The Costco Connection

BY STEVE FISHER

UNLESS YOU WATCH a lot of Australian television, the name Marta Dusseldorp may not be familiar to you. It should be. There is a reason she is currently starring in three different series in Australia: A Place to Call Home, Janet King and Jack Irish. All are now available on the streaming Acorn TV channel and on DVD at Costco.

Dusseldorp recently chatted with The Connection via Skype from her home in Sydney. In explaining how she has resisted the allure of working in Hollywood, Dusseldorp points to the draw of the craft.

“I’ve been busy working here,” she says. “I
believe that acting is a craft, and you have to
keep plugging away at it and chipping away at
it, so if it meant that I could do a theater piece
here in Sydney rather than wait over there for
a job, I tend to do that.”
Dusseldorp’s characters are strong
women, but not without their weaknesses. In
Jack Irish she plays Linda, an investigative
reporter and sometimes girlfriend of Jack,
played by Guy Pearce. “She defines herself by
her individuality and her lack of need for men
in any kind of way, shape or form except to
have sex with, which I really like because
there are women like that out there,” she says.

A Place to Call Home, a 1950s melodrama, is an in-depth look at Australia in the 1950s. “I play Sarah Adams, and Sarah is a really complicated woman. One of the hardest characters I’ve ever had to embody,” Dusseldorp says.

“She’s a nurse on the surface, and she’s been
living overseas. She got caught up in the war.
She married a Jewish doctor and was taken by
the Nazis and put in Ravensbrück for three
years, where she was repeatedly beaten, and
raped. She then survives and is repatriated and
ends up in London.”
When the series begins, her brother has
died and she returns home to a strained rela-
tionship with her mother and difficulties accli-
mating to life in Australia. “She gets involved
with an aristocratic family, falls in love with
one of the sons, but it’s unrequited love and
they can’t be together for various reasons.”
(Dusseldorp’s husband, Benjamin Winspear,
appears opposite her in part of the series.)

“The third character I play is Janet King,”
says Dusseldorp. King was originally a char-
acter in another series, and a show was spun
around her when that one ended. “She is a
very high-powered prosecutor. She’s also a
lesbian, and has two children with her part-
ner. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a man or a
woman, she’ll say what she thinks and kind of
disintegrate people in front of her. But it’s a
really great look into our legal system, but also
into the life of a woman we don’t often see on
our screens, especially here in Australia. It’s
rare we even have a woman lead.

“Recently, when I was in America, everyone said, ‘How do you choose your roles?’ It’s not really like that here. We don’t have enough work. We don’t have enough product. We don’t have enough people comparatively to America. So these roles really chose me. I auditioned for all of them—some of them three or four times. There’s a lot of me in them, but there’s also a lot of them in me, because, like I say, they chose me.” C