No one could accuse Heather Mitchell of being typecast. Over the past 40 years, the performer has developed a dizzyingly broad back catalogue, with more than 100 screen credits to her name, not to mention her work on stage. She has danced with company Force Majeure. She’s won Helpmann, Green Room, AACTA and Logie Awards. Her IMDb page , which dates back to 1981, shows she has worked steadily since that date, with multiple projects each year.
The NIDA graduate is on the board of the Sydney Theatre Company. She is a cancer survivor and ambassador for the Australian Research Centre for Cancer Survivorship. In 2019, she became a Member of the Order of Australia. She’s an artist and poet. Her memoir, Everything and Nothing , was published by Allen & Unwin in 2023. As Toni Collette says in the book’s blurb, “Is there anything she can’t do?”
Mitchell’s path to success, however, has not been linear. The body of work outlined above, she notes, “happened among a messy life, during huge ups and downs, times of great financial insecurity. But on paper, it looks great.”
You’re not going to have a stagnant life. You’re going to get up every day, keep alive, help other people and do things that give you joy and pleasure.
HEATHER MITCHELL Success is mostly hard graft and perseverance – plus that extra something that makes a person run towards a challenge, not away from it – and Mitchell is a strong believer in being ready to pounce on an opportunity when it presents itself. That’s where her internal drive comes in.
“Of course, life will give you things – it just will,” she says. “You’re not going to have a stagnant life. You’re going to get up every day, keep alive, help other people and do things that give you joy and pleasure. Things are going to happen, I have no doubt.”
Mitchell dials into our interview from Auckland, where she’s currently touring RBG: Of Many, One . It’s a one-woman show about American lawyer and associate justice of the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a role Mitchell has played in three separate productions since 2022.
We’re meant to be speaking about the upcoming release of Stan’s* The Killings at Parrish Station (a series so terrifying at times, I had to watch it through my hands). But I can’t help asking her about the experience of playing RBG over the past four years, and whether it hits a little differently with this particular American presidency (Mitchell started in the role while Joe Biden was still president).
“Absolutely,” says the 68-year-old. “Each year we’ve done it, it’s changed. When Trump got in, it was like, ‘Oh, that won’t last.’ People were laughing at him in the show. Now, people are audibly crying and cheering as well.”
Many actors have a ritual when preparing to perform. For Mitchell, it’s a fried egg. Nicholas Wilson Even on Zoom, Mitchell is poised, focused and self-possessed, so I can only imagine the gravitas she brings in person. And she’s certainly not afraid to take on roles with plenty of chew. In The Killings at Parrish Station she plays Georgia Cooke, a police detective who’s been institutionalised for 37 years after working on a grisly massacre at a remote desert research station. To all intents and purposes, Cooke has lost her life. Over the course of the show, we learn what drove her to be shut off from the outside world for decades, isolated from family, her career in tatters.
The show is set across two timelines: the present day, and 1987. Mia Wasikowska ( Tracks , Alice in Wonderland ) plays Cooke in the ’80s, working on a case that gets ever more horrific and fantastical, eventually prompting the young detective to question her grasp of reality.
Because of scheduling issues, Wasikowska had to film all her scenes first, which meant Mitchell could watch rushes to get an understanding of how the younger actor was treating the character. “I’ve known Mia for 20 years,” says Mitchell. “I worked with her on one of her first jobs, actually. She is a master at economy. She’s very internalised as an actor. So I could get a feel for what she was doing.”
The role’s focus on a woman with a lifetime’s worth of demons required Mitchell to reflect on what the first five years in an institution would be like, and then the next 10. “That’s one of the things about getting older,” she says. “You’re dealing with your past, and you’re dealing with what you hope the future might be. But the future gets smaller as you get older. So you’re not thinking that much about the future except, ‘I hope I can still stay here.’ ”
Inhabiting a character, then stripping that character off when the curtain drops, comes easily for Mitchell. She’s more fascinated by the way things in her personal life will start to mirror those of a character she’s portraying; her choice of music, or books, for instance. “When your mind is focused on particular things, you start observing very particular things,” she says.
In RBG , the subject of cancer is tackled throughout the show. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life…
Read the full article at The Age →
Australia