New Lease On Life

Actress Georgie Parker Talks To Paul Ewart About Overcoming A Life-changing Health Diagnosis And How Exercise Helps Her To ‘wipe The Slate Clean’

- Paul Ewart

As Lucy Gardiner on A Country Practice, Terri Sullivan on All Saints, and – most recently – Roo Stewart on Home and Away, actress Georgie Parker has been a fixture on our screens since the ’80s. Iconic, long-running roles aside, she’s also managed to pick up seven Logies, forge a dazzling theatre career, marry her dream guy, and become a mum along the way. Her secret? The simple fact that she’s full of beans.

“I have a lot of natural physical energy,” a smiling Georgie tells Good Health & Wellbeing. “I’m quite excitable! And expending some of this excess energy through exercise definitely helps relax me.”

The go-getter’s passion for fitness has its roots in her childhood, during which she was a confirmed “sporty kid”.

“I’ve always liked health,” she says. “It’s just the way I was raised. I played a lot of softball, swam and was a ballet dancer. For us, it was never about how you looked, it was always about how exercise made you feel.”

However, at the age of 13, after nine years of ballet training, Georgie’s promising future as a dancer came to an end when she was diagnosed with scoliosis, a spinal condition.

“Everyone in the room was very quiet and looking at me when they told me,” she recalls of the fateful day. “So I realised that it was very important. I was good at ballet and it gave me a lot of physical freedom, so to be told that not only could I not do it but that I’d need to be put in a brace for years, was a shock.”

Though the blow signalled an end to dancing, Georgie was determined to make the best of the situation. Already knowing that acting was where her real ambitions lay, she made peace with the fibreglass brace that covered her torso.

Adjusting to ‘Boris’