I’VE MADE SOME OF TV’S BIGGEST STARS!
Aussie doll maker Cathy’s ‘babies’ are so lifelike that you’ve probably seen them on TV and never even realised
When fans were introduced to Dr Hugh Knight’s newborn baby daughter Eliza on hit drama series Doctor Doctor, they fell in love with the beautiful bub’s tiny little feet, chubby cheeks and button nose.
What they probably didn’t realise is that the gorgeous baby actor wasn’t the only one earning their affection – because like most babies on television and film sets, Eliza had a “baby double” or lifelike doll to do scenes that didn’t require much interaction between the actors.
Artist Cathy Brady, from East Maitland in the NSW Hunter Valley, has garnered an international reputation for her “little miracles”, which she says so easily pass for the real thing that even she gets confused!
“One of the babies I made for House Husbands for a newborn scene, even though I knew it was my doll, I couldn’t tell [when I was watching it on TV] – they use them very well,” says Cathy.
Also known as reborn babies, the dolls are handcrafted to look like a human infant down to the finest detail, including tiny veins, mottled skin and even a touch of glistening saliva around the mouth.
INCREDIBLE DETAIL
The key to the dolls’ authenticity is the passion and painstaking detail Cathy pours into making each baby, which can take anywhere from five to 12 weeks.
The dolls begin as separate vinyl parts, with Cathy using up to 150 colours to add countless layers of heat-set oil paint to create the baby’s delicate skin tone, before adding the finer features including fingernails, eyelashes, eyebrows and hair, and weighting the doll with glass spheres in order to make it look and feel like a real baby.
“Everything you see other than the silicone vinyl parts, I’ve had to do,” she says.
“Every strand of hair is hand applied, one at a time, using baby goat mohair, and the eyelashes are the same. There is layer upon layer upon layer of paint – if you don’t do the layering you won’t have
the transparency and it won’t look real.
“The dolls are weighted as well, so when someone is picking it up it is heavy and when they’re holding it, they’ve got to cradle it properly.”
Cathy was a successful portrait artist with an extensive career behind her when she encountered reborn babies at a craft fair in the late ’90s. She was stunned when her first “baby” created a storm of interest.
Having seen her work online, Matchbox Films art department coordinator Stuart Parkyn phoned Cathy in 2012 to ask her to create a baby for a telemovie on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, which was used as his son David’s body double in Underground: The Julian Assange Story.
Since then, Cathy has created dolls for TV series, movies, commercials and streaming services in Australia and overseas. Her babies have appeared in everything from Home And Away and Neighbours to
Love Child, Offspring and
A Place To Call Home.