Heather Mitchell’s latest act: Why one of Australia’s best-loved stars is reinventing her career
SOURCE:Sydney Morning Herald|BY:Garry Maddox
From her definitive performance as RBG to her latest work behind the scenes, one of our hardest-working stars reveals why she is far from finished.
Heather Mitchell has arrived early, coffee in hand. One of the country’s hardest-working actresses lately – with a slate of TV shows and films, playing American justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on stage, and a beautifully written memoir – she is clearly well-organised when it comes to morning caffeine.
Her preference: “a super-hot skim flat white”.
After steering this writer to a nearby café for a takeaway coffee of his own, Mitchell settles in to talk about how she is thriving at the age of 67 and the valuable life lessons she has learnt along the way.
“A lot of my busyness has been through the incredible faith and kindness of other people”: Heather Mitchell.Credit: Janie Barrett
“I’ve been really busy and I’m so loving it,” she says. “And a lot of my busyness has been through the incredible faith and kindness of other people going, ‘why don’t you come along and try this?’”
Mitchell has been trying plenty of things lately. Just about every streaming service has had the much-loved actress on the call sheet of a TV show or film. Just a few examples: Love Me (Binge), The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Prime Video), Fake and the coming Two Years Later (Paramount+), Jones Family Christmas (Stan) and Upright (Foxtel).
“I’m incredibly surprised,” Mitchell says of the variety of her roles. “I didn’t really have it in my 20s and 30s.”
The same actress who brought steely intelligence, moral strength and flashing wit to Ginsburg in Suzie Miller’s one-woman play RBG: Of Many, One and is a board member of Sydney Theatre Company, has also been a very funny, very bawdy nun in Gold Diggers (ABC). And now, in a new development in her career, she is moving into producing.
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Mitchell’s first foray behind the scenes comes as a producer on Baby Shower, a dark comedy written and directed by her friend and long-time colleague Matt Day. Set to debut at Flickerfest this month, the short film marks a significant expansion of her creative reach.
She will also co-produce and star in the series Dalliance (Paramount+) as a woman who has an affair with a married former news cameraman played by Hugo Weaving – a fellow NIDA graduate who has become a regular co-star on stage and sometimes screen for more than 40 years.
Returning for more performances: Heather Mitchell as the late US Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg in RBG: Of One Many.Credit: James Brickwood
After more than 270 performances as Ginsburg, Mitchell is set to reprise the role for an 80-show tour across Perth, Adelaide, Geelong and Auckland, starting in March. The play was born from a conversation between Mitchell and writer Suzie Miller, who crafted the work specifically for the actress; the resulting performance has been a revelation.
“I think of it as one of my dearest friends; I feel such affection for it, like I would a friend,” she says of the play. “What Ruth fought for and what she stood for each year, it becomes more important to hear her words. She reminds me of many of the women of that generation who I knew, including my own mother, and what they lived through, what they dealt with and what they fought for.”
Before then, though, is Flickerfest, which starts at Bondi Pavilion on January 23.
Mitchell was down to play the mother of a pregnant woman (Contessa Treffone) whose baby shower descends into chaos when her estranged father (Weaving again) arrives unexpectedly. But the day before the shoot, she tripped on the Brisbane set of Two Years Later and broke her wrist in three places, and a kneecap.
Matt Day’s short film Baby Shower is premiering at Flickerfest.Credit: Matt Day
“The brilliant Helen Thomson was on the train from Wentworth Falls the next morning,” she says. “She came down without having seen the script and did a brilliant performance.”
Mitchell thinks Day is generous calling her a producer as she just helped with casting but, not for the last time during this interview, she is just being modest.
Baby Shower came about when Mitchell read the script after Day showed it to her husband, cinematographer Martin McGrath. The duo is hoping to shoot a feature film, the survival thriller Killing Breed, this year.
Says Day: “I got a phone call from Heather saying, ‘Darling, I love this script. We’re going to make it, come over.’ So I said, ‘OK,’ and I came ’round. She sat me down and said, ‘Right, pick a date.’ So I picked a date.
“She goes, ‘OK, we’re gonna shoot it on that date. Who do you want to be in it?’ And I said, ‘Well, this is my dream cast.’ Then we just went through her phone and called them all up and got them on board.”
Mitchell insists that “everyone loved Matt so much” they wanted to be in the film. She thinks it can be as hard making a short as a feature film, given the challenge of locking down a cast and crew who are often not being paid.
“Had we done [Baby Shower] over a three-day shoot, it would have been really hard to do,” she says. “He shot the whole thing in one day, in one location, and then just said, ‘That’s it. Whatever we get on that day will be the film.’ I think that’s the secret of it: keeping people trapped until you get it done.”
While Mitchell was missing, McGrath shot Baby Shower, and one of their two adult sons, Finn, was the B-camera operator.
Co-producing Dalliance arose after veteran producer John Edwards (Offspring, Bump) had an idea for a romantic drama about people in their 60s and invited Mitchell to join a writers’ room to help create the characters and story.
Heather Mitchell has produced Matt Day’s short film Baby Shower with him. It premieres at Flickerfest. Credit: Janie Barrett
“Without John coming to me and saying, ‘Do you want to try this?’ I wouldn’t have gone after that,” she says. “It’s a very ensemble piece about people in their 60s. We wanted it to be not about people declining or getting older; it’s about the crossroads in your life.”
Co-producing has thrown her “very much in the deep end” of casting, discussions with Paramount+, scripts, locations and production.
“John seems to endow people with immediate faith in them and he sort of goes, ‘off you go’ – then you learn and make mistakes,” she says.
As she recounted in her 2023 memoir Everything and Nothing, Mitchell grew up in Camden on Sydney’s outskirts. Her adventurous mother Shirley, who was Jewish, met her American Quaker father, “Red”, while they were both working for United Nations agencies in China.
The youngest of three children, Mitchell was born in Seoul in 1958 and the family spent two years in Jamaica before a brief stopover in Sydney became permanent.
Hugo Weaving and Heather Mitchell in the TV series Love Me.Credit: Binge
She was an imaginative child who invented stories that played out in the tiny snow domes she collected. In high school Mitchell would dress as fictional teachers who would run through lessons in her bedroom after school.
The truth of her mother’s terminal leukaemia had been kept from the children; Mitchell only discovered the reality of the diagnosis during her HSC trials, when she witnessed her mother being lifted into an ambulance.
That experience resonated with Mitchell when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004. Losing two years of acting work during treatment, while McGrath brought up their two young sons, meant they had to sell their house. Long after they successfully returned to their careers, Mitchell had a recurrence of the cancer in 2022.
“The first one was a shock,” she says. “I think the first one was good for me in the end. I sort of always assumed that I was going to get sick and die [from seeing this happen to her mother]. That was something in my head. And so getting it, I was determined. I felt such determination that that wasn’t going to be the truth.”
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The recurrence she plays down as “such an inconvenience” – she laughs – at a busy time.
“I thought, ‘This isn’t right. I’ve got to get rid of this.’ I was just about to start Love Me and then RBG and they both very generously changed their dates.”
Mitchell’s message to the next generation is one of resilience: though life inevitably intervenes – through the demands of parenthood, health battles, or caring for ageing parents – the industry has a way of returning to those who protect their passion for the craft.
She has also learnt the importance of avoiding bitterness.
“If I’m getting upset about something, I say, ‘That’s just happening right now, you’re upset about something right now’,” she says. “But I know I’m not going to carry that forward.
“Know what to carry and what not to carry. Get rid of the burdens. It means later in life, as you get older, that you feel freer rather than heavier.”
That freedom has given Mitchell an infectiously positive attitude to life.
“I’m so happy,” she says. “I’m just at a point in my life where I’m just so grateful all the time. I always feel ‘whatever comes along, comes along’ and I’m just so grateful.”
As long as “whatever comes along” includes a super-hot skim flat, of course.
Flickerfest runs from January 23 to February 1 at Bondi Beach.
