Aussie soap star Simon Baker had a number of Aussie roles including Constable Sam Farrell on E Street and James Healey on Home and Away.
Now, Simon has shot to fame in the United States with the lead role in The Mentalist. He also played the lead role in the US TV show The Guardian and played Christian Thompson in The Devil Wears Prada .
From 1994 to 1997 Isla Fisher started her successful acting career by playing Shannon Reed on Home and Away, alongside Melissa George.
Now, a long way from the shores of Summer Bay, Isla has shot to major Hollywood status. The fiery redhead, who is married to funnyman Sacha Baron Cohen, has appeared in Wedding Crashers, Definitely, Maybe and played the lead role in Confessions of a Shopaholic.
Holly won a Logie award for most popular new talent for her performance on Neighbours, in which she co-starred with Daniel McPherson. She played Felicity Scully from 1999 until 2002 when she left to pursue a music career.
The sexy singer had success in the UK with her single, ‘Down Boy’, peaking at number two on the UK charts. She has since taken up acting again and has starred in US TV shows CSI: Miami, Entourage and Prison Break.
Once known for playing the part of Tasha Andrews on Home and Away for three years, Isabel Lucas has gone on to bigger and better roles and started dating some of the big names of Hollywood. She won a Logie for best new popular female talent for her role on the show.
Since moving to LA in 2008, Isabel has had a number of roles, but is most famous for her role in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. She has also dated some big Hollywood names including Adrian Grenier from Entourage.
Melissa George started her acting career playing Angel Parrish alongside Aussie actor Dieter Brummer on Home and Away. At just 16 years of age she moved from Perth to Sydney for the role.
A far cry from her young character Angel, Melissa is now slowly but surely becoming one of the big names in Hollywood. She has been in a number of movies including Music Within, 30 Days of Night and Turistas. She also received a Golden Globe nomination for her role in as Laura in US TV show In Treatment and has a continuing role on Grey’s Anatomy .
Ryan Kwanten played Vinnie Pattison on Home and Away for five years alongside Ada Nicodemou.
Since leaving Home and Away and moving to the United States, the sexy star has been cast in the TV show True Blood and a number of movies including a lead role in horror movieDead Silence. He has also starred in the movie Don’t Fade Away with Mischa Barton.
Famous for his role of Mike Young on Neighbours, Guy Pearce has become one of Australia’s best known actors.
The super-cute Aussie actor is best known for his first major movie role in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and since has appeared in LA Confidential and Memento. He recently starred alongside Adam Sandler in Bedtime Stories.
Kylie Minogue shot to fame in Australia and the UK as Charlene Robinson in Neighbours. She starred alongside Jason Donovan and their onscreen wedding episode in 1987 attracted an audience of 20 million British viewers.
She is one of the most well known Australians in the world and has had huge world wide success with her Showgirl tour.
Bob Hawke, recently celebrated his 80th birthday. The former Labor Prime Minister of Australia was Australia’s 23rd Prime Minister and the country’s longest serving Labor Party Prime Minister.
Throughout his political career, Bob Hawke welcomed a number of the world’s most fascinating and influential people to Australia. This included Princess Diana when she visited Canberra in 1983.
Bob Hawke welcomed Pope John Paul II during his Papal tour of Australia in 1986.
Bob Hawke welcomed Queen Elizabeth II to Australia alongside his wife Blanche and John Howard at the Opening Ceremony for the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games.
Bob Hawke with Margaret Thatcher at the Australian War Memorial in 1988.
Bob Hawke faces the media scrum during his 1987 Labor Campaign. He held his postion from 1983 to 1991.
Bob married Blanche D’Alpuget in 1995 at a ceremony in Sydney.
After only being in politics for three years Bob became Prime Minister of Australia. He went on to achieve the very unlikely position of winning four consecutive federal elections.
The Australian Idol winner and his family have been plagued by a killer gene, but the young star refuses to let it get him down.
Behind Stan Walker’s infectious smile and sweeter-than-honey voice lurks a frightening and real cancer threat that would fill most people with a sense of terror and dread.
The Australian Idol winner, whose single, Black Box, has hit number one in New Zealand, is a member of an extended Bay of Plenty Maori family who for generations were plagued by aggressive and deadly hereditary stomach cancer.
Ground-breaking research by Otago University scientists, combined with detailed records kept by the family, identified a mutant cancer gene responsible for the deaths of about 25 family members over 30 years.
The discovery meant the entire family, including Stan, could be tested.
“We’ve got the gene. Me and mum,” reveals Stan, 19, whose parents both descend from members of the cancer-plagued family.
The talented singer has regular gastroscopy examinations to check for early signs of the disease.
“They thought I had cancer last year, because I was bleeding from inside, but it was nothing. I was in my gown and I was just about to go in [for tests] and they said, ‘It’s probably nothing but you might have cancer’.
I freaked out, I was like ‘I’m gonna die!’” Despite the obviously frightening moment, as Stan tells the story, he can’t help but laugh at how scared he was.
Weight-loss role models Magda Szubanski and Ian “Dicko” Dickson tell Phillip Koch their tips for staying trim while enjoying all the trimmings.
Australia’s favourite funnygirl Magda Szubanski isn’t joking when she says you can tuck in to a traditional feast without regretting it this Christmas.
“The trick is that you can have little bits of all of that sort of food,” advises Magda, who has lost an incredible 36kg in the past two years and is determined to keep it off.
“We’re a classic: we have the glazed ham, the roast turkey. We do Polish Christmas, which is on Christmas Eve. We have all the trimmings.
“You can have little bits, you just don’t have to do it for the entire 12 days of Christmas. Adjust what you eat on other days. I actually got through last Christmas really well.”
Dicko has a different approach. He’ll be turning his back on the traditional Christmas lunch he was raised on, and instead enjoying Australia’s seafood and fresh produce.
“I absolutely envisage us having a beautiful, big sunny Christmas feast, but it’s going to be one that’s good for us,” promises Dicko, who admits he always ate, drank and made far too merry during previous Yuletide celebrations.
Both he and Magda have learnt how to enjoy life without putting on excess kilos since joining weight-loss giant Jenny Craig – and while Christmas can be a litmus test for everyone, Magda and Dicko insist they can show us all how to stay fit and have fun during the festive season.
“It’s not so much a test, because I’m now used to a different way of eating,” explains Dicko, who has lost more than 10kg since signing on to be the face of Jen4Men in September.
“Where seconds used to be my favourite thing, I’m now more aware of what I’m eating.”
Magda admits she still finds Christmas a difficult time to stick to her healthy new diet, but says even if she overindulges, she will make up for it with exercise.
An attempt to take her own life has left her parents reeling. Jackie Brygel reports.
She’s the girl who should have had it all. With a pop legend dad and a former supermodel mum, Alexa Ray Joel looked destined for a life the rest of us could only dream about.
But after a tortured early adulthood marked by her parents’ troubles, relationship dramas and cruel attacks on her appearance, the 23-year-old last week reportedly tried to take her own life by overdosing on pills.
Paramedics rushed to Alexa’s New York apartment after a female caller, identifying herself as a friend but believed to be Alexa, said that she had taken several pills, and “wanted to die”, but had changed her mind.
When ambulance officers arrived, they discovered the young celebrity was having trouble breathing. She was taken to a nearby hospital, and her mother raced to her side.
“She [Christie] stated that the victim had no health problem and that she was not aware how she [Alexa] had been feeling,” a police report said.
The incident reportedly took place after a “dysfunctional family getaway” with her mother in the Turks and Caicos Islands, and follows Alexa’s traumatic relationship break-up with musician boyfriend Jimmy Riot.
Cursed by a sense of insecurity about not living up to her mother’s much-admired beauty or her father’s extraordinary success, Alexa has recently had a far from easy time.
“Her mother was a supermodel. Her father is one of the biggest pop stars in America. She’s trying to find her place in the world,” a friend told the New York Daily News.
She was also the victim of a string of savage attacks on her appearance by internet bloggers, including Perez Hilton, who mockingly compared her to her mother.
“I think this Perez Hilton guy is quite dangerous, because he has actually made a business out of calling people fat and ugly,” she responded.
But friends say she is unable to brush off criticism and, according to the New York Post, she has been berated by her mother, too.
A Current Affair host Tracy Grimshaw tells Leigh Reinhold why a young policewoman’s horrifying story brought her to tears on air.
After almost three decades in journalism, Tracy Grimshaw has just about seen it all. But the highly regarded A Current Affair host says 2009 will go down as one of her most memorable years.
It was a year in which one of the nation’s most popular and well-respected journalists was recognised for her tireless dedication to her craft, with a coveted Walkley Award for Best Broadcast and Online Interviewing.
But it also saw her targeted by British chef Gordon Ramsay, who attacked her looks and sexuality during a promotional trip Down Under.
And 2009 was the year in which she cried on air for the first time since joining Nine’s Melbourne newsroom as a cadet in 1981.
It was during an interview with brave Cowra police officer Shelly Walsh, whose father murdered her children, Kevin, 7, and Jamie, 5, and her mother, Jean. The news veteran shares the experience in her own words.
“ I had never cried on air before, but Shelly Walsh was an overwhelming story.
The former PM turned 80 last week. Glen Williams looks at the remarkable life of one of Australia’s most popular leaders.
He has been called the heart and soul of Australia. Silver haired, charismatic, fiery tempered, a man of easy tears, champion of the worker, Australia’s mate, a Rhodes Scholar, the lovable larrikin.
Whatever label is pressed to the man, the fact remains, Robert James Lee Hawke is the most popular Australian Prime Minister of all time. A lover, a fighter, a hedonist – the labels are endless, but all serve to heighten public intrigue and interest in the man whose mum, Ellie, instilled in him a strong sense of self from the moment he was born in Bordertown, South Australia, on December 9, 1929.
Ellie, a school teacher and champion of women’s rights, sowed the belief in Bob from a tender age that he would one day grow up to become Prime Minister.
His father, Clem, a Congregationalist minister, doted on his son and could see his charismatic spark, telling all, “Bobbie had an outflowing magic about him.”
Raised in Perth, at 15, Bob took up his mother’s belief, boasting he would one day be PM. He joined the Labor Party in 1947.
Academically brilliant, he was successful in applying for a Rhodes Scholarship at the end of 1952. By 1953 he was ensconced at Oxford University completing a Bachelor of Letters. But his serious academic life was offset by regular, high-spirited carousing.
Bob set a new world speed record for beer drinking, an achievement he would later say contributed to his political success by endearing him to a nation of beer lovers.
For that is the magic of Bob – his ability to appeal to the everyday, battling Aussie.
He married Hazel at Trinity Church, Perth, in 1956, and in 1957, while studying arbitration law at the Australian National University, Canberra, accepted a job with the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) as a research officer.
Moving to Melbourne, he proved triumphant with the ACTU, gaining for the Australian worker a 15 shilling ($1.50) – roughly 10 per cent – wage rise. He became a champion of the worker, and was elected president of the ACTU in 1969.
Bob was brilliant at negotiating and was greatly liked and respected by employers as well as unions. But as his career flourished, and speculation began that he’d soon enter politics, his personal life was clouded with rumours of womanising and heavy use of alcohol.
Although a lengthy list of stars including Lady Gaga met Queen Elizabeth II recently at the Royal Variety Performance in Blackpool, don’t expect singer Pink to be next on the list.
The singer, who is not afraid to speak her mind, has come out swinging at the royal family and has labelled Prince William a “redneck” because he enjoys hunting.
The ‘Funhouse’ singer, who is an animal activist and works with PETA, has told Q magazine she wrote a letter of complaint to Prince William about his interest in hunting and the mistreatment of animals.
“I wrote to him to protest about foxhunting and I figured he would be this stuffy, privileged asshole,” Pink told the magazine.
“But he’s like a redneck from the south. If you’re brought up shooting and hunting animals, if you really think it’s second-nature and you’re blasting away, then it’s hard to see the other point of view. You need educating.”
This is not Pink’s first attempt to contact the royal family to share her views. She has also written to the queen to complain about guards at Buckingham Palace wearing bearskin hats.
She is yet to receive a response to her letters from the royal family and adds that she has planned for replacement hats to be made.
“To be truthful I was really surprised I didn’t get a reply to that one,” Pink said.
“I wasn’t just writing in and complaining, and it certainly was not a publicity stunt. I actually proposed a plan. Stella McCartney had designed these replacement hats for the guards, using fake fur. I felt we were solving the problem for her and offering a viable solution,” she said.
“But she never wrote back. Maybe she doesn’t have any of my stuff on her iPod.”
Packed with 250 all-new puzzles you’ll love to do and $82,418 in prizes you’ll love to win, the bumper new issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly Puzzle Book is the perfect stocking filler this Christmas.
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