Humility is a rare find these days. And there’s no-one more humble, affable and adored in the Australian entertainment industry than Georgie Parker.
Whether you’re sitting down with the actress for a chat or catching up over the telephone, the 55-year-old is a breath of fresh air.
“I don’t live a glamorous life,” a down-to-earth Georgie tells us. “I’m just as normal as everyone else.”
It’s this lack of concern for being in the limelight that makes Georgie an Aussie gem.
Add her acting prowess and the fact she has a heart of gold and it’s hardly surprising Georgie has been nominated for more than 20 TV WEEK Logie Awards over her impressive career, which spans almost three decades.
“I still remember the first TV WEEK Logie event I attended,” Georgie recalls. “I wore a taffeta dress I’d bought myself – that was pretty amusing!”
Georgie at the 1990 TV WEEK Logie Awards.
At that time, Georgie was playing nurse Lucy Gardiner in A Country Practice. The hit drama series centred around the day-to-day dealings of a rural hospital. ACP remains one of Australia’s most popular television series of all time.
“My character was outrageous, colourful and spontaneous,” Georgie enthuses. “She had a pet rooster called Rhett and she spoke to inanimate objects. She was pretty easy to love.”
Indeed she was. In 1990, Georgie, then 25, took home the TV WEEK Logie for Most Popular New Talent.
“It was a bit daunting, but I was super-excited,” she recalls. “I had no expectation of winning anything, so that was pretty nice. I’d been doing the show for only a year and had worked really hard, so I felt honoured.”
Georgie accepted her Logie award for Most Popular New Talent in 1990.
Georgie played loveable Lucy from 1989 to 1992. Six years later, she re-emerged as nun and nurse Terri Sullivan in Channel Seven’s much-watched medical drama All Saints.
“Terri was a bit of a gift of a role,” she says with a smile. “They wrote her very well.”
“Terri was very different to me, but that’s my job. I had to find her heart and voice – and the reason she did everything she did. It was complex, but ironically, it came quite quickly. She was a complex person who came from a difficult, complicated, dysfunctional background. Her coping mechanisms made sense to me.”
Georgie Parker was an iconic face on popular Aussie show A Country Practice.
By this point, it was clear Georgie, who grew up on Sydney’s North Shore, could do no wrong. Everything she touched turned to gold. The stars aligned in 2001 when Georgie won the coveted Gold Logie.
“That was pretty overwhelming,” she remembers. “In my acceptance speech, I said something like, ‘I didn’t really know what it meant’. That’s because back then, Gold Logies usually went to people like Ray Martin or Jana Wendt – not actors like me.
“I didn’t understand whether they were giving the award to me as a person, or to Terri. What I did know is that it belonged to the show.
“For me, everything always pivots back to the show. I actually got the whole cast of All Saints up on stage that night. I said, ‘Come on, everyone – come up!'”
Georgie with her Gold Logie, and Bert Newton, in 2002.
