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.”
