From The Daily Telegraph, 19 March 2008.
Catherine McClements had her newborn son on set, but she still put in a spirited performance.
Not every acting job is a jewel. Neither is every TV show. But when Catherine McClements read the script for Ten's telemovie Emerald Falls, set in the ruggedly beautiful Blue Mountains, the actress decided to take a leap of faith. Which, as it turns out, fitted the mood of the telemovie, perfectly. After all, McClements plays an Anglican minister named Rosalie.
It's an interesting return to TV screens for McClements, whose last big project was in the short-lived Ten drama CrashBurn. Yet to many she is best known as Rachel Goldstein, from the hit Nine drama, Water Rats.
Emerald Falls, she says, is a world away from the cut and thrust of the latter show. "I really like the gentleness of the piece. It is quite warm-hearted," she says of Emerald Falls. The telemovie, which screens this Sunday, was filmed on location last year, deep in the bush surrounds of the Blue Mountains and on the northern fringes of suburban Sydney.
Emerald Falls is based around kindergarten teacher and single mother Joni Ferguson (Georgie Parker), who decides, much to the dismay of her ex-husband Paul (Rhys Muldoon) to make a "tree change", buying a derelict bed and breakfast in the mountains. We then flash forward six months to find, as Joni's ex-husband predicted, the B&B isn't doing well and Joni is behind in her mortgage repayments. The plot then takes a twist when the local doctor and Joni's friend, Henry Forbes (Andrew McFarlane), suddenly dies, with the police suspecting foul play.
McClements' character Rosalie is Joni's best friend and helps the newcomer fit in. Also, she was in a relationship with the doctor. "It becomes a bit of awhodunnit in which characters are implicated in his murder, including Rosalie," she says.
While Rosalie is a fictional character, McClements was able to meet the local Anglican minister, who also happened to be a woman. "She was beautiful to talk to," McClements says.
The overall feel of the telemovie, with its quaint, picturesque small-town atmosphere and subject matter is not dissimilar to that of the British drama Midsomer Murders.
"The complications and dynamics of a small town, that's what I think they were trying to pull out. The sort of place where everyone knows everyone's business," McClements says.
McClements has fond memories of the telemovie shoot. And not because of the "freezing mornings". The actress's second child Quincy was just two weeks old when shooting on Emerald Falls started and she brought him on set. "The producers were really brilliant about letting me bring him along and it was lovely to have someone to hold him while I worked," she says.
So accepting was everyone of McClements' situation that they even held up shooting while Quincy was being fed. Even so, surely, as a new mother, McClements would have desired some timeoff from work?
"It was a really great offer. You have to take offers when they come," she says. On finishing Emerald Falls, McClements launched herself into a play, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?. Once again, Quincy waited in the wings while his mother was on stage. She fed him at intervals.
"He became very used to the smell of hairspray on my face," she recalls.