Written to script
She’s built a career under the radar as one of our most talented scriptwriters, but now, thanks to being handpicked by Nicole Kidman to work on Nine Perfect Strangers and with her own semi-autobiographical series about to premiere, Samantha Strauss is hav
well be one of Australia’s most successful screen stars you’ve never heard of. Fresh off the set of the latest Liane Moriarty screen adaptation Nine Perfect Strangers, starring Nicole Kidman and Melissa McCarthy, Strauss is preparing for the Australian premiere of the semi-autobiographical 10-part series she conceived, wrote and executive-produced, The
End, starring Dame Harriet Walter and Frances O’Connor, following its successful debut on Sky UK last year. She’s also working on a script with Shakespeare in Love and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel director John Madden, the true story of Nancy Reagan’s close friendship with her astrologer; while she’s been commissioned to write a pilot with ABC America for the production company run by Tom McCarthy, he of Oscarwinning Spotlight fame.
For someone so adept at penning refreshingly realistic and well-rounded characters, she’s done a good job of ensuring her own character has stayed firmly out of the spotlight.
“There probably isn’t a lot out there about any Australian screenwriters, is there?” she ponders. “It’s probably not the writer way, we’re all pretty awkward and weird people!”
Awkward and weird she is not, if a couple of hours in the company of this smart, thoughtful, self-deprecating woman is any indication. In fact, we know more about Strauss than you might think, given much of her writing is so candidly autobiographical. The series that established her successful career trajectory, Dance Academy, and its feature film spin-off, were inspired by her own dreams of becoming a professional dancer; while the alarming opening of The End, which
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sees grandmother Edie (British actor Walter) lying in bed with a plastic bag tied tightly around her head, is also all too real. The common thread is the sharp, insightful, sympathetic and very real world of characters she draws. Little wonder she caught Kidman’s eye, with her deft touch for dialogue and character.
Strauss grew up on the Gold Coast, devoting the first 18 years of her life to a full-time ballet program, only to have the dream cruelly cut short when she broke her back after her instructor pushed her too far. She is pragmatic about the turn of events, noting it was while she was enduring a long recovery that she discovered a new dream: film.
“I had this fanciful notion of going to film school, so I did. I loved the writing course [a Bachelor of Film and Television at Bond University], because the directing one filled me with so much anxiety I vomited before every day of filming.” It was at uni that she penned a short film, The End, which her writing teacher felt showed great potential, encouraging her to go further.
Writing jobs were scarce, so Strauss became a casting agent, exposing her to different styles of dialogue and characterisation. It was while she was casting H2O: Just Add Water that she met young associate producer Joanna Werner.
“I had a dream of writing my own show about a ballet school, because that’s what I knew. I tried every producer in Australia and they all said no. Then I had this magical moment with Joanna where I asked [what her ultimate show would be] and she described exactly the show I’d been writing. It took two more years to get up, but we did, together.”
Detailing a fictional Sydney-based dance school and its talented students, Dance Academy became a cult teen hit, running across three seasons and 65 episodes. Picked up by the ABC here and Germany’s ZDF Enterprises and screening in 160 countries, it was nominated for two international Emmys and won two Australian Writers’ Guild Awards. The 2017 feature film Dance Academy: the Movie was directed by Modern Family and Lambs of God director Jeffrey Walker.
Strauss describes the film as “wishfulfilment autobiography”. “I wanted it all to be true,” she says, laughing. “But I was really lucky in the sense my first writing job was my own show, so I didn’t have to do small script roles up the chain.”
It was while she was working between writing the Channel 10 telemovie Mary: the Making of a Princess and episodes of Wonderland that she successfully pitched The End to Rachel Gardner who had recently joined Australia’s See-Saw Films, the Oscar-winning and Emmy-nominated production house behind Lion, starring Kidman; and The King’s Speech.
The End is inspired by Strauss’s own grandmother, who tried to commit suicide following the death of her husband and the subsequent discovery he’d been routinely unfaithful. Questioning what her life had been for and depressed about her future she decides to end it but is thwarted by her daughter, palliative care doctor Kate (O’Connor), who intervenes and brings her out from England to the Gold Coast, only to dump her in a ritzy assisted-living facility.
The End tackles some meaty issues, from voluntary assisted dying to ageing and teen gender dysphoria, but is in fact darkly comedic and disarmingly candid. In addition to Walter and O’Connor – who
“I wanted to show that life can be a metamorphous at any age and that you can actually find yourself and have some fun in your retirement years”