Noni Hazlehurst never had the close relationship with her mother Leonie that she so badly wanted. Now, thanks to Who Do You Think You Are?, she knows why.
The series uncovers the trauma that Noni’s mother went through during WWII. At the time, she was living in the UK city of Liverpool with her baby son Cameron. Her husband George was in the army.
“She was very good at masking how she really felt and she didn’t tell us about what she endured during the war,” Noni says.
“I just felt a lot of regret that she didn’t feel like she could open those boxes of trauma and let us have an intimacy that I craved.”
Noni reveals she didn’t have a close relationship with her mother.
The actress wishes she could have learnt about her mother’s wartime experiences while she was still alive.
“I just would have loved to have been able to be more empathetic and sympathetic to what she’d endured,” she says.
“She was very frightened of loud noises, and not knowing what that came from, I didn’t understand that about her. I thought she overreacted.”
Noni says her mother, who had a career on stage as a young woman, wanted her to go into musical comedy, rather than the type of roles she ended up doing.
“I always felt like I was a bit of a disappointment to her,” Noni adds.
“I think generally she had a real disappointment about what life had dealt her.”
Noni regrets not asking her mother about her wartime experiences.
Who Do You Think You Are? also uncovers the showbusiness career of Noni’s great-grandfather, Patrick Carmody.
As a child of seven, he was whisked off to the US by a stranger and put into a death-defying stage act.
“He was, I suggest, exploited as a child, but clearly was just very, very good at what he did,” Noni says.
“It’s an amazing story.”
Who Do You Think You Are? airs this Tuesday, 17 April at 7.30pm on SBS
