Pamela Rabe emerges from theatre rehearsals where she is playing a strict Catholic nun, the actor seeking divine order from a grey late afternoon on the wharf above Sydney’s Walsh Bay. “Do we walk – in the rain?” she asks crisply.
The clouds yield and the rain loses its nerve as the tall, formidable Rabe steps onto the steel balcony to pose with laser focus on the camera lens. Canadian-born Rabe first sought early career traction in Sydney in the late 1980s and early 90s to distinguish herself from her Melbourne acting milieu, where she was revered as an “actress with a capital A”, of whom a critic remarked, “makes strong [people] swallow hard and lesser mortals involuntarily bow”.
