For actor Heather Mitchell, the #MeToo movement was a long time coming. When women started speaking out, "it immediately resonated, it really did shake me up", she says.
It sent her reflecting down the decades of her own life, all the times she had felt unsafe, uncomfortable and threatened, "not just in my industry, but throughout my life".
"It made me realise that I had minimised experiences," Mitchell tells Australian Story. "I was shocked at how I had silenced myself."
There was an actor who was always drunk and took things "much further than was safe", she says. "I felt physically threatened by him and therefore psychologically frightened. But I didn't know anyone to speak to. I felt powerless."
In the 1980s and 90s, she remembers a lot of drugs and alcohol being consumed on some sets. "There were freedoms that were taken, I did feel very uncomfortable."
"The film sets and TV sets were very male dominated. I would go so far as to say very testosterone, cocaine and alcohol-fuelled places."
One time while resting in her van on a set with her eyes closed, she woke to find a man kneeling and kissing her — "his tongue in my mouth" — and another man watching.
"I did go to a producer and suggest that something should be done. To my knowledge, nothing was done about it. I didn't feel I had a voice," she says. "I was afraid to speak out."
The fear of losing a job or not working again proved all too true when she did make a complaint about another incident, only to be "written out of the show, pretty much".
After that, she retreated to the place she felt safest. "I threw myself into the theatre. I felt in the theatre there was much more of a camaraderie. There was much more of an equality, a feeling of family."
Now in her 60s, in her full power and doing some of the best work of her career, Mitchell is determined that what she lived through does not happen to the next generation.
"When I'm working with younger people, I certainly encourage them to speak up if there's anything they're uncomfortable about, and to know who to speak to," she says. "In terms of sexual and emotional safety, I think it's an ongoing discussion that has to just keep happening."
"Heather is a very powerful voice in our industry," says Sydney Theatre Company artistic director Kip Williams. "And she uses that power to advocate for other young women."
The great reckoning has led to the industry being in a much better place than it was five years ago, according to Mitchell. "Now you feel the impact and the input of incredible women, many more female producers, writers, better roles for women, stories about women," she says.
Mitchell 'showcased for the genius she is'
What Mitchell did with those frightening situations was to "file them away". A part of her would "stand outside of it", she says, and observe. Later, she would draw on it in her acting.
Now, after four decades starring on Australians stages and screens, Mitchell brings her whole life to her performances, a life that has been lived with love and passion, and one threatened by cancer too.
"She is able," her old friend and co-star Hugo Weaving says, "to tap into a deep well of love and grief, but at the same time being very light and very buoyant."
Last October, her portrayal of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG), the late US Supreme Court judge, at the Sydney Theatre Company, was described by the Sydney Morning Herald as "a performance to live among the greats".
After a lifetime of supporting roles, Kip Williams says: "Here was this pinnacle of acting vehicles for Heather to really be showcased for the genius that she is."
Playwright Suzie Miller had written it specifically with Mitchell in mind. "It was so obvious that it had to be Heather," she says.
"There were so many things in Ruth's life that resonated with me," Mitchell says. "I was brought up with a Jewish mother. My mother died on my last exam of school. So did her mother."
They even both married a man named Marty.
Performing as RBG, who had fought so hard for equality and the rights of women, gave Mitchell the confidence to write about her own life in her just-published memoir Everything and Nothing; to articulate her own experiences of abuse and inequality.
The one-woman play had been interrupted by her second diagnosis of breast cancer and finishing the season had been a physical and mental feat.
"I don't know how she did it," Williams says, "For Heather to bring that story to life just months after overcoming cancer was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Heather went to this transcendent place."
The 'cancer club'
Mitchell is a person friends describe as universally loved; a rememberer of birthdays, a bringer of cakes, "Heather will come to rehearsals having learned all her lines," Williams says, "and yet she will have baked three vegan cakes for the entire cast overnight."
Friend and filmmaker Jocelyn Moorhouse used to call her "Heather Angel". "She is just so gracious and ethereal," she says.
Mitchell has a "warmth and natural empathy", says close friend and former boyfriend Sam Neill, which translates into her work in a "really magical way. A lot of that comes from being a naturally good human being".
When they were both going through cancer last year, she, Neill and the artist Nicholas Harding formed a "cancer club".
Mitchell had T-shirts printed with "F**k off cancer" on them. "And we'd get together occasionally in our T-shirts and drink good wine and have a great time," she says.
Harding died last December. "We miss him terribly," she says.
When she was 11, her "joyous, smart" mother Shirley was diagnosed with leukaemia. "Back in the late 60s you didn't talk about cancer," Mitchell says. "She kept it an absolute secret."
As her mother got weaker, Mitchell dealt with it by creating characters in her bedroom. They were "to prepare me for grief, for loss," she says. "I suppose I was doing my own therapy."
Shirley died when Mitchell was 17, during her trial exams for the Higher School Certificate. She left behind a letter, "just saying what a gift I'd been and how much she had loved being my mother".
'I was in heaven': NIDA calls
Mitchell had been left "adrift" by her mother's death. But after enrolling at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) performing arts school, she soon found her place in the world – and her passion.
"I loved being there and I loved doing it," she says. "I loved every class. I didn't care if they were repetitive. I was in heaven."
She and Hugo Weaving were some of the early recruits to the burgeoning Sydney Theatre company.
Mitchell's first big-screen break was with Weaving in the 1983 TV series Bodyline, about "the" famous cricket clash between Australia and England in the 1930s.
But after it aired, she found it difficult to get auditions. For a time, she was living in her girlfriend's yellow Mini and doing house-sitting.
A casting agent stunned her by telling her she didn't have "it", "that elusive thing". Mitchell was shocked, but quickly learned that "in this industry, resilience is your best friend".
Mitchell meets her 'guardian angel'
In 1989, Mitchell had to fly to Broken Hill on a last-minute job. The day before leaving she had been to a clairvoyant who told her she would meet "my guardian angel and it would make itself known to me".
She was picked up at the airport by cinematographer Martin McGrath. Three nights later, walking home from the pub, they had taken shelter from the rain under an awning. "And then," Martin says, "we just kissed. That was it, it was on."
When they moved in together, Mitchell says: "Every time I'd come back to where we lived, as I turned the corner, I thought, 'I'm going home.' Being with him was like being home." In 1992, they were married.
After six years of trying, at the age of 42, Mitchell had her first child, Finn.
Two years later, Seamus arrived. When he was five weeks old, Heather woke up to find him "boiling hot". He was critically ill with meningitis. "He was very lucky to live," Martin says.
There were distressing weeks in and out of hospital. "I don't think there is anything scarier than your child being in trouble," Mitchell says. "It's the most frightening thing."
There were months of trying to work out the effects on his development, months of a screaming child.
"It really did have a huge impact on all of our lives," Mitchell says.
The mystery 'godsend' that kept Mitchell going
For three years, Mitchell had a lump on her breast. "My left hand travelled to it at least 10 times a day," she writes in her memoir. But she was told, after mammograms, that it was benign.
Still, she was worried that it was too high up for the mammogram to see and asked for an ultrasound. "And that was when I found out I had grade 3 breast cancer." She was 46.
After they had both cried, Mitchell, Martin says, "grabbed the lance and rode into battle like Joan of Arc. She's made of very, very tough stuff." There would be two years of gruelling surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy.
"The cancer really took her to within a whisper of life," close friend Joanne Corrigan says.
"She was skeletal. There was a day when I went over to visit her where I honestly thought, you know, this is the last time I'm going to be with my friend.
"And she just slowly and surely came back to life."
Mitchell wanted desperately to work during that time, but the jobs dried up altogether for both her and Martin.
"Basically, we seemed to be unemployable," Martin says. "I could see what was coming was like a slow-approaching train smash, that we really needed to sell the house and regroup. It was a very confronting time."
But in the middle of all that, they received an anonymous letter with a bank cheque for $30,000. The letter said: "I am writing to you because over the years I have so much enjoyed your performances. It gives me pleasure to say thank you in a tangible way to artists whose work I have admired."
They still don't know who sent it, but it was a "godsend" and kept them going for a year.
Mitchell treads the boards once again
The Sydney Theatre company was about to announce the 2022 season last January, which included RBG: Of Many, One, when Mitchell received another cancer diagnosis. "The return that everyone dreads," Martin says.
It had been 17 years since the last diagnosis. This time it had been caught early and hadn't spread.
"It felt completely different," Mitchell says. "A little stumble, a trip and I straightened up again. I had a mastectomy with reconstruction. I was so thrilled I didn't have to do chemo."
And the second time around, cancer was not going to stop Mitchell. She had the surgery in March and was rehearsing three months later, as well as travelling to Melbourne for a role in the TV series Love Me.
"She never breaks into a sweat," Sam Neill says. "How is that possible? She's doing three things at once."
Neill watched her performance in RBG "with my jaw on the floor. At the end of it, I found myself not just on my feet, but in floods of tears. And I thought all those struggles, all those adversities, all the health issues, all the rest of it, paid off in a way that I could never have dreamt was possible".
Heather Mitchell doesn't fear ageing in the way some actresses do. "I love acting more than ever now. It's given me so much in my life and I just feel as I get older acting is about growing in your life. I love getting old because I love seeing my kids growing up. I feel so blessed that I've lived long enough to see them in their 20s."
Mitchell lives every day as if it is her first. "I can go for a walk in the morning and see things fresh and see new colours and talk to people and find something new in them."
Basically, she says, "getting old is fantastic".
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