THE POWER OF LOVE: Gorgi Coghlan finds her voice
A divorce, a baby and a battle with cancer have led The Project’s Gorgi Coghlan and her family to sing a brand new tune, they tell Tiffany Dunk.
The local theatre at Warrnambool in country Victoria was packed to the gills as Kay Rendell took her seat ahead of the first performance of that year’s holiday musical, Les Misérables. Her daughter Gorgi was about to take the stage playing the role of Cosette. To be honest, Kay bashfully admits now, she wasn’t expecting much from the then 18 year old.
But then Gorgi opened her mouth to sing the first line and Kay, along with the rest of audience, gasped.
“I was in shock with this magnificent voice,” the 74 year old chuckles in retrospect.
“I’d hardly ever heard Gorgi sing at home and I honestly didn’t know she had such a beautiful voice until I saw her on stage.
When we left the theatre, all my friends were coming up and saying, ‘Kay, we didn’t realise
Gorgi could sing like that,’ and my reply was, ‘Neither did I!’”
If Kay was shocked, that was nothing compared to the millions of viewers who watched The Project presenter Gorgi Coghlan – incognito in a bright majenta monster costume – on Network Ten’s smash hit The Masked Singer late this year.
Gorgi would come third behind two professional singers. And when she unmasked herself in the finale, she emotionally dedicated her performance to her mum who – ever since that very first performance back in her home town – had been begging her not to waste what is clearly an extraordinary gift.
That plea had extra resonance as Kay had been facing a battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, an aggressive form of cancer, which had seen mother and daughter fear for the very worst outcome.
Inviting The Weekly into Gorgi’s gorgeous hobby farm in Ballarat, which she shares with husband Simon and their eight-year-old daughter Molly-Rose, the pair say it all started two and a half years ago. Kay’s right eye had been continuously watering, which her GP had assured her was simply a side effect of ageing. But when she later found a lump in her neck she knew immediately it was more than the doctor suspected.
“I can remember exactly where Mum was when she told me she had cancer,” Gorgi, 44, emotionally recalls.
“It came out of the blue because she’d always had a really healthy life and never had any serious health issues. I was driving to host a charity event when Mum rang and she said, ‘Oh look darling, I’ve got some news’ and she just sort of blurted it out.
I was so unprepared. It hit me like a tsunami and I just lost it.
“I burst into tears and was just uncontrollably crying, and I felt awful because I couldn’t be the strong, supportive daughter that I usually am.”
“She was fantastic,” Kay says staunchly in her daughter’s defence, tearing up at the memory. “It’s had a big effect on Gorg. I think things go really deep with her.”
An unbreakable bond
Kay and Gorgi have always been close, perhaps in part because Kay spent seven long years and underwent three courses of fertility injections in order to have her much longed for first child. Gorgi’s brother Nigel arrived four years later – the last child for Kay and her now former husband Noel.
While Noel, a wool classer and contractor, was often out working on sheep stations when the kids were young, mum Kay kept the home fires burning.
“It was a really fun childhood with a huge connection to the land,” says Gorgi. “Animals, empathy and days spent outdoors just creating a cubby house. It was a really carefree, beautiful childhood. And because Mum is a very emotionally warm person, she always created a very safe space for us to talk about our emotions and that was incredible as a kid. I never felt like I didn’t have a place to go and talk – I’d always talk with Mum.”
Gorgi was horse mad in those days, and still is, she chuckles. She’d only be pulled out of the paddock in order to do her homework – she loved school and studying to the point Kay actually worried about her daughter burning out by high school.
“I remember saying to Gorg as a kid one day, ‘Gorgina’ – because it was always Gorgina if I was a bit cross – ‘Gorgina, see that beanbag? You sit in that beanbag and don’t move for 30 minutes’, because she was always on the go,” Kay laughs. “She was school captain. She was very studious and I never had to tell that girl to go and do her homework. When we had the local eisteddfods she’d always enter everything, and of course more than often she’d win.”
“I’m not an idle person,” Gorgi admits. “But if slowing down doesn’t make you happy, you have to honour who you are.”
Despite having started taking music lessons at school, the thought of pursuing it as a career never occurred to Gorgi at that point. Instead, she decided, she wanted to be a vet and headed off to university to study science.
It was during this time that her parents’ marriage broke down irrevocably, a fact she’d been anticipating for some time.
“I think the teenage years were the hardest for me and Nigel because we really started to understand,
‘Okay, I don’t think Mum and Dad are going to make it here’ and it’s always devastating for any child to realise that your parents aren’t going to be together,” she explains.
“By the time they actually announced they were going to separate, my brother and I looked at each other and said, ‘Oh thank God they made a decision!’”
“I really felt I had to [divorce] for future stability,” Kay says of the decision to end the marriage to the man she’d dated since she was a teenager and wed at 23. “And it’s turned out for the better all round.”
With Noel having been a workaholic throughout her formative years, for a while the relationship between father and daughter was strained, Gorgi admits.
But once she had her own child in her early 30s while continuing to juggle a hectic work schedule, and spent a little time in therapy along the road, the way she looked at her dad shifted and a new era began.
“We are the closest that we’ve ever been now,” she says proudly, adding that Noel and Kay are also great mates these days, and see more of each other than they do of their children at times.
“I was able to look at his role through different eyes and say, ‘Okay, he
was trying his best with the tools he had.’ And once I did that and saw him for the man he is – which is just a man trying to provide for his kids – our whole relationship changed and it’s healed.”
A second act
Having moved from Warrnambool to the big smoke in Melbourne to study, it wasn’t long before Gorgi decided that being a vet wasn’t for her. Instead she shifted focus, completing a Graduate Diploma of Education and turning her attention to teaching Year 11 and 12 students.
It was during this time she started classical singing lessons, much to her mother’s delight, spending a hefty chunk of her wages on engaging the services of acclaimed teacher Gary May. After hours she would perform in musical theatre and even put on her own one-woman Shania Twain tribute show in order to get her singing fix.
But despite finding early success on stage, she once again shifted focus, turning her attention to TV news presenting. Starting on now defunct community Channel 31 – a place which also birthed the careers of her The Project cohorts Waleed Aly, Peter Helliar and Tommy Little, along with Rove McManus, Hamish Blake and many other successful TV faces – she next turned to working as a producer and reporter on the Nine Network’s Today Show before landing her breakthrough job as a co-host on Network Ten morning show The Circle alongside Denise Drysdale, Chrissie Swan and Yumi Stynes in 2010. The Project gig would come shortly after the show’s demise in 2012.
Ahead of each new job along the way, Gorgi had quit the previous one with an idea of what she wanted to do next but no actual role. It was a by-product of the total confidence she puts down to Kay and Noel.
“I’ve never been someone who has been afraid of jumping off the cliff,” she laughs of her ability to leave behind what seems like a dream job in search of the next adventure,” she says.
“I think that comes from having an incredible childhood and parents who instilled a good sense of self in me.
I’ve always had fairly strong selfbelief, particularly when it comes to my career. I listen to my intuition and I get such a strong sense in my body of, like, ‘That’s done, there’s nothing more here to grow, I’ve loved it but it’s time to move on.’”
However, even as she hit new heights at work, there was another voice chiming in, reminding her that she’d once had a great love she never followed through.
“I used to get frustrated because Mum would constantly nag me about going back to singing: ‘Why aren’t you using that voice?’” she says, looking fondly at her mother, who is busy teaching Molly-Rose to play on the piano that has been passed down from grandmother to grandchild. “I was like, ‘Mum, I’m busy, I’ve got so much on!’”
But then came the dreaded cancer diagnosis and a battle that for some time looked like one which wouldn’t be won.
Kay shamefacedly admits she had spent some time on “Doctor Google” searching her symptoms. So once the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma call was made by the oncologist, she felt she
knew what to expect. But nothing could have prepared her for the fight that was on her hands.
First came the chemo which, she says, “my system didn’t cope very well with,” in what is clearly an understatement. She ended up spending huge chunks of time in intensive care, waiting for her immune system to pick back up before moving on to radiation treatments that would burn across the entire right side of her face, causing insufferable pain.
“She was really, really unwell,” Gorgi states bluntly. “It was really confronting to watch your mother so vulnerable, so stripped back. I’ll never forget just sitting there in silence and she’d have her eyes closed, she’d lost all of her hair and she was so thin. I remember thinking, ‘You have to beat this because I am not ready to say goodbye.’ You never think you’ll get to that place where it’s so close to the end that the Angel of Death is looking you in the face. It makes you reassess so many things. It makes you reassess what life is about.”
So when the call came from the producers of The Masked Singer, it was a foregone conclusion that Gorgi would once again throw caution to the wind and enthusiastically say ‘yes’. She was honouring her mother’s dearest wish to hear her sing again, but also keeping it a strict secret from her entire family, including her husband and daughter.
Kay was relaxing at home, having completed treatment, when the TV playing in the background made her look up in shock. “I heard this voice and I went, ‘That’s Gorgina’ and they were advertising this new singing show. But when I asked her she said, ‘Oh no, Mum, I’d love to be in the show but it’s way too hard to get into. But you should watch it, you’ll enjoy the music.’”
“I’ve always had fairly strong self-belief.”
Watch it she did alongside MollyRose – who was also not fooled that it wasn’t her mother inside that monster costume – and the rest of the family.
“I guessed,” Gorgi’s delighted daughter pipes up. “I was so excited to see if it was her. I would have been really disappointed if it wasn’t!”
On the night of the finale, they all gathered in the lounge room with a bottle of champagne to celebrate the outcome – which ended with thirdplaced Gorgi telling audiences she’d done it all for the most important woman in her life, her mum Kay.
“Mum burst into tears and came over and gave me a cuddle and said, ‘That means so much,” Gorgi recalls. “It was really emotional for all of us. We were all just sitting there crying – happy tears as Molly-Rose calls them. It just, it just made [the cancer] count for something.”
Today Kay has been in remission for 12 months and is feeling both healthy and happy. And Gorgi is determined to continue making their experience count for something.
She’s looking to get back into musical theatre, and as we talk she is two weeks away from putting on her first one-woman show in Melbourne, belting out the tunes she sang for her mum on TV. And to add to the fun, her very excited daughter will join her on stage.
Just like Gorgi, Molly-Rose loves to sing and they have been practising a duet which they can’t wait to perform together. And sitting front of the stage, once again, will be Kay delighting in seeing her girls showcase their talent – and their love of each other – to another jam-packed audience.
“When you’re a parent you’re just so proud of your child, so I know what it’s meant to her to hear me sing,” says Gorgi. “As a parent you just want your kids to shine.” AWW