Home And Away actor turns her back on love.
She is tired of romance and now Georgie Parker wants writers to give her stories that aren’t so gender specific. Kerry Harvey reports.
“I frankly wasn’t that excited about it because I guess I would like to see storylines for her other than getting pregnant.” – Georgie Parker
Georgie Parker is calling time on romance for Summer Bay’s Roo Stewart and it’s not hard to understand why. Roo has, like most Home And Away characters, had a rocky romantic history. After a fling with Marilyn’s ex, Sid (Robert Mammone), she married and divorced Harvey (Marcus Graham), nearly committed bigamy with Dr James Edmunds (Myles Pollard) and, most recently, found herself pregnant to toy boy James Mayvers (Tim Ross).
“It was a bit of a miracle really because I’ve been in menopause for three years,” Parker says, laughing.
“I read that then I went, ‘OK, just how old do you think this woman is?’. I frankly wasn’t that excited about it because I guess I would like to see storylines for her other than getting pregnant.
“However, this does happen to people and, ironically, I do know a couple of women who got pregnant when they didn’t think they could in their late 40s.” The 52 year old was also lukewarm about Roo’s fling with the much younger James. “I wasn’t that enthralled about it. I just knew it wouldn’t be taken seriously,” she admits. “But when they cast Tim, he’s so delightful, we got on so well and, ironically it didn’t feel that strange that we were together. “Admittedly, I don’t worry about my age at all. I never talk about it. I don’t feel it and I also don’t want women to be hampered by, ‘Oh, you’re over 40 or you’re over 50’. It’s certainly not an issue for men. “I did actually say to the writers can we not write me as a woman any more? Can we just write me as a human being because I think it might free me up for different stories that aren’t so
gender specific. They listened and they agreed so if I’m single that will be an easier task.”
After a tragic miscarriage, Roo is now setting her sights on a teaching career – a move Parker relishes because it will give her even more interaction with the show’s ever-changing young cast members.
“This is a show primarily about the younger people so that’s where the focus really needs to be a lot of the time,” she says.
“The older cast members are there to mentor, to guide and to also go through their own dilemmas, but it is primarily about younger people going through their lives.”
It would be difficult to find a better mentor. The actress has been a fixture on Australian television since the 1980s, playing Lucy Gardiner on A Country Practice and Terri Sullivan on All Saints, before landing in Summer Bay seven years ago.
Over the years she has won seven Logies, including two Gold ones for being the most popular person on Australian television.
However, unlike many of her contemporaries, she never had any aim to try her hand in Hollywood.
“That’s not why I act. I have been very lucky. I’ve never had to have another job but I do a lot of theatre as well,” she says, adding her success at the tender age of 23 came as a huge surprise.
“I didn’t want to act to be famous so when the popularity came my way I wasn’t really equipped to handle it,” Parker says.
“But I embraced it and liked that I could have a career and not be finding other jobs between the jobs.
“I was never ambitious enough to uproot my life and move to another country. I really wanted to work in my own country and tell Australian stories and go home to my home every night.”
However, that doesn’t stop her from understanding the ambitions of her younger co-stars.
“I do miss them terribly when they go but it’s so exciting in so many other ways because the show is like a training ground for them,” she says.
“We work very fast and we expect them to be technically proficient and to learn their lines very quickly and do 15 things in a row.
“It’s a hard task but when they leave they are really primed to do a lot of different things.”
Parker, who has a 16-year-old daughter, Holly, says she doesn’t try to mother the newcomers.
“But I do definitely become a shoulder for them to lean on if they need it. I definitely try to guide them and if they want advice I give it but I don’t give it if they don’t want it because I think there’s nothing worse than somebody saying, ‘In my day’.”