From The Age, Melbourne Magazine, 31 October 2008.
Life began at 40 for Catherine McClements, the veteran actor (and new mother) who's more in demand than ever, writes Susan Horsburgh.
The first time Catherine McClements appears in the new TV police drama Rush, her character, Inspector Kerry Vincent, is peering through a window watching her husband in flagrante with another woman; in the next scene, she's ramming his BMW with her car and smashing it to bits with a crowbar. "Hope you're enjoying yourself, you moll," she sneers at her sexual replacement, before warning her husband, "It's just the beginning, you scumbag!" Kerry's a cop, but one with a borderline contempt for the law - and an AVO out against her. By the end of the first episode, she's telling her underling, the head of the tactical response team: "I'm God - so you lot better start believing."
Thankfully, the warm, unassuming woman eating muffins across the table seems nothing like the slightly unhinged hard-arse she plays on TV - but that's precisely why the part appealed to her. McClements says it's liberating playing someone who doesn't have to be liked. In the mid-1990s, she found fame as earnest Rachel "Goldie" Goldstein in the TV police series Water Rats but Kerry Vincent is "a lot more jagged around the edges", says McClements. Kerry is also older, with the baggage and complex relationships that often come with age.
In the show's publicity material, the character bio says McClements' 40-something alter ego is "about to enter the 'invisible woman' era", but the 44-year-old actor insists that she herself isn't plagued by any worries of age-related irrelevance. "That's a man writing about a woman probably," says McClements, who also played a character on the verge of a midlife crisis in the recent Melbourne International Arts Festival show Appetite. "I don't even think about that. There's a lot of talk about it: 40 is the new 30. That's only because they're trying to sell magazines to 40-year-olds. I've had a baby at 43 and ... I just haven't reached that point yet. Maybe I am just about to because there's been a lot of chat about it with this character and with all the women who are my contemporaries who are working in television now. But no, it just didn't occur to me."
McClements argues that there are plenty of good female roles around, probably because she has played many of them on stage; her CV lists parts that most other actors can only covet, including Lady Macbeth, Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Catharine in the Tennessee Williams play Suddenly, Last Summer. Since graduating from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1985, she has worked pretty much non-stop in film, television and theatre, picking up Australian Film Institute awards for her performances in the TV series The Secret Life of Us and the 1990 movie Weekend with Kate. At the time of this interview, McClements was juggling three roles - in Rush, Appetite and an upcoming Foxtel series, Tangle - which might explain why she doesn't seem to suffer any of the mid-career anxiety common among similar-aged actresses.
Or maybe she really is that Zen. This is a woman who chose to deliver her two children drug-free; she's no age-obsessed prima donna. "She doesn't have a neurotic bone in her body," says her friend Claudia Karvan. "She takes earthy to a whole new level." The two actors first met at the AFI awards in 1990, when they were up against each other in the same category: Karvan for The Big Steal and McClements for Weekend with Kate. After the ceremony, McClements told Karvan she should have won. The year after, they shot the movie Redheads and each found a kindred spirit in the other. "I don't think words can do justice to our relationship," says Karvan, who counts McClements among her closest friends. "She's just someone I have an honest respect for. She's very smart and a beautiful friend." The two yoga lovers have travelled together often, everywhere from Stradbroke Island and Byron Bay to Thailand and Malaysia. "She's not driven by ambition and she's not publicity-hungry; that's a similar thing between the two of us," says Karvan, who was pregnant at the same time as McClements. "Our lives come before our work. We don't really talk about work much."
McClements' slim clippings file is proof she has never courted publicity. You won't see her working the red carpet either. "I'm from the '70s, when it was no make-up," she says. "Once I put on make-up I feel quite exposed, like I've made an effort, so if it doesn't work, (it's like), 'She made an effort, she wanted to, but it didn't work'. And also you reveal your style or what you feel comfortable in. All that sort of stuff, I find that really hard."
Today, McClements is lightly made up, looking much younger and prettier than her on-screen persona. She's dressed in a sage green shirt and brown cords, wearing thin silver bangles that jangle with her darting hand gestures. According to Karvan, McClements is compacting this year, not buying anything new except presents, and a browse through her clips on YouTube reveals that the tweed coat she's wearing today is the same one she wore in the 2003 TV mini-series she did with David Wenham, After the Deluge. McClements says her frugality has helped during the lean times. "I've got that depression-era thing from my grandmother," she says. "We've got a lot of crap in our house because we can't throw anything away."
McClements lived in Adelaide for a couple of years after graduating from NIDA and spent the late '90s in Sydney, where she was shooting Water Rats, but for the past decade she and her partner of 18 years, Polish-born actor Jacek Koman, have lived in Melbourne. Although she loved Sydney, she couldn't wait to get back. "I missed its ordinariness in a funny way, the low-key aspect of Melbourne ... and that it's sort of for everyone, whereas Sydney is not," she says. "When we did Water Rats we used to film a lot on the harbour and there were these incredible mansions and a lot of really beautiful houses pulled down and a lot of concrete monsters put up because there's a lot of new wealth. They cut off the beaches and you couldn't walk along the waterside. It just felt like it was for a certain amount of people and then that was it. But Melbourne just seems a little bit - I'm probably mistaken - but egalitarian. When I look at Federation Square, I think: this is something that was created so that a mass of people could be in the same place at the same time." Her seven-year-old daughter, Clementine-Coco, still talks about the 2006 Commonwealth Games, when the pair of them would trek into town every day for cultural events.
McClements bought her home in East St Kilda 10 years ago, when she was riding high in Water Rats. "You grow up in those Anglo white areas and you want to rub against something that puts you in perspective, I suppose." The third of four children, McClements grew up in middle-class Watsonia, going to Mass every Sunday with her parents, a high-school principal and a humanities teacher who both worked in the public system. She vividly recalls watching her first play, Peter and the Wolf, at the age of four ("I can still see that actor putting on the nose to become the wolf") but it wasn't until her after-school pottery class was cancelled in primary school that she joined her sister's drama lessons and found her passion.
For an offbeat tomboy crippled by self-consciousness, acting offered an emotional outlet. "I was very, very shy and embarrassed about myself, I think, as a kid," says McClements, who sees the same timidity in her own daughter. "I was terribly pimply and just sort of odd and didn't change my clothes a lot. There were those girls who knew how to be girls and they were always given soap as their birthday presents. I just didn't know how to do it. I was always getting notoriety at school for odd things, like we used to play that game where you'd turn into a monster and everyone thought I really did and it became a bit of a thing at school. I was socially very shy of adults, I couldn't speak on the phone, I couldn't look at anyone in the eye ... I don't know what the psychology of it is, but that was me and drama was sort of a release. Because I wasn't outgoing but probably incredibly opinionated and sensitive, it gave me a way of just getting rid of (emotion) so I could leave it behind and move on." At Eltham's Catholic Ladies' College, her acting aspirations were encouraged by a drama teacher whom 14-year-old Catherine treated abominably. McClements is still appalled by her teenage insensitivity and regrets that she can't apologise to the woman, who has since died. "I just gave her such attitude and she was so giving," recalls McClements. "She lost her husband and one of her children in this incredible boating accident and then we did this archaic Irish play about this woman who loses her husband and her son in the water. And I'm going (she does the up-yours gesture with two fingers). I just had no conception."
At 14, McClements performed her first big role, donning a Tudor period dress for a monologue as Queen Elizabeth: "I came out and I had very big thick eyebrows and (the teacher) sort of soaped them out and drew other eyebrows on, so I had four eyebrows and a red wig. It was just a disaster. I walked out in front of the school and they all burst out laughing."
Undeterred, McClements performed in several plays with St Martins Youth Arts Centre in South Yarra, but still didn't consider acting a serious career option. Instead, she enrolled in an arts degree at the University of Melbourne with a view to becoming a teacher. When a friend dared her to apply to NIDA in her first year out, though, McClements turned up for the audition and her friend didn't. At 17, she was accepted into the prestigious drama school, in the same year as Baz Luhrmann, Rosalba Clemente, Justin Monjo and Nell Schofield. Back then, Judy Davis was her hero. "I've seen her on stage and just felt sick because I had no idea how she did it," says McClements. "And I admired the way she was sort of a secret. Things have changed since I left drama school, but actors were sort of secrets (then). There was none of this sort of stuff (media interviews)."
These days, young actors are hunting American agents as soon as they graduate, but McClements says the idea of trying her luck overseas never occurred to her. "I was never really that ambitious," she says. "I suppose I was, everyone is, but I didn't have that sense of entitlement: 'It's there for me and I'm going to go and get it.' I was still really pleased when someone wanted me for an audition; I just had that underdog feel about me."
After graduating, McClements moved to Adelaide to appear in the State Theatre Company of South Australia's production of the Patrick White play Shepherd on the Rocks, directed by Neil Armfield. The renowned director, who has cast her in five of his productions in the two decades since, says McClements was always a talented actor but didn't truly shine on stage until the mid-'90s. "The interesting thing with Catherine is that she was - she is - so beautiful, and in her early career straight out of NIDA I think she was kind of misjudged and she may have misjudged herself," he says. "I don't think she made mistakes but I think she sat on her intelligence in a way ... and she tended to play the pretty young ingénue."
All that changed in 1994, he says, with the Melbourne Theatre Company production of Angels in America. As Harper, McClements spent the play in a pair of men's pyjamas, playing a Valium-popping wife trying to escape the fact that her husband is gay. "Catherine is one of the smartest people I know and I think there's an absolute strength inside her; from when we did Angels, that was when this stuff came out," says Armfield. "The character in Angels is someone who seems sweet and lovely and has everything going for her, but she finds a reckless and savage energy inside her and (she's) very funny. It just took the lid off (Catherine) as a performer and it was from that that she was cast in Water Rats. And she played that with such a powerful assurance."
McClements, however, still can't bear to watch the show. "I was much younger and it was my first go at television and I just sort of did it; I didn't really know anything," she says. "The great thing about theatre is it disappears. With Water Rats, you see it sometimes and you go, 'Oh, Jesus!'" Soon after she left the series, she said she liked maybe five out of the 109 episodes she was in. "I was a tosser," she says now. "You can't look at yourself and not have any judgement. It's excruciating and in some way you then judge the whole episode on the terrible pain you feel (about) the performance you put in." Certainly her performances weren't helped by the relentless work grind. "I just went to work every day from seven till seven and you sort of go mad," she says. "We were just exhausted by the end."
The exhaustion was compounded by the anxiety of fending off a stalker. For more than a year, McClements was harassed by a 24-year-old mentally disturbed fan, who broke into her house, trashed her car and called her parents. Recounting the ordeal, though, McClements still seems unflappable. "It didn't really freak me out," she says. "I was in a very exposed house just by myself and she'd come every night, but I wasn't afraid. If it was a man, maybe it would have been different." For the sake of the woman involved, she says, she'd rather not talk about it: "She was just a kid. She had issues with her sexuality and all sorts of things, so any discussion is about her and that's not really fair." These days big fans occasionally recognise her, she says, but most people can't place her. "They sort of think that I went to school with them or I shop in the same place," she says. "I sort of seem familiar but they don't know why." Although she has encountered the ugly side of fame, she says it never made her question her career choice. Even now, after 24 years in the business, she still gets the buzz. "You're constantly searching for that little thrill that you get," says McClements. "And it's lovely being offered roles. It's lovely to be wanted."
Rush producer John Edwards says generous, craft-based actors such as McClements are indispensable in television. "Whether you like her character or not, what she does is make the other actors look good," he says. "Some actors always look good but they're always in shit shows. You find very often they're not good at all; they're like these black holes who absorb energy. Catherine is the exact opposite. She lifts all the others with her." On stage, says Armfield, McClements is willing to emotionally strip herself bare - "She's really unafraid of what she's got inside her" - and offstage her honesty is just as uncompromising. "She's the loveliest person but whenever she comes to my shows she's probably the most critical person you could have in the audience. While she'll be polite, she'll never disguise her feelings. I really love her. In an industry where there's a lot of 'luvviness' and people sort of sweetly look after people's egos, Catherine weighs in ... She's just really well-centred. It's that intelligence."
When McClements left Water Rats she said she'd well and truly found her inner cop, so it's curious that she has chosen to rejoin the force. But McClements, a long-time fan of shows such as Cracker and Prime Suspect, says she has always been fascinated by the police genre: "They're like old-fashioned moral tales," she says. "Morals versus law and what a human being thinks is right - and there's a sort of blurring of the edges." McClements was drawn to that same moral ambiguity when she read the script for Tangle, a Foxtel series screening next year about parents with teenage children on the cusp of adulthood. "It really started with The Secret Life of Us, that sort of writing: the detail and the questioning of morality ... mores and what we think is OK now and what we don't." McClements, who has a 24-year-old stepdaughter, says television writers had to eventually face the reality of fractured, contemporary family relationships.
McClements met Koman in 1988, when they were both acting for Anthill Theatre, but the pair didn't get together until a couple of years later. They have worked together since, but they certainly don't practise their lines over dinner. "We don't really talk about acting much, not the process. We sort of think it's a bit daggy." In 2003, they appeared opposite each other in Company B's Macbeth. "It nearly killed us," she says. "We just don't work well together. Even though I admire him - I think he's an incredible actor - he's not for me as far as being on stage with. You look at him and it's embarrassing because there has to be a (sense) of you're not who you are."
Macbeth isn't an easy play and, to make matters worse, Clementine-Coco, who was then two, was keeping them up all night. Motherhood, says McClements, is guaranteed to deflate an actor's sense of self-importance. Last year, she starred in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at Sydney's Belvoir Street Theatre just a couple of months after her son, Quincy, was born and she breast-fed at interval. "The brilliance of it is that you can love someone more than yourself," says McClements, whose children were born in the seasons of their namesake fruits, clementines and quinces. "You don't have to go to the Buddhists to get rid of your ego; it sort of happens at the dinner table. It's a great thing to have done in life ... and acting does sort of feed the ego in a really sick way. It can be damaging, I think, to you as a person, so to have kids is great in that way - being vomited on and just their incredible egos. Really, you take a back seat, you're totally subservient, and that's how I've survived: you just become their slave."
When McClements turned 40, she says, she didn't succumb to a midlife crisis, but she did re-evaluate all the choices she'd made. She thought her life had ended - but not in a bad way, she insists. Suddenly, she felt free to choose a path for the next 40 years. "It's a funny feeling - I'm not saying it's euphoric - but it's like having your life back again or whatever you want to make of it," she says. "I think there's more sense of possibility, because at 18 I was so about 'I'm going to be an actor', but now I think there are just so many things that are possible. Whether you start them or not is another thing, but the world sort of opens up a bit the older you get."