Tara Morice, played Fran
Baz Luhrmann was this cool guy two years ahead of me at NIDA, the drama school in Sydney. When I graduated, I joined his theatre company Six Years Old and the play of Strictly Ballroom came out of that. It was inspired by Keith Bain, who taught movement at the school. He was a ballroom-dancer who had left Australia for South America in the 1950s then came back with these shocking new steps. We talked a lot in rehearsals about the paso doble, and from that came Fran’s Spanish immigrant background. I thought up the name Frangipani because Sydney has frangipani trees everywhere. On my walk to rehearsals, I’d often pick one of the flowers to put in my hair.
