EXCLUSIVE:
For nearly six decades Maggie Dence has been a presence on Australian television screens.
Famously as the title character in The Mavis Bramston Show she seemingly has seen a resurgence recently in Heartbreak High, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, Queen of Oz, The Messenger.
Except that isn’t quite true -Dence has been working every decade since 1966. Not bad for a young girl who entered business college after leaving school at the age of 15.
“I was born in Chatswood on the North Shore, and I lived most of my life in Killara, until I got married. So I’m a North Shore girl, as we say in Sydney,” she tells TV Tonight.
“We didn’t have television, but my parents loved going to ‘the pictures’, always on a Friday night. Where I lived there were six cinemas within close proximity.
“I was so young that sometimes I’d just fall asleep. I have a memory of my father, carrying me to the car.”
“It was a bit of a flea pit, but it had an extraordinary history.”
The films were a big influence, with Dence writing a letter to Australian star Chips Rafferty who recommended two acting schools one of which was was the Independent Theatre.
“Doris Sitton ran the Independent Theatre at North Sydney. (The building is) still there, owned by Winona School, and it’s been beautifully restored. When we all worked there it was a bit of a flea pit, but it had an extraordinary history. Doris was brilliant in that she managed to get the rights to a lot of plays that certainly weren’t going to be done by commercial management. We were doing Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and all of that. So it was a great training ground, really.”
She studied alongside Leonard Teale, Diana Perryman (Jill Perryman’s sister) and Ruth Cracknell before roles at Phillip Street Theatre, first as the Wicked Witch in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
“Then I auditioned for a new faces revue called What’s New?, where I met Barry Creighton and Noeline Brown. But it was a flop. One of the critics said, ‘We’ll never see any of these people again.’ But we didn’t take that on board.”
After a year in England, Dence returned to Australia where Channel Seven invited her to replace Noelene Brown as the face of The Mavis Bramston Show, a satire created by Carol Raye.
“I honestly had no idea what I was putting my hand up for, but I was arriving back with no work and needed a job. So I said, yes. Originally, Channel Seven weren’t going to bother with the Mavis character. They felt they didn’t really need it because Noeline had done three appearances, and the joke was that she was to go back to England,” Dence explains.
“But Ampol, the petrol company, were the number one sponsors and they wanted Mavis. So that’s why I got a contract.”
She describes the Mavis character as “over the top, flamboyant, totally devoid of any real talent, egomaniac. She believed in herself and was larger than life. Crazy, high camp, really. The gimmick was that she had her own show in Australia, because we went through a period where people would be brought out to star in shows, and they would be third rung of the ladder. They weren’t the stars of the West End or Broadway, but they’d be fobbed off on us.
“I can remember there was an election, and Mavis ‘ran’, I can’t remember what for. People were writing on the ballot papers, ‘I’d rather vote for Mavis.’”
Ampol’s decision to retain the Mavis character paid off big time, with Dence travelling across Australia to open new petrol stations.
“Ampol was so smart. I was the face that launched a thousand petrol bowsers!” she laughs.
“I was told that I couldn’t move around the set because I was too tall”
Subsequent roles included Wake in Fright and shows such as Division 4, Bony, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo and Homicide.
“I didn’t enjoy the Homicide that I did, because I was playing the wife of the man who’d been murdered, and the cops came to break the news to me. It was quite an emotional scene and I was told that I couldn’t move around the set because I was too tall, and the cops (were shorter),” she recalls.
“I did have to walk at one point, and they said, ‘You’ve got to bend your knees.’ And I just thought, ‘Oh, God, I look like John Wayne or someone.’ I perched myself on a chair and wept over my husband’s death.”
By 1976 she was cast alongside Michael Caton as Aunty Rose on Crawford Productions’ The Sullivans, a popular supporting soapie couple until Dence tired of the travel from Sydney to Melbourne.
“I just said, ‘I don’t I don’t want to stay.’ They offered me six months off with TB and I said, ‘No, no, I’m going.’ So my nose was a bit out of joint, and I realised they were actually going to kill me.”
It would be a brutal, tragic scene with Aunty Rose found floating in the Yarra River following a family picnic, devastating viewers who had watched so loyally.
“I’m well aware there was a soft spot for Uncle Harry and Aunty Rose”
“I’m well aware there was a soft spot for Uncle Harry and Aunty Rose…. I didn’t want to come back, but a death scene is somehow so permanent!” she exclaims.
“But to be associated with a show that was a really classy soap….. I know some cast members say it wasn’t a soap, but I don’t look upon that as a derogatory term. It looked great, it was well cast, everybody was very obsessed with getting the look of it and the period right. It was a terrific show, and it ran for five years. What more can you say?”
Comedy came calling in the form of UK comedy Doctor Down Under and Seven sitcom Kingswood Country, with Dence cast as Merle Bullpitt, sister to Ross Higgins’ cantankerous, misogynistic, racist ocker, Ted.
“I loved playing Merle. She was so frightful and they were a great cast to work with at RS Productions. It was hugely successful. It’s still popular. I mean, it probably would be so frowned upon by a huge percentage of the population, but there’s also a mob of people out there that have great affection for Kingswood,” she insists.
“Ross Higgins played such a sad character, and so funny. Judi Farr was wonderful as Thelma. It was a great team, I was lucky.”
Following a brief but memorable role in Prisoner, Dence was cast as school principal Dorothy Burke in Neighbours.
“It’s extraordinary that Prisoner still crops up. I was barely in it, but it was, I know, a very savage character, a bit like Silence of the Lambs. Who could forget those sort of characters?” she asks.
“I was really grateful to get Dorothy Burke in Neighbours. I did stick with it for three years, and then they decided to retire the character. So that worked out well. But it was a godsend, because, things were a bit lean, and that was a really great opportunity. My husband was very busy directing E Street, and we just were able to contribute to our superannuation fund in no uncertain terms.
“I loved working with Kristian Schmid and Ben Guerens and Annie Charleston. In hindsight it was an odd job, because there were, I think, 21 regular characters, and so there were 10 people I never worked with. I’d never struck that before. I don’t think I ever did a scene with Stefan Dennis, who’s terrific in that show.”
“I feel I was in on the ground floor of a very famous romance!”
Another role in 1995 in ABC’s Correlli saw her starring alongside Deborra-Lee Furness and a young Hugh Jackman.
“I’d worked with Deborra-Lee on Skyways or Flying Doctors or something. I remember being in the car with her, and she was talking on her mobile, and then she said, ‘Oh, that was my friend, he’s cooking dinner for me tonight,’” she teases.
“Sadly, I didn’t get to work with Hugh. All my scenes were with Deborra, she was terrific. But I feel I was in on the ground floor of a very famous romance!”
More roles would come in Small Claims, All Saints, Wonderland, Out of the Blue, Black Comedy, A Place to Call Home, Rake, Frayed, The Messenger, Queen of Oz and The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.
“It was just a privilege to be in the presence of Sigourney Weaver, a major film star and a fantastic actor, just to be able to watch her work. Leah Purcell was there, of course, too. So that was heaven on a stick.”
“Those young actors that are in it are extraordinary”
The breakout success of Heartbreak High, (Dence was also in the 1997 original) in which she played Nan drew more acclaim, now seen by new generations of viewers. It’s a point not lost on her.
“Heartbreak High was such a such a gift. I mean, that was an amazing success, thank God and those young actors that are in it are extraordinary. To be riding along on their coattails was fantastic. They are immensely talented young cast,” she assures.
“I worked mainly with Will and James. Will McDonald had done Home and Away and James I’d seen in FanGirls. But they’re so smart, these kids. I don’t think a great wealth of experience is any guarantee of anything. I just think talent is talent. It’s like Will McKenna in The Messenger. He’s just leapt onto the scene, and he’s had a couple of good credits under his belt. But he’s just such a natural, marvellous talent.”
“I don’t know why I became an actor”
For her amazing body of work, Dence has an Order of Australia and an MEAA Lifetime Achievement. Yet if there are any plans to slow down, it’s not one Dence has mapped out. She remains a jobbing actor, moving with the times and showing an acute understanding of the industry in 2024.
“I suppose it’s what I’ve done all my adult life. I don’t know why I became an actor. It’s something that came into my head at a very early age, and I just aimed for it. The times that we were working in the 60s, 70s and 80s was a very busy time, there were fantastic television opportunities.
“They don’t exist now. There’s no Crawfords, no Grundys doing four shows a week. There’s work, and some of it’s fantastic. The good news is a lot of these people, like Margot Robbie, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett are having fantastic careers.
“We didn’t have that kind of opportunity, but we did have the joy of having a lot of work.”
TOMORROW: Highly-regarded actress who first hit our screens in the 1980s.
Photos: National Film & Sound Archive, Netflix.
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