Opposites Attract

Georgie Parker chats with Samantha Trenoweth about fall in love, motherhood, and the operation that gave her a new lease on life at 53.

- Samantha Trenoweth

Georgie Parker talks a lot – she is positively effusive – but she doesn’t say much about love. Perhaps that’s because she holds close those things that are most precious. When she does speak about love, you stop and take notice.

The Weekly team has stolen Georgie away from her family on this grey and drizzly Saturday. Her husband, writer Steve Worland, and their 17-year-old daughter, Holly, are running errands. They message to say they’re having a good time, and Georgie smiles.

“You know,” she says, “when I first met him, I thought, this is a person I could rely on. That was an important thing to me at the time and he was the sort of person who, if he said he was going to do something, he would do it. If he said he would be somewhere, he would be there. There was also a deep kindness there, and he was someone who I felt I could talk to forever and ever and ever. He is funny and smart.”

The winner of seven Logies (two gold) and star of many of Australia’s most loved television dramas (including A Country Practice, All Saints and Home and Away) has been bounding about for the camera all morning. A bundle of irrepressible energy, she is one minute leaping onto the couch, the next shimmying down the corridor to Aretha Franklin.

She and Steve, she says, are “completely different” in most ways, so opposites do attract. “If you were going to compare us, I would say he’s the introvert. But when I go home, I tend to sit and daydream and plod around and put some music on. So he’s much more animated than I am then.” She ponders that perhaps that’s because writing is so often a solitary pursuit, “so he needs people. We balance each other out.”