At the end of her first year at the Victorian College of the Arts, Michelle Brasier’s acting teachers told her she hadn’t made it to second year: that she was too young; that she lacked “life experience”; that she had “no well of pain from which to draw”.
The following year, she suffered third-degree burns to her legs during an accident with a home heater, was hospitalised for more than a month and had to learn to walk again. Shortly after she was released from hospital, her dad died of pancreatic cancer – two weeks after he had been diagnosed. Brasier was just 20.
