Secrets of the Logies: behind the scenes with Australia’s most loved stars
The countdown has begun to Australian television’s night of nights, the Logie Awards, so we invited our most loved stars – all multi Gold Logie winners – to share their award night secrets with Genevieve Gannon.
Bert Newton
From 1967, when he was presenting to a room that looked like “Vesuvius”, because everyone was smoking and drinking, to his most recent appearance in 2010, Bert Newton has seen it all. He’s hosted TV’s Logie Awards 19 times and taken home 18 of the coveted statuettes, four of which were Gold.
Yet, as he tells The Weekly, there are a few moments that really stand out in his memory.
“We had a lot of people coming over from Hollywood,” Bert says of his earlier years.
“John Wayne, Rock Hudson, Sammy Davis Jnr, Bob Hope, Sophia Loren.”
Many of the guests he knew “from a fan’s point of view” and so to engage in a little banter with them on stage was exciting.
“I’ve been a film buff all my life and my special interest is the movies of the ’40s and the ’50s,” Bert says. “There are certain moments in my history of the Logies when there was a special aura in the room.”
While the Hollywood names brought with them a certain gravitas, Bert says that the memories he really treasures are the times he got to give a Logie to someone dear to him. “The thing I’m quite sentimental about is one of the first Logies I gave out as compere,” he says. “It was in 1969 and I presented it to a beautiful young blonde girl named Patti McGrath, who is now Patti Newton.”
Rove McManus
The Logies have bittersweet memories for Rove McManus. When he won each of his three Gold Logies – in 2003, 2004 and 2005 – he accepted TV’s top award with his late wife, actress Belinda Emmett, waiting to congratulate him.
“Belinda is just wonderful,” the host of Rove Live said after winning his second Gold Logie in 2004. “It goes without saying she is undoubtedly the best reward I’ve ever received. If the choice had to be made between this [the Gold Logie] and her, I would hand back every single Logie.”
Of course, life doesn’t offer such choices. Belinda died from secondary bone cancer in 2006 after battling breast cancer. Rove went on to rebuild his life, marrying actress Tasma
Walton and starting a family.
In total, Rove has proved to be one of Australia’s most successful talents, collecting 16 Logies of various hues, including the three Gold. The effect of those awards is overpowering, he says, even today.
“To win that first year really was quite overwhelming and not something I took for granted at all,” he says.
“For someone like me, who loves this business so much, it was equal parts overwhelming, but also very humbling.”
All his Logies still take pride of place for Rove, but he’s not telling where he keeps them. And for a very good reason. “I was once asked, ‘Of all the toys you have, what is your favourite?’, and I said what that toy was and where it was, and within a couple months it had been stolen.”
So Rove demurs when asked where he keeps his pride and joy, but he doesn’t hide them away. “I’m very proud to have them out where people can see them.”
Denise Drysdale
The Gold Logie winner in 1975 and 1976 has always brought spontaneity and laughter to everything she does – be it unscripted antics on TV, or even accepting an award for the joy she inspired.
“We used to run crazy. I’d do daredevil stuff,” Denise says of her time on evening television in the mid-1970s, when she and long-time performing partner Ernie Sigley were “blowing up chooks”, a reference to an infamous on-set prank that left Ernie covered in feathers and “frightened the daylights out of him”.
Their easy rapport on The Ernie Sigley Show made them one of the country’s most popular double acts.
Ernie, who gave Denise her famous nickname “Ding Dong”, would dedicate himself to trying to make his co-star crack-up on air as they were beamed around the country. She got her own back, turning up for work one night in her pyjamas. “I thought that would be funny. I didn’t tell anyone except the stage manager. So I came in in my pyjamas, no make-up or anything,” she says, laughing.
Her playful comedy and refreshing candour won her millions of fans across Australia and, in the process, turned her into a star.
Three years after she returned, penniless, from England to begin her Australian TV career, the former go-go dancer was accepting her first Gold Logie, in 1975, from none other than Hollywood legend,
John Wayne.
When Denise reached the stage, she said to The Duke, as the movie star was universally known, “I don’t know whether to say hello or stick
’em up!” She laughed before “hugging him like a koala bear”.
Georgie Parker
She has breathed life into some of Australia’s favourite television characters, but Georgie Parker says when she was starting out in television, all she wanted was to get a job. “I just wanted to be employed,” she says with an infectious laugh.
“Success isn’t something you should strive for – you’ve always got to just do the best you can.”
Nevertheless, success found her in the form of a rich and varied career, and seven Logie awards, two of which, in 2001 and 2002, were Gold – a rare feat for a dramatic actor at the time.
“It consolidated for me that I was doing my job well and, for the show, that they were on the right track as far as the audience goes,” Georgie says of her early Logies for the role of nurse Lucy Gardiner on A Country Practice.
“You can literally have Brad Pitt, but if he’s playing someone nobody cares about, it doesn’t matter,” says Georgie.
It was, of course, her second iconic role, that of nurse Terri Sullivan on
All Saints that earned her the two Gold Logies. Georgie jokes that the best part of the night on which she won her first Gold was getting a full night’s sleep while her sevenmonth-old daughter stayed in the care of her father in Sydney.
“I got to stay in a hotel, so that was heaven,” she recalls.
She believes that the accolade was a reflection of the hard work put in by the cast and crew on the show and that it benefited everyone.
“The ripple effect is much greater than it just affecting you,” she says.
“It made Channel Seven really invest in the show, so it was a positive thing.”
Georgie’s haul of Logies lives in various rooms in her home. “We’ve got awards all over the house,” she says, laughing.
Lisa McCune
For four-time Gold Logie winner
Lisa McCune, the punishing schedule that came with filming 42 episodes of Blue Heelers a year meant she wasn’t aware of the impact of her work.
“The Logies is like the applause on television that we don’t hear,” says Lisa, who took the gong in 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000.
Those award ceremonies were a bit of a blur, with Lisa having to be on set by 6am the next morning. “I’d do my photos and go straight down to the taxi line and wait for a cab in my Logies frock,” she says.
As time has passed, she has grown to appreciate the awards even more.
She recalls taking her eldest son, Archer, as her Logies guest one year, and walking on the carpet that bears the names of all the Gold Logie winners. “He saw my name four times in a row and went, ‘Wow’. And he thought I was cool for a moment,” she says, laughing.
Kate Ritchie
Two-time Gold Logie winner Kate Ritchie (in 2007 and 2008) never expected recognition for the role she performed for 20 years.
“I remember the first time that I was nominated, the publicist called me and I thought she meant that I’d only been nominated for a Silver Logie,” recalls Kate, who played Sally Fletcher on TV soap
Home and Away for nearly two decades.
“I said, ‘Oh, that’s exciting’, and she said, ‘No, I don’t think you understand, you’ve been nominated for the Gold Logie.’ I said, ‘Oh, my God! What? Are you calling the right person?’ It was a lovely surprise.”
She was reminded of the impact her work had had after she left television and was finding her feet in radio. Home and Away’s international success had also made her a star in the UK, where the show was as popular as its rival, Neighbours. Kate was interviewing Oscarnominated British actor Pete Postlethwaite when he told her he was thrilled to meet her because his mother had been telling him that Kate had just won some big award.
“I felt chuffed that someone I respected a lot had heard of the Logies,” Kate recalls.
“His mother had been excited that her son, who had a long list of accolades, was being interviewed by Sally Fletcher.”