The naked truth

After a rocky start to the year, and another brush with cancer, Heather Mitchell is celebrating friendship and family, true love and a career that is just hitting its stride.

- SAMANTHA TRENOWETH

Heather Mitchell slips mischievously out of a waffle bathrobe and dashes naked towards the swimming pool. It’s one of the sexiest scenes in the first season of the Binge drama Love Me. She jumps in the deep end – not perhaps the most elegant of all jumps but not too splashy – and unsurprisingly Hugo Weaving follows. In that moment, Heather embodies joy, and the unselfconscious confidence of a woman in the prime of life. And at 64, with an Order of Australia, a Silver Logie this year for Most Outstanding Supporting Actress and a queue of coveted theatre and television roles in her diary, that is exactly where she finds herself.

“As a young actress,” she admits, “I would often read scenes requiring nudity – predominantly sex scenes, which were almost obligatory in every script – and I felt uncomfortable about exposing my body.”

Less so now. The reason, she suspects, is that the nudity isn’t so gratuitous.

“In Love Me, the shedding of clothes was driven by the truth of the situation,” she explains. “Standing naked felt like a natural extension of the character [free-spirited Anita], and I felt comfortable with that ... I should add that it was the middle of winter and the water was freezing. The scene didn’t originally have Hugo jumping in after me, but being the beautiful man he is, he said, ‘If she has to suffer, so will I’.”

Heather has become, not only more comfortable in her long, lanky body, but grateful for its inner strength.