You probably know Mary Coustas best as Effie, the outrageous second-generation Greek Australian who delighted 90s audiences in TV shows like Acropolis Now. But when Coustas next gets on stage, it won’t be as that iconic character. In a run of shows for the Sydney Opera House in late May, the longtime performer will be shedding her Effie armour and doing something far more daunting – speaking about her real life as Mary. The show, fittingly, is called This Is Personal. Finally putting it on is a dream realised for Coustas.
“In the wings of my mind, I’ve had this show that I’ve always wanted to do that I was too afraid to do,” she says. “I’ve always had accents and wigs and characters. Like, how much can I disguise myself while I become somebody else? But I knew there was a point where I would have to just strip all that back and get to the core of me without the bells and the whistles.”
This Is Personal is an exploration of love, laughter and fear that Coustas describes as a “drama with laughs”. Her experience of growing up in a migrant household will form part of the show, as will her experience of motherhood. But despite her European roots, Coustas didn’t actually travel to Greece as an adult until her late 30s. When she eventually did make the trip, Coustas was given a collection of jewellery from her extended family that she now treasures. Here, she tells us why she’d save that trove of yellow gold in a fire, as well as the story of two other important personal belongings.
What I’d save from my house in a fire
A jewellery collection. I was gifted a lot of jewellery when I first met my relatives in Greece, because I didn’t meet them until I was in my late 30s. I’d been as a child but I didn’t go back again as an adult until a documentary I was filming took me there. I’d been avoiding it because my father had died many years earlier and I just thought, if I go back, it’ll bring everything up – because he spoke with his village, which was very beautiful, every day. My mum had gone, my brother had gone, but I wouldn’t go to Greece.
Then I got convinced to go to Greece for that documentary and I fell in love with it. I have no blood relatives in Australia, except for a mother and a brother. But my grandmother, all my cousins and my aunties and uncles were all there. I fell in love with them and that changed everything for me. And as their way of showing their love towards me, they gave me this jewellery. Greeks have the most beautiful yellow gold. It’s just beautiful stuff.
My daughter’s obsessed with it all now too. Sometimes she’ll say, can we have a look at your jewellery? It’s all from Greece, and each one of these pieces is from someone I love, so I would grab that in a fire before anything else.
My most useful object
This is so funny because Greeks love a hose. They love hosing and there’s always jokes about it, because it’s true. They love concrete because they get to hose it. And I truly love nothing more than my power hose.
It’s a big electrical hose. I mean, if you ever want to see cleaning porn, just look for the before and after shots of someone using an electrical hose. So if someone was going to paint the exterior of a building, a professional painter would bring an electrical power hose and wash it first, to get all the dirt off. That’s how I discovered them – I got my house painted. The guy bought this electrical hose and started cleaning the exterior of the house and it was like one of those ads where you think you’re being had. The walls went from grey to stark white. I said oh my god, how do I get one of these? He told me to go to Bunnings.
It set me back a couple of hundred bucks and it’s the best thing I’ve ever bought. I’m obsessed with it. I know it sounds really ridiculous but it’s sort of an antidepressant. Like, you think you have achieved the most miraculous feat when you get that power hose on.
The item I most regret losing
I’m not the type of person that loses much. My daughter did a show and tell and for the tell bit, she said, three times a week my daddy thinks he loses his wallet but three times a week my mum finds it. But I’ve sold things that I wish I hadn’t.
I bought a rare sports car when I just finished uni. My dad said to me at the time, you didn’t buy a car, you bought a box of matches. It was that small. It was a Honda S800, and it was brought out to rival the MG. It was tiny. I thought I’d lost my car every time I went to a nightclub – I’d come out and I think, oh my god, someone’s stolen it, but it was just parked next to a sedan. It looked like the sort of car you could imagine James Bond getting into in a desperate moment.
I stupidly sold it because I had no way to store it, and I really regret it. I was moving to Sydney and I thought, I don’t want to be parking this on the street in Darlinghurst or Potts Point or wherever I was living at the time, because it was rare.
But I was doing a corporate gig a couple of years ago at Luna Park, hosting as Effie. A guy came up to me when I sat down and said, I bought your sports car. I’ve still got your number plates with your initials on them and if you want me to, I’ll send them to you. So that was nice. But I do regret selling it because I would have loved driving around in that now. And it’s gone up in value – like, enormously. Plus it was just the most reliable car I’ve ever had. I used it every single day.
