Playing By Heart

- Susan Horsburgh

Noni Hazlehurst stands amid racks of exquisite 1950s cocktail dresses and lets her character’s stern façade crumble, distilling a lifetime of unrealised longing into a look and a few heartfelt words. Finding the heart in any character, no matter how prickly, is what Noni does best. This time, it is in Bruce Beresford’s latest film, Ladies in Black, which is set in the summer of 1959-’60, when post-war migrants were belittled as “reffos” and women hung on the approval of thoughtless husbands.

For Noni, who has spent the last six years immersed in the same era as formidable matriarch, Elizabeth Bligh/ Goddard, in Foxtel’s A Place to Call Home, it was the still-relevant themes of bigotry and sexism that drew her to the film.

We are moving forward on the equality front, she says, but progress has been glacial “and the backlash has become even more vicious as some men seem to fearfully cling to their perceived superiority,” she says. “It just seems so ludicrous to me that we are still fighting for equality and that it is perceived as some kind of threat.”

Still, the current fight against sexual harassment was inconceivable in the 1970s, when Noni was starting out in show business. Looking back, she says, her sheltered “Enid Blyton upbringing” left her ill-equipped to combat the predatory behaviour of the time. “I was the quintessential young blonde,” recalls Noni. “I got locked in a dressing room and had to sort of scream my way out – things like that. There were auditions that I was told to come to in a bikini, which I didn’t.”