Laura De Gois tells Patrice Fidgeon why she’s disgusted the actress agreed to play her mum in a movie.
Rebecca Gibney has won the hearts of Australians as beloved mum Julie Rafter on popular sitcom Packed to the Rafters.
But a new sexy role has caused her nothing but heartache and viciously raked over a family’s painful memories.
Barely recognisable in the role of Maria Korp, with dyed hair and racy attire, in controversial new telemovie Wicked Love, Rebecca says she relished the challenge of playing a more sultry character. The movie chronicles the final months of Maria’s life after the Melbourne mum-of-two was strangled and left for dead in 2005 by her swinger husband and his young mistress.
“This is very sexy. I have lots of cleavage and you couldn’t get more different from playing Julie on Rafters,” she says. “It’s fun because all of a sudden, as a woman as well, you are heading towards that age when you don’t think you can be sexy any more.
“Julie is a mum. I don’t ever think for a second anyone is ever going to look twice,” she adds in her interview with The Daily Telegraph.
“Then, in this role, I put on the high heels and low-cut tops and I’m getting wolf whistles. I’m like, ‘I can do sexy, even for a 45-year-old I’m OK, I can pull if off’.”
It’s precisely these comments that have outraged Maria’s children, Laura and Damian, who are devastated to hear Rebecca describe playing their dead mother as “fun” and brag about feeling “sexy” in the role.
“She’s been quoted as saying that playing Maria was ‘fun’,” Laura tells Woman’s Day in an exclusive interview. “She is talking about a role that is supposed to be my mother.
“How do you think I feel when I read it was ‘fun’ to play my mother? The mother I lost in the worst imaginable circumstances, brutally attacked and left to die the way she was?”
Playing the ill-fated Maria was seen by many as a career-defining role for the leading lady of Australian television.
The bizarre true story of Maria’s murder had it all: sex, violence and criminal intrigue. And her gruesome death gripped the nation five years ago as the “body in the boot” case played out in headlines across the country.
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