EQUITY FAREWELLS BELOVED MEMBER ANNE PHELAN
Australian performers are mourning the loss of one of their most esteemed colleagues; actor and activist Anne Phelan.
Since proudly joining Equity in 1968, Anne was a continuous presence on Australian stages and screens, starring in some of the country’s most beloved productions. As well as roles in Prisoner, Bellbird, Neighbours and everything in between, Anne was a passionate activist, campaigner, fundraiser and mentor.
In 2016, Anne received Equity’s highest honour, the annual Equity Lifetime Achievement Award, Presented by FOXTEL.
Equity president Chloe Dallimore says Anne was nominated by her performer peers because of her impressive career as well as her outstanding record as a humanitarian.
“Anne was not only one of Australia’s most recognisable and popular performers, she also demonstrated a lifetime’s commitment to social justice — standing up for what she believes in both publicly and also quietly, tirelessly behind the scenes. She was an enduring activist with the Victorian Actors Benevolent Trust and Oz Showbiz Cares/Equity Fights AIDS”.
This interview with Anne was published in our 2016 Winter edition to celebrate her Lifetime Achievement Award.
LIFETIME AWARD A THRILL
Being honoured by her peers with the Equity Lifetime Achievement Award is a career highlight, Anne Phelan tells Lizzie Franks.
Although Anne Phelan has been in more than 50 stage productions and starred in some of Australia’s most iconic TV series — Bellbird, Prisoner, Something in the Air — she still calls herself an “accidental actress”.
“I was playing badminton in a church hall. I was captain of the team. And I got a phone call — this is when I was about 15 — from this guy, a stranger. The local priest who supervised the letting out of the hall had given him my phone number. He was with an amateur musical theatre company and they rehearsed in the same hall that we played badminton in. He asked if they could have an extra night using the hall and I said that was fine.
“Pleasantries over with, I nearly hung up and then he said, ‘Phelan? Are you any relation to Barry and Peter?’ And I said, ‘Yes, they’re my older brothers.’ And he said, ‘I went to school with your brothers. If you’re a Phelan you can sing’, because both my brothers were beautiful singers. And I said, ‘Yes, we’re a musical family. You know, Saturday night round the piano’ And he said, ‘We need chorus members’. I almost didn’t know what he meant, because we weren’t theatrical at all.”
Phelan joined the back row of the chorus of Kismet. “It means fate,” she says with a laugh.
In the 1970s, Phelan’s friend Rod Delany, whom she had worked with in amateur theatre, phoned and asked if she’d like to “do a play and get paid for it”. Phelan thought “what a fucking great idea. Get paid for a hobby that I love!”
“I did this show in Adelaide. It was supposed to run for eight weeks and it ran for seven months. It was a two hander. A musical called I Do I Do. And then it was sort of like ‘Oh I’m an actress’. I really did fall into it and at 68 I’m still floundering around.”
Over the past five decades, Phelan has become a familiar face on our TV screens thanks to roles in everything from Mother and Son and Neighbours to City Homicide and Winners and Losers.
“One of my first long-term television jobs was Bellbird where I was surrounded by the likes of Terry Norris and people of that ilk who were, and still are, terribly important to our union and have a great sense of fairness and justice. I was in my early 20s and the extraordinary cast of Bellbird was a big influence. I often call it my nursery.”
In October, Phelan was selected by Australian performers to receive the 2016 Equity Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by Foxtel. As well as a formidable CV that spans the length and breadth of the industry, Phelan is widely admired and respected for her advocacy and charity work.
She is patron of Positive Women Victoria, a member of Actors for Refugees and has raised money for The Choir of Hard Knocks and the Victorian Actors Benevolent Trust. She has also been passionately involved in several Equity campaigns.
“When you’re lucky enough to be surrounded by not only great actors but also people who have a great sense of social justice and are unionists, like I was on Bellbird, I think that rubs off. And then of course over the years I’ve experienced personally what the union can do,” says Phelan, who joined Equity in 1968.
“I’ve been very aware of the benefits from very early on because I did a lot of touring. In regional touring you were billeted out with people. There was no living away from home allowance; there was no accommodation provided. Very rarely was it a plane fare. It was, you know, hop on a bus or a train. I think a lot of people really have no idea about some of the reforms we’ve had thanks to Equity, so I do my best to try to remind performers about that and how far we’ve come by sticking together.”
Abbe Holmes was among the many Australian performers who nominated Phelan for the Lifetime Achievement Award. “Her deeply authentic performances, across all the disciplines, reflect a uniqueness of character that is particularly Australian. I’ve always championed her self-effacing simplicity, humour and warmth.
She is a true jobbing actor, for whom acting is her very reason to live.
She is representative of a large pool of Australian actors, not famous, never stars, but loved and respected in the industry by all.” says Holmes.
In 2007, Phelan was awarded an Order of Australia for her services to the arts and to the community. She is also the recipient of eight Best Actress Awards including an AFI award for Mumma in Poor Man’s Orange. She was voted the Variety Club TV Actress of the Year for her role in The Harp in the South and received two Television Society of Australia Awards for her role as Myra Desmond in Prisoner. She picked up her second AFI award for Mon Taylor in Something In the Air.
Despite the awards and accolades, Phelan has never been one to shy away from discussing the realities of life as a performer.
“I’ve got a poster that’s framed. It’s from The West Australian I think. It says ‘Why top actress is on the dole.’ When I got my first AFI for The Harp in the South, I hadn’t worked for months. And I remember one of the journalists said, ‘What’s next for you?’ And I said, ‘the dole’. They thought I meant Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. They said, ‘Oh that’s a fabulous play.’ And I went, “No, no, no. I’m talking about the dole office,” she laughs.
Phelan has been based in Romsey, a town 60km north of Melbourne, for 35 years.
“It’s funny because when I’ve been working in the local pub here — the town knew me, the regulars — but if a passerby came in they would presume I owned the pub because I was on television! My CV looks good because I’ve been around for a while and I’ve done so many different things but sometimes those theatre jobs are eight weeks. And it might be the only eight weeks you work that year. Or you might have a lead guest role in an episode of something and it’s two days’ work, whereas on screen it’s a massive role. It sounds like I’m whining but I’m not. I just think it’s something you have to accept as a performer.”
For Phelan her most treasured memories as a performer are the times she’s spent working on Australian plays.
“I think it’s to do with a familiarity — the characters, the language. I also enjoy working with the writer. I’ve done two Katherine Thomson plays, which were both wonderful. Diving for Pearls and Mavis Goes to Timor. That one was based on a real story after she [Thompson] and Angela Chaplin had seen the documentary on television, which funnily enough I narrated.
“Katherine being in the rehearsal room, never imposing but just being there and going ‘Oh, that doesn’t work’. I find that exciting. That’s happened a couple of times with new plays where the writing is still evolving. And I love that.”
Being honoured by her peers with the Equity Lifetime Achievement award is also a career highlight, says Phelan.
“I’m very, very chuffed. There’s something very special about this one. Being peer-nominated means a lot,” she says.
Past recipients of the Equity Lifetime Achievement Award include Peter Carroll, Maggie Dence, Ron Haddrick, Jill Perryman, Kevan Johnston, Toni Lamond AM, Grant Page and the late Bob Hornery.
“Those people who have received this award before me, I’m such a great admirer of their work and of them as people. And I think the thing that’s given me the best feeling is just knowing that I’ve joined this fantastic group of people.”
