Ginette McDonald ‘I try not tobea diva’
‘I try not to be a diva’
Drink your wine! Isn’t it nice? Ginette McDonald – our own ‘‘enfant terrible’’ and possibly pretty proud of the fact – is a convivial host. Her declamatory voice (her own description) is drowned out only by the planes overhead – the house being so smack bang in the flightpath of Wellington Airport that the jets fair rattle the place as they heave themselves off the runway just spitting distance away.
She delivers something of a monologue interrupted by a rather persistent phone.
I’m privy to one hilarious one-sided conversation to the gas man which will lose everything in translation but involves a firmly delivered explanation that an explosion is imminent unless he gets round here licketyflippin-split.
McDonald, actor, producer and most famously Lyn of Tawa (a curse and a blessing of a role), played opposite her daughter, Kate McGill, earlier this year in Tom Scott’s play Joan, about his own mother. A Circa play by the late Michelle Amas is her next project.
For the moment, though, she’s taking a breather.
Her Rongotai home is an extension of her character – idiosyncratic, effervescent, ever so slightly chaotic.
Strings of coloured lights, a shelf of battered cookbooks. Ashtrays abound. She chuffs just one or two cigarettes at first but when she’s on a roll she takes up position at the breakfast bar and settles into a committed smoke-a-thon.
Refreshments are offered. Coffee, followed by wine. A bottle of brandy appears later on.
She’s a full-blown Francophile. The evidence of her affection for that country is all around: an Eiffel Tower ashtray, a hanging scroll saying something in French written by Charles de Gaulle.
She and fellow Francophile femmes have a monthly meet ostensibly to speak French. Truthfully, says McDonald, they rarely actually parler Francais – like a boozing book club that doesn’t bother with a pesky book – but they gather nonetheless at Le Marche Francais and shoot the proverbial breeze.
The French connection comes from her maternal grandmother Jeanette (Big Net to McDonald’s Little Net), who lived with the family. They didn’t get on. But they were much alike, she begrudgingly admits.
‘‘The McDonalds are tall and strapping and look like avocados. I was more like my grandmother and looked like a box.
‘‘Parts of me do feel rather French, the curmudgeonly parts, the take-no-shit parts.’’
She talks affectionately about her ‘‘feral’’ upbringing.
Benign neglect is how she describes her parents’ approach to raising their large brood of seven. ‘‘I don’t think my mother was cut out for children. She was fond of us and everything, but we were pretty much left to roam around the neighbourhood.
‘‘One neighbour complained that ‘those McDonald children run around like animals’ and we all laughed like drains at that.
‘‘The great thing about our family is that, while there’s pain in everybody’s life, most pain was dealt with by humour. By laughing uproariously in the teeth of awful tragedy.’’
McDonald, 66, is the third eldest of the seven siblings. It was older brother Michael, who was always very gentle in quite a roughand-tumble environment, to whom she was particularly close, most alike. So much so that they became a creative team, with Michael writing the voice of her gum-chewing, vowelmangling Lyn of Tawa.
The story of Lyn of Tawa is well told: after the character’s original debut at Downstage when McDonald was just 16, Lyn reappeared on the 1970s daytime show Good Day.
McDonald was asked to participate in a
roasting of broadcaster (and, later, oral historian) Judith Fyfe, playing an ‘‘old school friend’’. Michael suggested she resurrect Lyn, and promptly scribbled out a script which she frantically memorised and delivered.
Lyn was a vehicle for saying serious things in a funny way. Plain good satire. There was a lot of hard-hitting social commentary done in a soft and accessible way, she says.
But people – ‘‘even sophisticated, educated people’’ – seemed to confuse the character with the person.
It was decided Lyn of Tawa was far too common to appear in front of the Queen in a variety show during one royal visit.
McDonald got a call at the last minute because one performer had the flu but some organisers were still not keen and treated her, she says, like an amateur.
‘‘I try not to be a diva,’’ she says like a diva, ‘‘but I thought ‘who is this telling me my job I’ve been doing for years . . . ?’
‘‘Today when people try to tell me how to do my comedy, which they wouldn’t know if it bit them in the arse, it’s all I can do to clench my bottom and nod, otherwise I won’t be responsible for what comes next. I’ve always had people kind of underestimate me.’’
McDonald, who in 2007 was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to entertainment, started out as a dancer – ‘‘amazing given my physical [makeup]’’.
From the age of 5 she trained in Russian classical ballet under Galina Wassiliewa, by all accounts a fearsome woman.
‘‘I was quite a lean girl and I passed all her exams which were judged by a lugubrious Russian man,’’ she says. ‘‘But then I went through puberty and put on weight and Galina was merciless with me, ghastly, whacking me on the bottom with a stick!’’
She became restless at Erskine school, invoking the ire of her teachers. The nuns were a great disappointment.
‘‘I don’t know what vows they take but I think they would have broken most of them – humility, kindness, all of that.
‘‘I was considered a bright girl but the minute a boring teacher opened their mouth I would immediately drift off into some stratosphere. In School Cert history they asked ‘What were the Crusades?’ and I replied it was a violent IRA uprising. Not because I was stupid, it was just that I hadn’t been present in my head. It’s labelled as ADHD now but I was considered a huge nuisance.’’
McDonald got work in radio drama and joined a theatre class, where she found likeminded precocious youth. It was pure joy, she says.
She eventually left school under a cloud and found work at Downstage, waitressing, prompting, stage managing – giving herself an apprenticeship. A five-year stint in London followed, where she got small parts, which she once described as ‘‘village yokel’’ characters. But at 24, she says, she was ‘‘over it’’. ‘‘People who I respected over there said if I gave it seven years in London I’d conquer the world but I wanted stability to my life which was not happening over there.’’
She found stability with writer David McGill, though the pair have been separated now longer than their 16 years together.
Her long career has been played out both in front of and behind the camera. The latter includes such memorable series as Gliding On
and The Fire-Raiser, and perhaps the less memorable Peppermint Twist.
She is a mainstay on stage at Wellington’s Circa Theatre.
Outside work McDonald says she tries hard to stay out of trouble ‘‘because trouble finds me’’.
‘‘Because I’m outspoken and have a booming voice pitched from the diaphragm, so everything I say sounds declamatory, bossy, and self-regarding people attribute to me the most extraordinary amount of shit. I’ve been told things I’ve said and done and people believe it. So I do try and stay out of trouble but if I do duck my head out the door something dramatic happens.’’
McDonald, who once ran for Wellington City Council, is a political animal these days.
She keeps running into Gerry Brownlee – ‘‘quite affable for a Tory’’ – who tells her she’s an old leftie from way back. Middle-of-the-road, she’d say.
Donald Trump has shaken her up on the political front and got her thinking. ‘‘When he was running for president I did all I could in my small semi-retired way to alert people to the danger he presented and even now people think I’m over-obsessed and scream at me that I’m an old leftie. But there’s this pernicious, cheap plasticky kind of fascism leaking through the world now at a great rate – certainly infecting New Zealand . . . and it all leads straight back to Moscow.
‘‘So when people ask what do I do in my spare time, I say I’m an online activist!’’
Boom! Another declaration delivered straight from the diaphragm.
‘‘Parts of me do feel rather French, the curmudgeonly parts.’’
Ginette McDonald performs in Circa Theatre’s The Pink Hammer from September 7 to October 5.