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Lots of characters

by
February 2006, no. 278

Noeline: Longterm memoir by Noeline Brown

Allen & Unwin, $29.95 pb, 291 pp

Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600)

Much Love, Jac X by Jacki Weaver

Allen & Unwin, $45 hb, 280 pp

Lots of characters

by
February 2006, no. 278

In 1961 a young Noeline Brown was playing in Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince (1954) at the Pocket Playhouse in Sydenham – ‘just across the Princes Highway from Tempe Tip’, as she characteristically locates it – when Vivien Leigh, on tour with the Old Vic, came to see a specially arranged Sunday evening performance. From the moment she emerged from the chauffeured limousine, Leigh was the star of the show. She was, Brown recalls, ‘wearing a gorgeous, waist-length mink jacket’, and ‘there were strands of lustrous pearls and sparkling diamonds on her delicate throat and hands’. Brown, on the other hand, ‘was in a dress my Mum had made’. That contrast, between theatrical elegance and put-upon pathos, has been the essence of Brown’s own style ever since, and the key to her success as a comedian and an actor. She hid under a large picture hat to introduce Mavis Bramston, a parody of English self-assurance, to a bemused public in 1964. At the other end of the register, her world-weary, ‘You’re not wrong, Narelle’, delivered in a way that was both funny and sad, outlived its many iterations on the televised version of The Naked Vicar Show (1977) to become part of the Australian lexicon.

Noeline: Longterm memoir

Noeline: Longterm memoir

by Noeline Brown

Allen & Unwin, $29.95 pb, 291 pp

Much Love, Jac X

Much Love, Jac X

by Jacki Weaver

Allen & Unwin, $45 hb, 280 pp

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