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Jacki Weaver’s life as an actor is a story of immense talent and resilience. At the beginning of her career when she was 15 she played Cinderella at the Phillip Street Theatre in Sydney in 1962. She also appeared on the television program Bandstand several times as a teenager. Weaver studied elocution as a child and trained at the Independent Theatre with Doreen Warburton and Doris Fitton. As a youngster Jacki was determined to pursue acting but her small stature, girlish beauty and blonde hair often meant that she did not get the ‘strong characters’ that she wanted.(1) Weaver achieved success in the early 1970’s in Stork, Petersen, Caddie and The Removalists (stage play and film). She appeared in the feature films Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Squizzy Taylor (1982) as well as in the telemovies Do I Have to Kill My Child in 1976 (winning a Logie for Best Actress), Polly My Love (1975) and the musical play set in the Depression called The Girl From Moonooloo in 1984, playing a part written especially for her. She also appeared in The Perfectionist in 1987.
In spite of Weaver’s achievements in these film and television productions and in the television series of House Rules (1988) and Trial by Marriage (1980), as well as her featured roles in significant mini-series such as Water Under the Bridge (1980) and The Challenge (1986), she was known primarily for her work on main stages in a range of roles in the 1980s and 1990s. Weaver appeared in the film Cosi in 1996 and then focussed on stage acting until Animal Kingdom, filmed in 2009. At the age of 63 Weaver’s mesmerising performance in Animal Kingdom (2010) brought her to international prominence, and many more coveted roles in various feature films followed, including Silver Linings Playbook (2012). Since filming Animal Kingdom Weaver has appeared in 22 films and three television series. Weaver now lives in Los Angeles and is amongst the most successful Australian actors of her generation and possibly of all generations.
Jacqueline Ruth Weaver was born in Hurstville, Sydney, in 1947 to Arthur and Edith Weaver (nee Simpson). Arthur studied law and Edith was a homemaker. Jacki has one brother, Rodney, who was born in 1952. One of Weaver’s earliest memories is dancing in a talent contest on the ship Orion dressed in a hula skirt and no top, singing ‘Buttons and Bows’ at the age of two and winning first prize.(2) She recalls her delight in the dancing and in the fuss made of her by the stewards on the ship. In her early years the family lived in Kogarah. Arthur Weaver read his daughter Shakespeare’s plays before she had even started school. Weaver took elocution lessons as a child, as Edith found Jacki’s vowels a matter of concern. The teacher, Joy Mead, informed Mrs Weaver that ‘This child was born to act!’, but according to Weaver her mother ‘was as unlike a stage mother as it was possible to be’.(3) Jacki caught the bus to the St George Children’s Theatre in Kingsgrove and some ‘wonderful ladies’ put her through some ‘old fashioned declamatory acting’ which she recalls ‘was a great outlet for me’.(4) She attended the Rathbone Academy of Dramatic Art run by two English thespians (Judy Rathbone-Lawless and Winifred Hindle) and frequently appeared in church concerts. Once Arthur established his own law practice the family moved to Pymble where Jacki attended Gordon West Primary School and was dux in 1959. Weaver excelled in Latin and other subjects at her selective high school, Hornsby Girls High. She also took acting classes at the Independent Theatre School run by Doris Fitton. John Alden, Keith Bain, May Hollingsworth, Doreen Warburton, Valerie Roy and Doris herself taught the students.
Weaver maintains that one of her prize possessions is a portrait of Dot Mendoza painted by John Perceval, given to her by Derryn Hinch who she married in 1983. The comment reveals a great deal about the way one person can influence and help an actor. It also shows the crucible in which Weaver was formed as an actor: the Independent Theatre, Phillip Street and then at Nimrod. She wagged school one day and took herself off to the Phillip Street Theatre to audition for the role of Cinderella, singing ‘I feel Pretty’ from West Side Story to Bill Orr, having practised it with her father’s secretary Mary playing the piano.(5) Weaver recalls that she had ‘a tiny voice, not a huge voice … but can be sharply focused … [I] could get those notes and I fell in love with the red-haired Dot Mendoza immediately’. Mendoza was ‘a tiny, little dynamo … She was terrifying and she would have you in tears…’.(6)
In the Christmas holidays of 1962-3 Weaver starred in the pantomime at Phillip Street and was paid 30 pounds a week, an enormous sum for a high school girl used to receiving one pound a week pocket money. The experience of playing in A Wish is a Dream was transformative, Jacki recalls.(7) She played the lead role, opposite Bryan Davies, with Robina Beard, Janet Brown, Valda Baganall, Neva Carr-Glynn, Reg Gorman and others.
Immediately the newly established agent Gloria Payten took Jacki into her small stable. Weaver appeared on the popular television program Bandstand and was offered a recording contract and an advertising job for Rice Krinkles. She also continued to take singing lessons with Dot Mendoza. In 1964 Jacki appeared in an ABC television play, cast as the daughter of a broken marriage with Leonard Teale and Diana Davidson.
During her teenage years, Jacki longed to play in Shakespearean drama, but ‘those other things fell in my lap’ she says. She told an interviewer in 1994: All I wanted to do was become other people and say great lines – all I wanted to do was act’.(8) Weaver had hoped to play the shrew but at school was cast as ‘the soppy Bianca’. She believes that her small stature prevented her from playing ‘the strong roles’. Weaver stands four foot, 11 and a half inches or 151 cm. Her petite form and youthful appearance meant that she was still playing children well into her adult years.
Looking back at her life Weaver says that there was always a rebellious streak in her and that she caused her conservative North Shore parents a lot of heartache when she decided against going to university in favour of acting.(9) She married a television director (and skating champion), David Price, when she was 19. They met at a rehearsal of a television show called Be Our Guest that he was directing, and married eight weeks later.
Be Our Guest (1966) was a variety show on the ABC although there was also a drama embedded in it. The program was set in a motel with Lorraine Bayly and Jacki as its regulars, and the setting served as an opportunity to showcase pop music bands, but the program was not well received. However the fact that the two hosts were young women: Jacki Weaver, who was 19 and Lorraine Bayly who was 29, makes it a landmark in Australian television history.
Weaver’s first opportunity to appear in the straight theatre came along when Robin Lovejoy invited her to play at the Old Tote in Pinero’s The Schoolmistress in 1967. It was an interesting cast with David Copping, Jeanie Drynan, Martin Harris, Clarissa Kaye and others. Weaver also played in The Imaginary Invalid (1967) with Ron Haddrick, Jennifer Hagan, Helen Morse and many others.
It was in these plays that Weaver gained her foothold in the kind of theatre that she had yearned to join. She met and closely observed actors who were her contemporaries such as Helen Morse and Kirrily Nolan. Here she also met Rex Cramphorn who was looking after props in one of these productions.
Weaver played in Pinter’s two-hander, Applicant, with John Derum in 1969. At Nimrod Weaver appeared in a double bill of the premiere productions of Jack Hibberd’s satire on censorship, Customs and Excise and Buzo’s The Roy Murphy Show (1971) a satire of sports commentators on television. In the same year she played Fiona in The Removalists, directed by John Bell. Although this production was not the premiere (the premiere was in Melbourne at La Mama in 1970), it was John Bell’s Nimrod Street Theatre production that attracted national attention and acclaim.(10) It was the first time that Jacki had worked with John Bell and it transformed her career. She recalls the tiny theatre in Darlinghurst with the audience so close they could touch the actors: Max Phipps, Martin Harris, Don Crosby, Carole Skinner, Chris Haywood and herself.(11) At one performance after the beating scene, a woman ran out of the theatre down the stairs and vomited in the foyer. Jacki recalls ‘I was the only one off stage and I had to go and clean it up before the audience came down… In those days we sold the tickets, made the costumes, cleaned the lavatories and made the set’.(12)
Weaver also worked with other directors on stage during this important and formative period from 1967-1976, culminating with her performance in A Streetcar Named Desire directed by Richard Wherrett in 1976. Wherrett initially did not believe Weaver was right for the role of Stella but Jacki believed otherwise and wrote an essay for him on the play and why she should be cast in the role: ‘I’m very Stella, part of me is earthy and stable’, she recalls, in an interview more than 20 years later.(13)
Jim Sharman directed Weaver, Michael Boddy, Ron Haddrick and others in Shaw’s You Never Can Tell (1968) and Richard Wherrett directed her as Susan in Alex Buzo’s Tom (1973), a play she believes is outstanding and should have had more attention. Weaver became one of the faces of the New Wave. She also appeared in the rollicking, anarchic musical play, The Legend of King O’Malley, when it toured to New Zealand.
Weaver appeared in several significant Australian films early in her career: Stork in 1971, Petersen (1974) Caddie (1976) and Alvin Purple (1976). It was an important period for her as an actor. It was also a significant period in Australian film making because the film industry was receiving a much needed financial boost from government and increased interest from the public in Australian productions.
Petersen is a vibrant and multilayered Australian film. It is significant because of the way it explores sex roles, sexuality, sexual violence, sexual liberation and long term relationships. It is also a disturbing film, and far more serious in its exploration of relationships than the lighter, satirical films Alvin Purple and Stork. The cast of Petersen was extraordinary, with Jack Thompson, Wendy Hughes, Helen Morse, Jacki Weaver, Arthur Dignam, Belinda Giblin, Sandy Gore, Sheila Florance and George Mallaby.
Weaver played Susie, the wife of the main character, Tony Petersen, an electrician and one-time football star. Susie is threatened by her husband’s new-found interest in intellectual life and university study. She fears being left behind by him in her domestic role as homemaker and mother as he begins to spend more and more time on campus away from the home.
Looking back at the film some years later, Jack Thompson said that Petersen was important in that the world of the film ‘could only have been created by this ensemble of actors and … over the years the ensemble is a particular strength of Australian film making – we are good at it – and this is probably the first example of it in the renaissance …’.(14) There were risks to this ensemble approach however. For example when a film adaptation was made of The Removalists in 1975 it had the look of a play and critics maintain that it is ‘very clearly a film of a play’.(15) Indeed the playwright David Williamson had written the screenplay for the film adaptation. Both Weaver and Kate Fitzpatrick appeared in the film with John Hargreaves, Peter Cummins, Martin Harris and Chris Haywood.
But the excoriating portrayal of violence and police brutality in combination with a raw comic exuberance make The Removalists a landmark play and significant film. In spite of her extraordinary achievements in four innovative Australian films: Stork, Petersen, Caddie and The Removalists, Weaver’s film career stalled and she was seldom offered film roles for some years.
Weaver’s stage career continued to flourish throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In 1974 she appeared in The Seagull playing Masha, directed by Richard Wherrett, and Rosaline opposite John Bell in Love’s Labours Lost (1974), directed by the visiting English director Bill Gaskill. Gaskill said to Weaver when she went to read for the part that ‘your eyes are the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen’.(16) The comment struck a chord with her because she is melancholic and introverted. But she says that she behaves according to Oscar Wilde’s dictum ‘It is our duty to be cheerful…’.(17) Certainly her warm smile and her laughter are distinguishing features of her personality.
For Weaver, performing Shakespeare was something she enjoyed with an intense passion. Similarly she relished playing in Chekhov and her creation of Natasha in Three Sisters in 1977 attracted high praise. One critic spoke of the choice of Weaver for the role as ‘the most original casting’, remarking on her strength in the play: ‘Ms Weaver would appear at first blush too vulnerable, too soft-edged. [But] this is Natasha with dimples of iron’.(18)
Weaver gave birth to her son Dylan in 1970. She recalls that her parents suffered major embarrassment because she was not married to the father of the baby. At the time she learned of her pregnancy she was still married to David Price. Weaver remembers without rancour the ‘tawdry headlines’, and the pressure on her to marry the baby’s father, John Walters, who was 27 years her senior. But Weaver also recalls her resolve, explaining that ‘I was a child of the 1960s’, and did not accept the rules her parents’ generation prescribed. Weaver did not marry her baby’s father, who lived in Canberra and taught at the College of Advanced Education. But Dylan continued to see his father as he grew up. Around that time, Jacki took up with Richard Wherrett, in a relationship that caused endless speculation, primarily because he was known to be a homosexual man. With characteristic candour, Weaver said in an interview in 1994 that ‘Wherrett was one of the great loves of my life … the fact that he is homosexual was never an issue for us… we had an exclusive monogamous relationship at the time’. Weaver was also ‘a child of the 1960s’ in other ways. She took drugs like so many others at the time, ‘never heroin but just about everything else … we took amphetamines to stay awake and dance for three days’ and also to continue working long hours, but after a while she realised that ‘you can’t do your best work on drugs’.(19)
As a young mother, Weaver continued to work in the theatre and in films, appearing in various plays throughout the 1970s, including Forget Me Not Lane, alongside Ruth Cracknell, Buzo’s Tom, A Street Car Named Desire and Love’s Labours Lost. In 1980 she appeared with John Waters in Neil Simon’s musical They’re Playing Our Song, at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne. Weaver auditioned for the role several times, each time with a different potential leading man, and fearful that the producers would most likely cast a well known overseas actor for the Australian production for both male and female leads. She was delighted when she was offered the role and that John Waters would play opposite her. It was an important production for both actors, as it allowed them to consolidate their achievements in musical theatre. They did 600 performances of the musical over two years, enjoying a strong rapport and friendship over the long seasons.
The demands of the musical, and the touring required stamina, patience and an ability to keep renewing the role. It wasn’t easy but the success of the musical had a positive effect on Weaver’s career. Over the next few years she appeared in leading roles in Garson Kanin’s post-war comedy Born Yesterday (1983), Stoppard’s The Real Thing (1985), a play that broke box office records in Sydney, Williamson’s Emerald City (1987), Peter Nichols’ A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1987), directed by Simon Phillips, Nick Enright’s Daylight Saving (1990) and opposite Enright in Michael Gow’s Away (1993).
Jacki Weaver in The Imaginary Invalid, 1967. The Old Tote Theatre Company, Courtesy NIDA Archives and Photographer Malcolm Holmes.
In Born Yesterday Weaver spoke in a strong Bronx accent in what was a long and highly successful production. H G Kippax praised Weaver’s performance as the one-time chorus girl Billie Dawn, as ‘simply gorgeous - the kind of shot of adrenalin our Sydney theatre has needed since winter set in about February last year. Her part could have been written for her. Her Billie is tiny but far from fragile – a pocket battleship disguised as a doll…’.(20)
In William Nicholson’s play Shadowlands (1991) Weaver played a character based on a real person, Joy Davidman Gresham, a Jewish-born atheist from New York City who became enamoured of the writings of author and Oxford don CS Lewis, travelled to the UK to meet him, converted to become a Christian and married Lewis in 1956. In preparing for the role of the left-wing intellectual poet, Weaver visited Gresham’s son in Tasmania. Douglas Gresham spoke at length to Weaver and allowed her to read his mother’s letters to him, and her poetry. In an extraordinary gesture he also offered her the rug his mother slept under, and had over her when she died of cancer in 1960. Weaver herself slept under this rug, and became ‘attached’ to the character of Joy, as if she had known her when she was alive. She played Joy opposite John Bell as Lewis in 1991 and Max Phipps in 1993, and although in many ways she felt she was cast against type, the play was immensely rewarding and successful. In addition to the critical success of the production, Douglas told Weaver that watching her on stage was like watching his mother.(21) In the play Jacki had to embody a woman, Joy, dying on stage. Edith Weaver had died in the year the play opened, and so the crying and the sadness of the play drew on something immediate and real for the actor.(22) Weaver also found Joy Gresham’s attraction to Christianity familiar and nourishing, as she herself had never given up her Christian faith and is a practising Christian.
Weaver appeared amongst a large and interesting cast in a play written by the American Wendy Wasserstein called The Sisters Rosensweig in 1994. The play explores the lives of three middle-aged Jewish-American sisters during a family reunion in London. The cast included Ron Challinor, Judi Farr, Max Gillies, Genevieve Picot, Tony Sheldon and a new, young actor called Rachel Griffiths.
With the success of Shadowlands and The Sisters Rosenweig, Weaver reached a high point in her career, having demonstrated her power as a dramatic actor on the national stage. In 1992 she played Ouisa in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation at the Sydney Theatre Company, and recalls her work in this production with pride.(23) She continued to appear in a variety of plays and touring productions, including the two hander Girl Talk with Christen O’Leary (2000), the premiere of David Williamson’s Soulmates (2002), the premiere of Reg Cribb’s Last Cab to Darwin in 2003, the highly praised one woman play, The Blonde, Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead in 2004, written by Robert Hewett and the musical Priscilla Queen of the Desert in 2007. Weaver played opposite her husband, the South African-born actor Sean Taylor, in an acclaimed production of Death of a Salesman in Sydney in 2008. Weaver and Taylor have appeared together in leading roles in several other plays: Prisoner of Second Avenue (2008), Entertaining Mr Sloan (2010), Last Cab to Darwin (2003) and Soulmates (2002). In 2012 Weaver played in a highly praised Australian production of Uncle Vanya in New York City in a cast that included Cate Blanchett, John Bell, Hayley McElhinney, Sandy Gore, Anthony Phelan, Richard Roxburgh and Andrew Tighe.
In the extraordinary and acclaimed film Animal Kingdom (2010) Weaver plays the matriarch in a family of criminals in suburban Melbourne. The director, David Michôd, wrote the role of Janine ‘Smurf’ Cody especially for her. For the first time international film audiences saw the power of Weaver in the role of a dangerous woman, whose smiles and motherly charms mask her pathological cruelty. Weaver was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the role. In 2012 Weaver played another mother in the film Silver Linings Playbook, this time in the role of Dolores Solitano who struggles to help her adult son (Bradley Cooper) deal with the effects of bipolar disorder. Robert De Niro played Weaver’s husband in the film. Once more she was nominated for an Academy Award in her role. Since her prodigious success in those roles Weaver has played in various films: The Five Year Engagement (2012), Parkland (2013), portraying Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, in the horror-thriller Stoker (2013), the doctor in Last Cab to Darwin (2015) and many other films.
Weaver is a remarkable actor of unusual range and depth, and a master of accents, particularly regional American accents. Her recent success in film comes as a result of dedication, perseverance and a tireless capacity to take on new challenges. Over the years she has played ‘nine David Williamson women and six Neil Simon women’.(24) From the beginning of her career Weaver has exercised a natural charm in the media. Never out of the spotlight since she was 15, she has always had a peculiar knack for enabling honest exchanges and witty repartee with reporters and on game shows such as Would You Believe and Blankety Blanks. She has always been candid about her relationships and never coy. In fact Weaver seems to enjoy presenting a kind of earthy and liberated persona, unafraid to confront the realities of her own life, and the facts about her marriages and partnerships. In interviews in the press and on television almost nothing is off limits with her. She has been open about her battles with alcohol. It is her candour and disarming authenticity that make her appealing and unique as a public figure. Weaver has overcome entrenched, sexist attitudes to her that derive from her small stature, blonde hair, youthful beauty and early roles in cinema. Graeme Blundell who played Westy in the film Stork recalled in his memoir that at the time of shooting the film ‘Jacki was already able to impart to any role a fascinating admixture of sensitivity … sadness and singlemindedness that seemed both tongue-in-cheek and desperate at the same time. This was also the way she appeared to be in her real life. There was a kind of ripe Sydney glamour about her, and she liked to laugh’.(25)
Like Glenda Jackson, an actress much admired by Weaver, she has the capacity for perfectly rendering a character through intense concentration.(26) Weaver is a witty and learned woman of exceptional vivacity. First and foremost she is an actor who has transformed Australian acting: since she was a teenager she has brought a distinctive sensitivity, joy, intelligence and energy to her work.
Jacki Weaver in George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell, Old Tote Theatre, Sydney, 1968. Copyright Robert Walker. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016.
Footnotes
(1) Jacki Weaver Interview with Bill Stephens, National Library of Australia, 1994.
(2) Jacki Weaver, Much Love Jac, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 6.
(3) Much Love Jac, 19.
(4) Jacki Weaver Interview with Bill Stephens.
(5) Interview with Bill Stephens.
(6) Interview with Bill Stephens.
(7) Interview with Bill Stephens.
(8) Interview with Bill Stephens.
(9) Interview with Bill Stephens.
(10) H G Kippax, A Leader of His Craft, Sydney: Currency House, 2004, 180 (Sydney Morning Herald, 12 August 1972, 12).
(11) Interview with Bill Stephens.
(12) Interview with Bill Stephens.
(13) Interview with Bill Stephens.
(14) Jack Thompson, interview on Petersen DVD, Special Features.
(15) Paul Byrnes, ASO Curator’s Notes online http://aso.gov.au/titles/features/the-removalists/notes/.
(16) Much Love Jac, 124.
(17) Interview with Bill Stephens.
(18) Greg Curran writing in Nation Review, quoted in Katharine Brisbane, ‘Jacki Weaver’, in Philip Parsons (ed.) Companion to Theatre in Australia, Sydney: Currency Press, 630.
(19) Interview with Bill Stephens.
(20) HG Kippax, 271 (Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Sept 1984, 10).
(21) Much Love Jac, 217.
(22) Much Love Jac, 218.
(23) Correspondence with Anne Pender 20 October 2016.
(24) Correspondence with Anne Pender 20 October 2016.
(25) Graeme Blundell, The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts, Sydney: Hachette, 2008, 179-80.
(26) Interview with Bill Stephens.
Image Credits
Header image: Jacki Weaver in George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell, Old Tote Theatre, Sydney, 1968, copyright Robert Walker. Licensed by Viscopy, 2016.
Image one: With her husband David Price on the set of the ABC’s variety program, Be Our Guest, 1966. Photograph by Robert McFarlane, Courtesy of Josef Lebovic Gallery.
Image two: Jacki Weaver in The Imaginary Invalid, 1967. The Old Tote Theatre Company, Courtesy NIDA Archives and photographer Malcolm Holmes.
Image three: As Joy Davidman Gresham, with John Bell and Don Reid in the Sydney Theatre Company production of Shadowlands, 1991. By Robert McFarlane, Courtesy of Josef Lebovic Gallery.
Image four: as header.