minor roles with the Players, including in a production of Our Town. The cast featured Leo McKern, with a young Betty Lucas, also in a minor role. Betty and Lynne developed a friendship that continued until Betty’s death in 2015. Other roles with Metropolitan Players included Desdemona in Othello (with Betty Lucas as Emilia) and Julie in Liliom. Lynne never looked back.
During a production of Lady Windermere’s Fan, in which she played the title role, she came to the attention of people from The Minerva Theatre in Kings Cross and this led to Lynne’s first professional stage role in 1947, the year she joined Equity. She played the outraged young school teacher, Judith Drave, in No Room at the Inn, followed by Charlotte in Pride and Prejudice and Catherine in the comedy, Little Lambs Eat Ivy.
In 1949, Lynne returned to Metropolitan Players for a tour of northern NSW and southern Queensland, receiving much acclaim for her performances in three comedies: as Lydia Languish in The Rivals, Elsie Radfern in Laburnum Grove and Viola in Twelfth Night — the same play that, as a teenager, had sparked her desire to pursue acting. Following this tour, Lynne married fellow aspiring actor Jules Feldman.
She began working regularly in radio in 1947 and, that same year, was cast alongside Peter Finch in Macquarie Radio Theatre’s production of Tolstoy’s Redemption. But her big break came the following year, when she beat practically every other young actress in Sydney to secure the role of Ann Todd in Lux Radio Theatre’s highly anticipated adaptation of The Seventh Veil.
Lynne’s success in this production pushed her into the star category and she was kept busy with a variety of work. There was the title role in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and lead roles in The Heiress and The Aspern Papers, for ABC Radio. Her Irish heritage shone through in Piano in the River and A Brooch You Throw Away, and she received one of radio’s highest accolades when she was chosen as the narrator in a production of Douglas Stewart’s verse-play, The Fire on the Snow.
Lynne’s star status was cemented when, in 1950, she won the Macquarie Radio Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama for her performance in Caltex Theatre’s Mesmer. She couldn’t attend the award ceremony because she was on tour in New Zealand with Robert Morley’s play Edward, My Son, in which she had appeared the previous year at Sydney’s Theatre Royal.
As Lynne and Jules’ family grew, with the arrivals of Paul, Eloise and Peter, Lynne concentrated on radio. Roles included the headstrong Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal and the gentle and innocent Edie in On the Waterfront, alongside John Meillon, whom Lynne first worked with at the Metropolitan. There were sensitive poetry recitals, as well as many roles in the ever-popular radio serials of the day, including Mary, a movie star with a mysterious past, in The Life of Mary Southern, the cast of which included Ray Barrett and Queenie Ashton.
What’s also notable about this serial is that Richard Lane was one of the directors. He and Lynne would marry in 1978, following her divorce from Feldman.
Lynne also appeared in the popular radio serial Blue Hills, but it was as Virginia in the hospital-based serial Dr Paul that she was best-known. She took over the role originated by Dinah Shearing, joining the show in the early ’60s and staying until it ended in 1970.
After a lengthy break, and with her three children now older, Lynne returned to the stage in the mid-1960s via Q Theatre Company. Over the ensuing years, she performed for all the main theatre companies in Sydney. For the Old Tote there was Uncle Vanya and The Night of the Iguana, in a cast that included Lynne’s friend Judi Farr. There were plays at Marian Street, Belvoir Street, Griffin Theatre, The Independent and Theatre Royal.
In Queensland, she performed in Butterflies are Free for Twelfth Night and went to Canberra with the comedy Butley. In 1990, she was in Melbourne for the International Arts Festival play Abingdon Square, following its Sydney season.
In the latter part of Lynne’s career, when she was in her 70s, she accrued an enviable list of credits with the Sydney Theatre Company in The Crucible, The Visit, Just Bent, Phedra, The Philadelphia Story, You Can’t Take it With You, Three Sisters, Seneca’s Oedipus, A Cheery Soul, End Game and Howard Katz.
Her early TV work included a number of plays for the ABC, such as Swamp Creatures by Alan Seymour, in which she played Amy, the frail and delicate sibling of a domineering older sister. A Sydney Morning Herald TV critic called it “one of the finest drama efforts I have seen done here”.
Other TV plays included Shadow of a Pale Horse, The Outcasts, in which she played the wife of Governor Macquarie, The Pigeon and The Runaway. From 1961 to ’62, she played Brenda Grey in more than 150 episodes of The Story of Peter Grey, Australia’s second attempt at continuing soap opera, opposite James Condon and Moya O’Sullivan. She also appeared in Riptide, The Rovers, countless episodes of Crawford’s popular crime dramas Homicide and Matlock Police, had guest roles in series such as Catwalk and Boney, an episode of the ABC’s Norman Lindsay Festival called The Cousin from Fiji, with Ruth Cracknell, and the now-cult series The Evil Touch. She appeared in Certain Women for the ABC and Class of ’74 for Grundy’s, and then came Cash Harmon’s ground-breaking Number 96. She joined the series in 1976, playing Fay Chandler for three months.
In the late ’70s, Lynne worked with English comedians Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett in a Channel 9 series, The Two Ronnies in Australia.
Over the next 30-plus years, she appeared on our screens in long-running series, short-lived series, miniseries and telemovies. Her credits included The Young Doctors, a couple of different characters in A Country Practice — most notably, the mother of Grant Dodwell’s Dr Simon Bowen — Rafferty’s Rules, GP, Palace of Dreams and The Last Resort. Other roles came in Perhaps Love, Murder Call, All Saints, White Collar Blue, The Cooks and The Alice.
On the big screen, Lynne worked with acclaimed directors and actors in movies such as Cecil Holmes’ Gentle Strangers, Bruce Beresford’s Puberty Blues, Richard Lowenstein’s Say a Little Prayer, as Lisa Harrow’s mother in Gillian Armstrong’s Last Days of Chez Nous and as John Hargreaves’ mother in Claude Whatham’s Hoodwink.
She was particularly proud of the 2001 docudrama Kabbarli, in which she played the lead role of Daisy Bates. Lynne looked sensational as the eccentric, desert-dwelling Bates, who was never without straw hat, handbag and black parasol. It was during the filming of Kabbarli that she developed a deep love of the desert.
Richard Lane wrote in the Companion to Theatre in Australia: “Early in her career Lynne Murphy brought sensitivity and tall, willowy beauty to classic and contemporary roles. Later she invested character parts with comic energy, and lent quiet maturity to her playing of sophisticated women.”
Following Richard’s death in 2008, Lynne relocated to Melbourne, where she lived in Balaclava with her cats and was active with the Society of Women Writers Victoria. In 2014, as she entered her 90s, she gave her final performance in the ABC’s acclaimed comedy series Please Like Me, in which she appeared in a brief scene on a tram.
Obituary by Nigel Giles
