Exclusive: Marta Dusseldorp – how my mum inspired me
Marta Dusseldorp doesn’t do anything by halves – her stellar acting career or the love she shares with her husband Ben – discovers Samantha Trenoweth.
It’s a shiny, blue-sky Sydney morning. Marta Dusseldorp is dipping her toes in an ocean pool and thinking about the big questions – mortality, meaning, love, especially love. “I read this quote,” she begins. “Someone said that, every day, we can choose to fear or to love. I choose love. I’m well aware we’re not here for very long and I want to make it count.”
Marta’s eyes are on the horizon, but everyone else here is looking at her, from the photographer to the kid with the kickboard and the cafe proprietor on the boardwalk. The star of Janet King and A Place To
Call Home dazzles almost as brightly as the sea. Her husband and fellow actor, Ben Winspear, is as much in her thrall as anyone. “She is fearless, unpredictable, inspiring,” he says.
Marta and Ben met almost 15 years ago. It was a not-so-typical office romance. She was playing the arch manipulator, Mrs Marwood, in a Sydney Theatre Company (STC) production of The Way Of The World. It was a pivotal moment. “Suddenly, I was working at the Opera House – a dream come true – in this vicious, wonderful role,” says Marta. “There was something about playing the bad girl, rather than the romantic lead. I had this black leather corset on and this wicked green skirt, spinning around on a carousel with the audience laughing, and I thought, ‘Okay, now I can do this. This is who I want to be’.”
Ben was a resident director of the STC at the time and often sat in on rehearsals. They discovered they shared an obsessive love of theatre and only lived a block apart. When Marta professed her love, Ben tells
The Weekly that he wanted to say, “You are one of the most fascinating, inspiring, complicated and original people I’ve ever met. You are beautiful in a way I’ve never seen, crazy talented and, at times, a bit frightening”, but he opted for a more traditional response and they married a year later.
“I feel very blessed to have met someone like Ben,” says Marta. “He said, ‘I love who you are, don’t change anything and walk beside me.’ I said, ‘You don’t want to have made me up?’ And he said, ‘God, no, I could never have thought of this. It’s way too complicated.’ Ben is truly the best father to our girls [Grace, 10, and Maggie, seven] I could have hoped for and the most beautiful partner.”
When he played opposite Marta for a season in A Place To Call Home, Ben admitted to The Sydney Morning Herald that he was “a bit nervous. I thought I’d better be good in this or Marta might turn to the director and say, ‘Where’d you find this guy?’” But so far, their relationship has thrived with collaboration.
“We’re about to do a play together,” says Marta, “playing a married couple. It’s Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage and I think that will be a test for us. Some of the stuff we have to say to each other is quite difficult, so there will need to be a real rigour about clearing it out at the end of the night. But we chose to do it because we love to work together. Part of our love is our artistic conversation. That’s why we fell in love and each time we work together, we’re reminded of that … We once did a scene dancing together that we didn’t have to rehearse. We also breathe at
the same time because we sleep beside each other.”
In Janet King, Marta worked alongside her friend, Anita Hegh, who played Bianca, Janet’s colleague and lover. Again, their familiarity smoothed the path to an intense on-screen relationship.
“When I work with Anita,” says Marta, “we shortcut the preliminary conversations and get on with the work because we know each other and want to get the most out of each other. Doing the sex scene, we had to pace that carefully; it was done quickly and respectfully … We’d played a two-hander [the play Like A Fishbone], so we had that close connection and, if anything, I had to estrange from Anita to fall in love with her and then to break up with her [as Janet King].”
When last The Weekly spoke with Marta, she was in Beirut, Lebanon, visiting Syrian refugees in cramped apartments and leaking tents, collecting their stories to communicate to the wider world. It was a confronting experience and, afterwards, she took time to decompress in London.
“Every night, I went to the theatre, my church, and that helped process the experience,” she explains. “I found myself in the theatre with tears streaming down my face, but it helped to hear these stories about humanity and struggle and survival. I used that to meditate my way out of the horror.
“The theatre has always been my place to go to contemplate the bigger questions. It satisfies me every time. It’s a revisiting of a deeper understanding of human nature and that is what drives me to go to Lebanon and Jordan, and immerse myself. It’s part of my job, too, to lather myself in the mud of the other. It’s such a privilege every time. That’s why I never tire of it.”
Marta has been awestruck by the arts since she was a child, taken by her grandparents to the Opera House, where she would “get a sticky-beak seat” and lose herself in whatever story was playing out on the stage. Her grandfather, Dick Dusseldorp, was a Dutch property developer, a friend and associate of architect Harry Seidler, and a powerful philanthropist.
Marta’s strongest childhood memories involve the noise and busyness that came with a large family in which everyone had an opinion and two parents worked (her mother in advertising and her father in law, education and social science). Marta recalls the pain that engulfed the family when she was eight and her baby brother was lost to leukaemia.
Yet through it all, dance, music and drama were her escapes. “Stepping into ballet allowed me to explore my inner world,” she recalls. “I’ve always felt a lot and I think feelings are much more acute in childhood. I needed a place to express them and I loved travelling in my imagination.”
Marta credits boarding school with fostering her independent streak. After her twin brothers were born, she says, “things got slightly chaotic at home” and she insisted on being enrolled at Geelong Grammar. A few weeks in, she had second thoughts, but her old school had given away her place. So she toughed it out and, she says, “it was a gift. I made the best friends, like sisters. We were girls becoming women and did it together, as an ensemble.”
Marta was a child of the 1970s (she was born in ’73) and the spirit of the era still resonates with her. “I only listen to music from the ’60s and ’70s,” she admits. “I’m stuck with Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone. If I could go back, I’d go to a lot of concerts, I’d go to Woodstock, I’d see Janis Joplin. Those women were so inspiring. I saw Nina Simone’s last concert. It was crazy and fabulous, and free and political, and atonal and wrong, and I loved every second of it.”
In the ’70s, “women were rocking it”, including Marta’s mother. “She was, and is, an independent woman. Those women were creating it all – opportunities, equality – they had to find their voice. There was a lot lined up against them and there still is, but gender issues are talked about now and her generation created that.”
Like her mother, Marta is a passionate communicator and, like her grandfather, a true believer in the arts. She is planning a number of projects that will see her working both in front of the camera and behind it, including a TV series. Marta has a sense the curtains are about to open on a new stage of her creative life.
“I’d like to generate stories for other people to tell,” she says. “I don’t want to ever stop acting, but I’d like to create world-class drama and share complicated, nuanced, unpredictable stories. Storytelling is such a powerful tool for justice … and for love.”