On a sunny spring Sydney midweek afternoon, Sigrid Thornton – one of Australia’s best known actors – meets me outside a rehearsal room on a pier on Sydney harbour. Thornton is immediately engaging, with a smiling readiness to explore; despite being a fixture on our screens large and small for well over 40 years, she somehow manages to slip among her fellows flâneurs and joggers unsaddled by attention.
We skirt past the Walsh Bay finger wharves, purpose-built a century ago for steamships and their cargo. Dressed in a bold, red-striped shirt, Thornton suddenly breaks from discussing Andrew Upton’s fresh adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull – in which she will play the grand actor Irina, one of Chekhov’s great female roles – and laughs: “This is difficult, walking and talking,” she confesses. “It’s more difficult to gather your wits.”
But by the time our feet crunch the sandy walking path of the Barangaroo headland reserve, Thornton, 64, is in the moment, as well as her element. “I do a lot of walking,” she says, drinking in the western harbour view across sandstone blocks to the Balmain headland. She later remarks she “much” prefers the classic Sydney rock to Melbourne’s darker bluestone.
Her walks are often a way to decompress, usually with her labradoodle, Bodhi, who doubles as a sort of life coach and who she brings up to Sydney with her. “Dogs take you into a place of purity: an innocent, in-the-moment enjoyment – I can watch dogs running around with one another in the park for a long time.”
Thornton’s usual walking track in the harbour city is at Centennial Park, closer to Bondi, where she’s staying during her current Sydney Theatre Company role with her husband, Tom Burstall (with whom she runs a film production company). Born in Canberra and raised in Brisbane, at age 18 Thornton moved to Melbourne with Burstall. They raised daughter Jaz and son Ben in the inner-city home they moved into in 1977 and only just sold this year; a remarkable demonstration of stability in an infamously unstable profession.
Thornton has starred in a plethora of screen roles, but is perhaps best known as city lawyer Laura Gibson in SeaChange. She also came into our consciousness through colonial dramas, and claims convict ancestry of her own: Sylvester Thornton, a short, malnourished Yorkshire teenager who was transported to Sydney in 1826 for alleged arson in a rope factory was her great-great-grandfather.
The actor believes he was innocent. “This harbour must have been so daunting,” she reflects. “Wild, impossible to escape.”
This is the first time Thornton has walked the Barangaroo park, although she remembers filming pub scenes at a hotel nearby, The Palisade, for the epic mini-series 1915 (which aired on the ABC in 1982). That was around the time she gained fame in George Miller’s epic feature The Man from Snowy River, remaining in the Australian public consciousness forever enmeshed in our post-colonial history.
Strong female figures have abounded in her CV across those years, and not just when she was ahead of her time as a female magistrate in the pop culture firmament. There was wealthy cosmetics dynamo Sonia Stevens in the prison drama Wentworth; a show-stealing turn as Judy Garland in the 2016 TV biopic Peter Allen – Not the Boy Next Door, which scored her an AACTA best supporting actor award; and stage roles such as sharp-tongued magazine editor Emily Penrose in The Lifespan of a Fact, her STC debut here in 2022.
Strong female role models, however, don’t come much better than Thornton’s academic mother, Merle Thornton, now 93. In 1965, Merle and her activist friend Rosalie Bognor famously chained their feet to the foot rail in Brisbane’s Regatta hotel to protest against the exclusion of women from public bars. Sigrid was six, unaware at the time of the death threats her mother received.
“I remember sitting cross-legged to watch Mum on the TV, because it was a big moment for the family, but also a big moment in history,” she says. Merle went on to successfully campaign for an end to the marriage bar, under which women civil servants had been forced to give up their careers when they wed.
“How rapidly things have changed in certain ways,” says Thornton, “and not enough in others.” Earlier today, Thornton was watching a clip of Meryl Streep “talking about the language of men and women, and how women fundamentally know how to speak ‘man’, but men don’t necessarily understand how to speak ‘woman’ yet.”
“It would be great if we were bilingual,” says Thornton, so that men and women might better work together to achieve their goals, although she is mindful of the importance of “non-binary folk” being “in the mix”.
Thornton believes the wheels have turned very slowly for women’s issues. “The whole landscape has to shift – wage parity would be a good start.”
And so to this great Chekhov role of Irina, an actor one cannot imagine settling for poor remuneration or lack of audience ovation. Irina is in a relationship with a younger man, the novelist Boris (Toby Schmitz), but dismissive of her playwright son Konstantin (Harry Greenwood) for experimenting with new writing forms.
Irina is clearly self-absorbed, though Thornton believes she sometimes has some self-awareness. “The bottom line is Irina does some dreadful things,” she laughs. “If she has an inkling in the corner of her mind and heart of the kind of damage she might be doing, she’s very good at brushing that to one side to further her own interests … Irina has her own personal bible of self-justification.”
Is self-absorption a risk for any actor? “Oh – of course! An easy assumption for actors to make is they find themselves at the very centre, the epicentre, of creative work. But the beauty of theatre, when it’s really firing, it’s a genuine collaboration of people with a diverse range of skills.”
The comic-tragic play ultimately asks what price artists are willing to pay for the creative life. “I understand the dilemma very clearly,” says Thornton. “I’ve always tried to strike a balance between my working life and my family life. At some periods, more successful than others.”
Thornton keeps private where those imbalances might have played out, soundingly resolutely grounded: “I understand Irina, my version of her, but she hasn’t made the decisions I would have made – put it that way.”
Perhaps Irina considers herself one of the immortals? Thornton chews over the question. Irina, she decides, “is very concerned with ageing and mortality”, but “sufficiently concerned to not want to think about it”.
Thornton’s own mother is still with us, so perhaps her daughter enjoys longevity genes. “You never know. I don’t plan to stop.”
Contemplating mortality, or longevity, she says is valuable. “A constant reminder of one’s mortality is important to oneself, it’s really good,” she says. “It’s useful not to dissolve into … being maudlin about how much time one might have left, but it’s really important to understand it might not be long at all. It might be a matter of minutes.”
The Seagull is at the Roslyn Packer theatre from 21 November-16 December.
