My long road to happiness

For once, quick-witted Julia Morris was lost for words. When a married man she scarcely knew groped her under the table, on a rare night out with her husband and friends, the comedy queen was literally shocked into silence.

“How weird is that? Someone did something to me and I didn’t say anything,” marvels Australia’s favourite funny woman, who has spent more than 30 years reducing hecklers to red-faced shame on the stand-up circuit.

“I didn’t call him on it … I got such a fright that I kind of thought, you know, if I tell [husband] Dan, I don’t want him to feel like he has to rise to protect me or absolutely blow the night apart. But I was fascinated that I didn’t say anything until we got home.

“I sort of felt like it was more grown-up just to go, ‘Do you know what? That guy’s a f***wit and he will never ever get to spend any more time with me.’ The fact that he’s like that is his own life punishment, because he’s going to come badly undone.”

Nowadays Julia, who turned 50 earlier his year, sometimes does feel quite grown-up. At the very least, she’s a zzing Catherine wheel of a work in progress, juggling a juggernaut career with a loving 13-year marriage and motherhood to two growing girls, 12-year-old Sophie and Ruby, aged 10.

“Happy ever after,” she chuckles contentedly, settling down for a chat about achieving her half-century in the notoriously ageist TV industry. “I wish I was 50 sooner. I think 50 is the secret window into happiness if you can get through the ‘I’m not young anymore’ bit.”

Finally, she has come through menopause and, thanks to cognitive behavioural therapy and clinical Pilates, emerged calmer and happier on the other side. “I started to see a psychologist and it changed my life. Oh my God! Who knew?”

These days, “given the keys to drive my brain properly”, she is free of the anger and tempestuous mood swings that threatened to overwhelm her high-achieving, “high-octane” life.

“I still get moments of general overheating and frustration but it’s not the non-stop nightmare that it was. And there’s certainly something about accepting that I no longer look 20,” she admits. “It does feel like it sets you free because, up until recently, I still thought I was 20 – and then I’d see a photo and think, ‘Dear Lord! Who is that?’

“It’s why I’m not a great judge in photo shoots because I think I look like Miranda Kerr and then I’ll see the photo and think, ‘Oh okay, obviously got some big mental health issues.’ But it’s all a part of the circle of life, and I’m really hoping I’m only half way through.”

Twirling cheerfully for The Weekly’s camera, she is endlessly co-operative. As photographer Peter Brew-Bevan checks his exposure, charismatic Julia does the same for hers. Nothing too revealing required when she’s sporting gold “50-year-old-appropriate shorts” or a cleavage-de ning suit.

“I’m one of many women my age and beyond who are at their busiest in what feels like a career apex,” she beams. “It’s a really positive change that happened in Australian television while no one was watching.”

Indeed, the self-styled ‘Lady J-Mo’ is probably the country’s most indemand small screen star at present, hosting the delightfully silly Blind Date before returning to the jungle for another season of I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here. But wait, there’s more! Next year she is set to helm Network Ten’s new live variety show Chris & Julia’s Sunday Night Takeway, once again alongside her jungle buddy, Dr Chris Brown.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Julia can do no wrong. Yet, earlier this year her light-hearted #MeToo dance number at the

Logie Awards saw her accused, in a beaten-up tabloid controversy, of trivialising sexual assault.

“I wasn’t trying to make light of some horri c situations that have happened,” she explains, relieved by public support for her use of humour to discuss a serious topic. “But if you are opening a proper dialogue, where do you start? Who doesn’t know that you’re not allowed to touch someone else’s body?”

All of which, she admits, makes it more bewildering that she stayed mum about that dinner guest’s inappropriate behaviour.

“I’ve always sold the fact that I’m outspoken,” she insists. “If someone did that to someone else in front of me, I’d shred them. So if someone with a loud mouth can’t speak up, oddly enough, for fear of polite-ing the evening away, then how must it feel in the workplace? I can’t imagine what a horror show that would be.”

That’s why Julia is determined to raise two strong, empowered daughters together with her “darling Danny”, a British-born comic and producer who does the lion’s share of household duties while she is off in Africa lming I’m A Celebrity for nine weeks of the year.

“My advice to the girls is, ‘You’re in charge. You are in charge of everything. So don’t let whoever you’re going to go out on a date with – whether it’s a boy, whether it’s a girl, whoever it is – tell you what to do. Just trust in your own decisions and you’re in charge. Full stop.’

“I’ve been trying to pass on some of my anxiety to the children,” she adds with a nervous laugh, “so they just don’t want to step out. That’ll keep them in the home. Or if I keep the cash owing, they’ll stay with me, won’t they?

“Obviously the idea of them dating scares me greatly but I survived it, so I gure it’s not impossible to have a positive experience starting to meet people and trying to nd your life partner. I’m lucky that I slipped through the system in that way, but I have a feeling it was because of con dence and a loud mouth. No one was game to cross me.”

Dan Thomas, now 47, was destined to be Julia’s perfect match from the moment she saw him belt out a stirring version of Shirley Bassey’s Gold nger at an Aussie expat get-together in London, where she then lived. The couple, who eloped to wed in Las Vegas on December 31, 2005, have since weathered their share of setbacks. They’ve been broke in LA, grieved a dangerous ectopic pregnancy and overcome Dan’s breast cancer diagnosis, from which he was cleared several years ago.

Blind Date contestants, take note: In the gospel according to Julia, the key to lasting love is possibly “the perfect combination of respect and laughter,” although she’s not 100 per cent sure.

“If you respect your partner enough not to speak to them badly, and try not to undermine them in their parenting or everyday life … I wonder if that’s it? I’m just making that up as I go along, but they’re the two qualities that I feel have made our marriage a success.

“When I say ‘success’, like any marriage, while today it’s joyous love, tomorrow will be a poo-poo sandwich of fury and then the next day we’ll be back on the same page again, as they say in advertising. So it’s the ebb and ow of dealing with the atmate you’re in love with. I don’t even know if that’s true. But it kind of feels like it, doesn’t it?”

Dan is, no doubt about it, the man for workaholic Julia who cherishes every second they spend together

with their daughters. The family’s Melbourne beach home is a warm, inviting place where Christmas –

“It’s the longest day of the year, isn’t it?” – is time to slow things down, recharge and bake chocolate chip cookies for Santa. No beer, though. They worry about Mr Claus drink-driving!

“The very rst second I’m not working, I’m straight home to the family,” she says. “Often I have to send Dan away when I really return to no work so I can get back into the habit as quickly as possible of joining in. Otherwise I just sit back and call out, ‘I’m going to need my slippers in 15 minutes.’ I don’t think I’ll say how that works out for me. It doesn’t work out very well!”

Obviously, it’s a joke. She’s crazy about her bloke, and vice versa. “I tend not to have nights out with my buddies because there’s not the time. If something’s got to give, that’s it,” she explains.

“I step out to dinner with Dan and other people, but never just a friendship night when Dan’s not involved because I just gure, in the nicest possible way, I’d rather be at home.

“I tend to say, ‘If you guys want to see me, come round to the house.’ Because then I can be there for the go-to-bed ght and all those little bits and pieces. There’s no point being a great girl and not raising two great girls. You’ve got to be there.”

Beneath the sequins, stilettos and leopard print lurks a secret homebody. Strange, but true. To echo Julia’s words, who knew?

“I get too excited by the washing-up, I really do,” she chortles. “And I do like to keep the washing at ground zero. That excites me. Maybe there might be one pair of underpants … I really have to breathe in on that – thinking that I’ve completely nished the washing, get upstairs and the girls have hidden one pair of underpants in the corner.”

Julia Morris – domestic goddess in disguise – is a contented woman. Life is good since she learned to manage the fury that once made her “want to bash people with a tyre iron for parking one centimetre over my driveway”.

Regrets? She’s had a few, but then again (almost), too few to mention. “Hmmmmm, I’m pretty upset that I never learned to rollerskate backwards,” she offers. “These days there’s no way my knees or ankles will allow for it, so I feel like that’s passed me by. I’ve never modelled in a David Jones fashion parade. That would have been on my teenage list…

“But I reckon I’ve given everything else a bit of a go. I’m slightly more realistic these days about what my body can turn to, and I try to speak up with kindness. I don’t let it build up like I used to when I was younger, and then have some furious spit about whatever it was. The more you do it, the better you get at it – speaking up for yourself.”

Julia has to go, with one parting thought: “I try to turn on the kindness as much as I can every day, whether that’s stopping for a giggle with a guy who’s just sold me a ticket on the train, or giving somebody a smile.” She does. “I literally try to put out that kindness all day, every day and I actively try to bring out as much kindness in my girls as I can.”

Right on cue her taxi arrives at the shabby chic, inner Melbourne photographic studio. She’s met the driver before and gives him a big hug. Wreathed with delight, he calls over to me as I wave them goodbye. “You know her? She’s Julia Morris. She’s a lovely lady.”

“I try to turn on the kindness as much as I can ... and bring out the kindness in my girls.”