Australian Biography: Diane Cilento

Interviewer: Robin Hughes Recorded: June 20, 2000

This is a transcript of the complete original interview conducted for the Australian Biography project.

Diane, could you tell me, could you begin by describing for us the kind of household you grew up in.

Ah. Well, it was very unlike other people's households in that both my parents were doctors and my mother had her surgery in the house. And so there were six children, and they always had a few friends staying and my mother had a few little people she kept under her wing. Then there was someone to sort of look after the kitchen, then there were both my grandmothers, one upstairs and one downstairs, and on the ground floor there was a surgery, and my mother held her surgery every morning, so there were a whole huge mass of people came in then. And it was, I suppose, compared with other people's houses it was just a hugely milling about sort of anthill, comparatively. I used to go into other people's houses, other kids' houses, and I always used to go back and say to my mother, 'Why don't you ever ask me where I'm going and when I'm going to be back and when I'm going to be there?' And she looked at me and she said, 'Why, dear?' And I said, 'Well, because everybody else's mothers do that', but she never did. She was very, extraordinarily occupied with her medical career in a very close family way, if you can see what I mean. It had to do with all of us as well. We were sort of guinea pigs a bit too. But it was a very odd household too, because the grandmothers were so different. Both of them had their own pianos. And when one upstairs, who was sort of flighty, and had a sort of calliper on her leg and was very vain and extraordinary - she would start whipping off a bit of Chopin or something - the one downstairs would immediately start playing hymns. So these two pianos would be, you know, fighting: duelling pianos by grandmothers. And the one upstairs also was very frightened of snakes and things, and there is a family story that my mother came home once and found us all sitting on the kitchen table, pointing to the corner, where there was a sort of stick that my grandmother had convinced us all was a huge black snake. We were in terror. No - it was a very rackety, extraordinarily volatile household. And don't forget, I mean I, being down the end a bit ... I mean, I had a brother who was a lot older than me. He was, I think by the time I knew anything, he was already in medical school. And so I sort of was this little thing in the middle down the end that was ... I mean my mother did have a problem in remembering everyone's names, actually. We all know that thing: 'Now, Carl, Ruth, Diane, ah, Jack, ah, what is your name dear?' You know, it was a little bit like that. But she was an extraordinary woman.

Did you feel neglected?

No. I didn't have a place though because we all slept on a sleep-out, and my elder sisters had a room where they kept their things and I was sort of just barely, you know ... if I went in there they used to say, 'Get out', and I slept on a top bunk outside. But I had a very friendly cat called Phenos that I was familiar with, that slept up there with me. And I ... and then there was a balcony out from the sleep out, which had netting right down to the floor. Everyone slept there, all the children, on double-decker big ones, and my trick was climbing down and getting on to this balcony and then dropping down to the ground and sort of wandering around. I was a totally nocturnal being with this cat. And then I'd come back and pretend I'd just woken up and ask for hot chocolate and pretend - I used to do a sort of acting job. Oh, you know. So that's ... I do remember that very well.

What's your own earliest memory?

I think it's having my hair washed at a big sort of lead sink, or whatever they were - those great big things, and then squealing because it was being sort of combed, and it had sort of curls in it and I do remember that very well. And standing there, above everyone, being angry.

Where did you come in the family?

I came fifth out of six. But I think it was slightly different in that my mother probably, before I was born, I think she sort of had another kid, but I was quite down the end, and my brother. We were both born when my mother was sort of like forty, forty-two. And I think she ... I think both my parents had said that they were better with us than the older children because they got less strict and less desirous of them to be top of the class, and I think we were sort of lucky that we weren't fussed so much.

What about your relationship with your older brothers and sisters, did they have much to do with looking after you?

Only one, and that was my sister Margaret, who's a painter. And she was terrific in that she was ... sort of used to tell us stories all the time. And then I have a brother that's near me called Carl, and he ... I just used to be following them around - all those boys, you know, all the time - trying to get in on the ... I mean I can remember when they used to have trolley races down this huge long hill, and I was allowed to get on board once to make it a bit heavier, so they could go faster. But that's about ... you know, you never really ... and then I do know that my ... when we went to Mooloolaba where... and Caloundra, they all built a big pandanus raft. I was the one put on to see if it would sink or not. It did sink, and so I was left in the sea being pounded up against the rocks, and I think they were a bit worried that they might have to go back and tell my mother that I'd been smashed to pieces or something, so I think they sort of saved me then.

They did save you?

They were ... I mean it's just like any kids, they were tremendously, you know - they don't treat you like kids in films. It was never like that. It's tough. And I think that's probably good: toughen you up a little bit. You don't really get much quarter from your older brothers and sisters. They're not really interested in looking after you much. I mean not that I ... I don't think in my family anyone looked after anyone. It didn't matter how old they were.

Did you have a sense of relationship with your mother as an individual?

Well, my trick with my mother was I used to climb into the back of her car at night sometimes and go to sleep there, and she would be called out to go on a delivery or something - a case - and then she'd turn round when she was nearly there and see this figure in the back, and she couldn't go back, so I got in on lots of, sort of, nocturnal sort of talks and things, and sort of saw babies [being] born even, and I was quite little. And I thought it was very exciting doing that.

And you did it to get her attention, of course.

Of course, because, of course, I had a brother, who was younger than me that she ... I mean he was her last born son in the world and he was really the apple of her eye. But I in fact was my dad's pet, favourite, the youngest daughter, and you know, in fairy tales it's always the youngest daughter that is given the ... I don't know what, the best dress, or the worst, like Cordelia. It isn't very good. But, my father really was very, very close to me. I mean, I was close to him. He had a study where you were allowed to go after school, and he would show you amazing things from a big roll top desk - just like that one I've got now. And he'd picked up all sorts of funny things, like little birds that pecked things and laid eggs, you know, those little Chinese, little ... and he used to cut our hair with very, very sharp scissors. So we were all like that. And he was always full of terrific stories. He was a great story teller, and he'd read books to you. He read me all of Robert Louis Stevenson and, oh, lots and lots of books.

Why do you think you were his special pet?

I think ... I don't know. I mean I was thinking that I knew but I don't. I think it was because I had a quick ear and could pick up languages too. And I really ... because he always dramatised all the stories, I sort of copied him a bit, and I think that's where I ... I just think he was ... I thought everything he said ... but I never quite understood why all the stories were slightly different the second time. They always were a little bit different. But then I realised that was sort of dramatic licence. But he had been in New Guinea and he'd had a spear through his eye and one through his knee, and he used to tell wonderful stories about fool's gold and stuff. All real, I believed, every word of it. Of course some of it I realised afterwards was total fabrication, or I might have even read it again in a book, but he was a great storyteller.

So he was a medico with an imagination?

Oh yes. I think he ... he was also a lawyer. He did law when I was born. He just was called to the bar. But he had this extraordinary thing that, you know ... at that time greenies used to come over every morning and they'd shriek, and that ... I couldn't do it before that, but that was the sign that I could run into their bedroom and go ... [ITALIAN] ... And that was the words of power that allowed me into the room and I could jump into bed with them. Sounds crazy now but it ... Once, the parental bed collapsed because all the children sat on it at once, and it just went phut, and my mother did have a sort of very gurgly sense of humour, and she spent a lot of time laughing after that. She was very ... she wasn't at all ... She could have a bit of a temper. I mean, once our dog bit her, because she was just about to give me a huge whack and she didn't know whether to laugh or get very angry. There was a moment when I thought she might hit the dog as well, but she didn't. She did laugh in the end, yes. She was a very forceful creature too, which was an interesting marriage combination between a Cilento and a McGlewd, because that was their names before - I mean that was her name before she was married.

What does that signify about her background?

I think she was a mixture of Scottish and Irish. And I ... her father had very red hair and my sister's got red hair and I think it signified rather a fiery personality. And my father being sort of from an Italian family, I think there was a bit of what the Italians call a fritto misto, a mixed grill.

Did it make for what's called a happy childhood?

You see, everybody keeps talking about whether they had a happy childhood or not, but I had a childhood and I can't remember being unhappy or ... very much, but I think I probably was. But, I mean, I don't ever think about it in that way, whether it was happy or not. I did have a fantastic childhood in that we spent a tremendous time, a lot of time on the beach, when it was incredible, sort of pristine: Noosa, Mooloolaba, Maroochydore, Caloundra - all that Sunshine Coast was where we all went. And it was sort of open, open days. You never came home for lunch: you just stayed doing, playing, having fun, surfing, running round. I can never remember anything ... I can't remember any sort of unpleasantness except, I mean, you've always got a few crow pecks and things from your brothers and sisters, but any ... I was often very, very incredibly naughty, and I did have that thing of if I didn't come home at tea time I used to be sent to bed without any dinner, but then people used to bring me things: I was better fed in bed. But, I mean, I was rebellious, yes, as a child. Very much so. But I certainly ... it was something to do with authority that I didn't cotton to very well.

And yet it doesn't sound as if that was a reaction to your being, your parents being strict, because ...

No.

... they were fairly lax. There wasn't a lot for you to rebel against from the sounds of things.

No. My mother used to do things like if I didn't make my bed, which was bloody hard to make, because ...[GESTURES HEIGHT] or do my violin practice or that sort of thing, she used to ring up the school and have me sent home, and she would say, you know, 'And I want you to say why she's being sent home in front of the class so they'll all know it's not because something terrible has happened. [It's] her own ... she's got to go and do it'. And of course I used to run home hating her all the way because it was just sort of being shamed in front of your peers and all that. But you know, that's the sort of thing that I think everyone's childhood's got in it, don't you? I mean, I don't think, if you've got a lot of children, I think you let the other children bring them up more and you just sort of step in and do stuff like every now and again.

Looking back at what it offered you from the perspective of now, what do you think were the advantages of the kind of childhood you had?

Tenacity. Well, a sort of bloody mindedness that does do its own thing; an idea of striving for perfection. Yeah, I can't think of anything else that it ... I mean, also I think my parents had a huge taste that was sort of innate. And you ... I don't know how that is passed along. It may be that it isn't. But, you sort of know when things look ... are right, and a way of behaving that ... You know, my mother and father I think came from that idealistic age, when they were brought up to believe that they should be working for the good of mankind, not for ... and that everyone should be doing that, including their own children. And I think my mother was totally in that way. I mean, yes, she did, for instance, have children that were in the household, but she never treated any of her children differently from the children who weren't hers. Ever. Not even [SNAPS FINGERS] like that. In fact, everybody used to think it was a bit odd how she wasn't discriminating on the side of nepotistic belief at all. No way.

Tell me about her career and how her interest in children got expressed in that.

Well, she was an only child and she had a father who wanted to have a son, so when she was little, she was actually dressed as a boy for a bit. And she used to go around with her dad to various different ... on horseback ... and her mother and father absolutely didn't get on. I think by the time she was about ten they had parted. And she ... her father went away and took the opportunity I think to go to the First World War and was gassed. He didn't die, but he never came back to Australia, and she, I think, probably always wanted to go to Europe to see him. He did die long before I was born. But he ... she wanted to be all sorts of things that he would allow her to: she wanted to be a trapeze artist, then she wanted to do art, and when she went to Adelaide University to do art, she fell madly in love with the body - anatomically - and she changed to medicine, and she was the only female in her year, and it just so happened that my dear old Daddo was in that year, having scraped together lots of ... It was very difficult for him to actually get to university. And these two met, and I don't think her father approved of that. She was engaged to someone else, and then she did that trip around to look at all the trenches from the First World War and she went with her mother, and she was going to marry someone else, and it was all ... and then suddenly she married my dad. So I don't think ... It was sort of not very popular with her mother, or her father, that she'd married this sort of crazy Italian guy.

And during your lifetime, her medical career took her in what direction?

Well she started as a paediatrician and gynaecologist, and then she got arthritis in her thumbs, especially. She could actually turn a baby round. She had very sensitive hands. She could turn a breech birth round inside the ... well that's what's said anyway. It sounds very good. But once she lost the strength in her thumbs and hands - she used to actually wear splints on her fingers sometimes - she began to change her medical career to diet and the whole thing of vitamins. She did bring vitamin C and vitamin E, and she went over there and studied and really she was nearly struck off by the AMA in Australia for [it]. There's a famous story about my mother you may or may not have heard about, when she gave an interview to the Melbourne Age about vitamin C. This is probably very early on in the sixties or somewhere earlier, and a headline appeared in the Age saying, 'Queensland doctor says that vitamin C, mega-doses of vitamin C, will give you hallucinations'. She was absolutely furious and she rang up this girl who'd done the interview and she said, 'I did not say hallucinations, dear, I said loose motions'. So it became sort of a great joke in our family about loose motions, with my mother. And I think that story, which is true, has sort of ... is the story of my mother's life. She was often misunderstood when she was being completely practical. People sort of thought ... Although now of course, Blackmore's has a lot to answer for, for her. I mean, she helped them get going and she did an enormous amount of work with, you know, all that stuff of hyperactivity, because of different dyes, and she went over to America. When I was there, she came. She would come to London when I was in the theatre, and that's what she'd be doing.

What kind of a doctor was your father?

My father was an administrator. He'd been up here. He came up to the north here, and got rid of Wheel's disease. And he has a wonderful story, he had a wonderful story to tell about this, which was all the cane cutters, you know, Wheel's disease is called another name, like spiragella [transcriber's note: leptospirosis] or some funny name now, but it's a little thing that gets into your feet from when you [have] bare feet and it's sort of like ... I think it's carried by rats - rats' pee or something, and it's a very unpleasant disease. But you can only test whether you've got it if you give a specimen of faeces. So he went round with little tins and he decided, because there were a lot of Italian cane cutters and most of them went to church, he'd go to all the priests and give them these little tins with people's names on. So he did that, and asked for them to go, and told the priest what to do and say, and [to] leave them [at] the door, and we'll pick them up tomorrow. He picked up a huge amount in one church. It was all filled with money because they'd put money in [the tins] instead of specimens of the other stuff. I suppose they thought the priest was being sort of allegorical when he said [to] fill it with shit or something like that. Anyway that ... I think then he went to New Guinea and he was Director General of Health and Home Affairs for the whole area, and he was very good at it, because he could speak languages. He had a very quick ear for all the languages and spoke pidgin English with people and all sorts of things. And then he went, when I was a child ... he was the person who was chosen to go to Belsen and clear out those prisons, [those] horrible camps. And he did go there and he employed some ordinary doctors [at] first. And they were all totally out of it within about two days, because it was so horrific. So then he got hold of a whole lot of medical students from Edinburgh and Glasgow and he brought them in and he said they worked terribly well, because they believed that they could amputate at the neck and the patient would still live. They had sort of an enormous faith in their own ability to save people and everything. So he did that, and that had a strange effect on him, I'm sure. It could not have had. He never let me ever look at any of those pictures, although, of course, now we look at them with sort of, you know, we're much more brutalised in our idea of what we see. And he then came back to this country and he actually tried to start a political party, the Democratic Party, but then he didn't want to do that any more, and I think he sort of retired to the coast. And as he got less famous, my mother got more famous. And it became very odd in a way, because he'd always been in our family the sort of ... my mother was, 'Now, your father ...' and then suddenly it was my mother. All her books began to come out and it was very difficult, I think, for both of them.

It didn't fit with the idea of an Italian patriarch.

Not at all. Not at all. So he sort of walled himself [in]. He built a tower, you know. It's very, very Islamic. He had a master builder, who had a sort of house, which he built a tower and put lots of green cement around it, for some strange reason. He was known as Dr. Cemento for a while there, and he sort of became very reclusive and was trying to write an autobiography, but it ... we all gave him tape recorders and things, but it sort of fizzled a bit because I just think he couldn't quite keep his attention on something long enough. But he was an extraordinary person, my dad.

How did you feel about him?

Very loving. I really thought he was the greatest person in the world. And great compassion then. And that's why I came back to Australia mainly, because he had one of those freak accidents, where he'd gone out to have a pee on the verandah in a place that had no balustrade, and he ... someone passing by had an aerial up on a boat, and it hit an electric wire and fused all the lights in the area, and he was left in the darkness and fell off the verandah and lost his inner ear balance, and then he had a sort of slight heart attack. So I came back to Australia and took a job. I took a job with the Queensland Theatre Company to do Taming of the Shrew. And he ... just to be near him for that time, but it was ... but he did have a very lengthy period of decline, and we all felt it very much. But that is, I mean, sort of indirectly, how I got here. Because when I did Taming of the Shrew, the guy, who ran the theatre, had oversubscribed, so at times I was doing the Shrew three times a day to fill in all the subscriptions that had [been sold], so it was very tiring and I was very tired, and I decided to come up here to have a holiday and make a documentary about here. And that's how I got here first. I'd heard about it a lot from my dad. He talked about here quite a lot. And we had ... there are very many great connections with here. My great grandfather was shipwrecked here. He was called Captain Walker, and then another ... I think it was him [that] started the Bank of New South Wales in Cooktown, and Captain Walker walked for about six months. It's called Captain Walker's Marathon. There's a book. And the people he left behind, who'd been on board ship with him, were saved the next day but he was walking forever. Anyway, so I have a lot of strange family connections with this [place], and when I came up here and saw this country, I sort of immediately felt a huge connection. And I ... that's when I bought this land, and I didn't really ... I had a place in England and I was commuting back from England to Australia, which is pretty stupid anyway, but after two years I sort of knew what I wanted to do with it more or less.

How did you get on at school?

Well, we come to the first part of my misdemeanours. I was ... when I went to Yeronga State School it was okay, but I was always a little bit flighty I suppose, and then my dad went away and I was sent to boarding school in Towoomba, and I didn't like it at all, so I sort of rebelled, and I used to sort of jump out of the window and do things like that. And I was a sort of rebel. I mean I keep saying 'sort of' and I always notice that when I say 'sort of' it means that I'm trying to get out of talking about it. But I was decidedly unable to cope with the ... I just thought it was silly a bit, and so I started being quite cunning about it and I used to go to the corner telephone and ring up the headmistress and pretend I was my mother, and invite myself and other friends out for the weekend, or to get on the bus and leave. And in fact she was fooled by me. So she let me go, and then someone wrote it up in their diary in supervised prep and I was caught and got into a bit of a hassle. And then I ... we had houses at that school, and if you got black marks, you had to stand up in assembly, and your name was read out and one ... and if you got more than five you had to stand through the assembly. So one week I did get twenty-two and so they decided I shouldn't be in a house, because I was causing so much bad marks for the house, so, I sort of got a lot of people to come into Blank House with me, and that's when I think they realised that, I think, it was time to leave that school and move on.

How did you get people to go into No House with you?

Well you just made it. It was a better house than any of the others: Blank House.

How did you make Blank House better?

It was very attractive, because you didn't have to follow any rules. Blank House was exactly a nice empty sheet where nothing, nothing was accountable because you were so naughty that you were in Blank House. So I mean, other people thought it was attractive too. But then I went to Somerville House in Brisbane and I was pretty naughty there too, and then they decided: my eldest brother and my mother felt it was time that I had some parental control, so I went off to America and went to New York.

Now, before we do that, can we go back to school, because there are a couple of other things I wanted to ask you about. How did you do academically? You came from very academic family, with high achievers. How did you do academically? We're going to let him, her ... [MOLLY THE CAT INTRUDES]

You came from a very academic, high achieving family, how did you do with schoolwork?

Well, when I was, again, at Yeronga school, I did very well. I sort of was good at writing essays and all sorts of ... I was never very good at mathematics, and I was never very good at algebra, or ... I loved science, but I wasn't sure of it, because I never really ... [INTERRUPTION]

So how did you at school? How did you do academically?

Well I did ... at Yeronga State School I did very well. I was sort of, you know, around the top and all that, but I wasn't very good at mathematics and I wasn't very good at algebra or science.

Your parents were themselves very high achievers academically. Did they have the same expectations for you?

Yes. They had for all their children. But I think because, again, that idea of being down the line a bit, they weren't as totally fixated by cleverness and being top and everything as they had been with the elder children, and I think also there was that thing of girls. Girls don't have to do anything. Little blondie pretty girls don't really have to know anything much. They can go on in life and I think, actually, if the truth be known, the most surprising thing for my mother and father was when I was actually earning more money than them by the time I was about 18, because I think they thought that I was going to be the juvenile delinquent, the ne'er do well, who they'd have to keep worrying about, and clear up this wake of shit that went behind me: the terrible things that I'd done, and suddenly, there I was, quite in another bracket of, you know ... I just think it was very ... I mean, they must have had a huge shock when suddenly I had a contract and I was earning lots of money and [was] able to pay for them to come to England, and you know, it was just very surprising. But I did get a scholarship to RADA.

Well, before we get to that, while you were at school, when you went to boarding school, why were you sent to boarding school?

I think because my dad had gone to Germany after the war to do that work, and because I think probably my mother didn't want to cope with someone who was being very recalcitrant and [who] didn't quite know what to do after [the] scholarship, and that part of going to high school. I think, she probably thought it would be much better to send me somewhere where I was not being such a tomboy, [to] learn airs and graces and things that you did in schools at that time: you know, sort of deportment. I wouldn't be such a sort of little tomboy and, you know, rush around and not have any basis of female behaviour. I think that was it more than anything.

How did you relate to the other kids at school? Were you a natural leader, or how did you fit in?

At boarding school? At first I noticed ... and you had to wear your name across your chest and your back, and it was, obviously I had a pretty funny name. It wasn't Brown or Smith or Hughes, and I noticed that you had to to sort of work your way into some sort of clique in a way, and I had no intention of doing that. So I just sort of was funny. I tried to ... I was sort of funny and everybody thought I was a bit of a crazy, funny person, who'd do anything, and that's how I got to be acceptable to everyone. I think that's pretty accurate. I think lots of kids do it. They develop a way of making people laugh, and making them not sure of what you're going to do next. So they're always attracted to the surprising, the next thing that happens, and that's sort of what it was like, for me.

How old were you when you drew all the other kids in the school who were so inclined, into Blank House?

I must have been about thirteen. Just on the cusp of ... I did come to puberty quite late - later than most of the people in my class and everything. So I didn't have all that problem of worrying about periods and all that, so I was a sort of, I was intent upon causing a lot of madness happening. I was wicked, naughty, and I think that I liked it if that was happening. I liked the frisson of things going wrong, of laughing a lot.

The drama of it?

Totally. I mean I loved all that. And I'd been in the Alliance Francaise so I spoke French a bit, and I could speak a bit of this and that, and when you were taught those things by people who couldn't really do it, you know, you can send everything up, and, I mean, we did do some pretty wonderfully, imaginative horrific things to teachers. I think it happens all the time though.

Like what? What do you remember most?

Well there was a really vicious one that we did, which was: There was a music teacher, who was a little bit sort of doddery and so and so. We all got bubbles, and when she came into class we'd blown them like that and then hidden the things, and so the air was filled with hundreds. And she said, 'Oh girls, the air is filled with bubbles', and we all said, 'Bubbles? Where? What? Are you all right?' You know and all that. It's wicked, but kids do it all the time. And then she ran out and got other teachers and, of course, there were no bubbles there, and we'd passed along all the bubble stuff so they couldn't find it. So you know, those sort of things kids are very cunning at. They're very good at them: at torturing teachers.

What was your role in this? Was it your role to entrepreneur them, to think them up? What role did you play?

Yes, sort of. And sort of, if there was a distraction I'd sort of get up and jump out the window or something, you know. I mean I was quite out of hand. And in schools like that I don't think they expect that girls are going to behave in such an outrageous fashion.

So they didn't know what to do with you?

They really didn't. They did not know what to do with me. And I didn't know what to do with myself much either. I suppose in a way I really did want to go and join my dad and not be there. And anyway I didn't really ... I wasn't excited by the teaching of the school. I mean if they'd been intent on really teaching you things, I think, I hope, I would have been a little more attentive. But I was just intent on not being there.

What was your father doing in New York?

He had gone into [the] United Nations, and he was in the World Health Organisation. And he was you know, sort of living in New York.

Without your mother?

Yes. Because he had got this extraordinary job as a ... I think at one time he was the head of the World Health Organisation. I'm not quite sure, but he lived in New York, at the United Nations, just down the road from the United Nations.

And why didn't the family go with him?

I think because they were all embroiled in either university or going to schools where they were embroiled in sports and exams and things like that. My little brother did come, but he got sort of ... completely hated it. On the other hand, I found it fascinating in New York.

Who came up with the idea that you should go and live with your father in New York, as a solution?

I think they'd gone so far as to take me to a psychiatrist, which I didn't ... I mean he was a friend of my brothers, and I didn't take any notice of him. I just answered the same thing for everything he said. Because if he said anything, I'd say, 'Not more than any other girl of my age'. 'Not more than any other girl'. 'You're not really getting on with your mother'. 'Not more than any ...' I used to answer that. I was sort of like a robot and I think he got a bit fed up with me too. I only went about twice. And I think they said, 'Right, she just really needs a little parental control from someone she loves'. It's not that I didn't love my mother, but she was very occupied at that time.

But wasn't your father also?

Yes.

So why was it decided that your father could handle you when your mother couldn't?

Well, that's a question. I think probably I ... yes, I was more malleable with my father, because he ... we had a deeply, deep understanding somehow. It wasn't just ... it was ... I don't know.

Did you ask to go to New York?

No. I didn't even ... I ... no, I didn't envisage it.

So it was decided that the solution to the problem of Diane was that she should be despatched to her father, who was very busy in New York, but there was some chance she might listen to him.

Yes, and that ... You see, then again I didn't behave very well there. I was sent to PS83, Washington Irving High School, on 17th and 3rd Avenue. We lived on 20th and 1st Avenue, so I just really had to ... it wasn't very far. But after the first few days, which I found frightening: classes, huge classes of terrifying people, and they used to ask the silliest questions and I didn't know what they were talking about half the time. After that, I never went. What I would do is I'd take the money to go to school and then I'd go, and I'd go to the Museum of Modern Art, I'd go to the Metropolitan, I'd go to Hayden Planetarium, I'd walk around the park, I'd go to movies on 14th Street, old movies, and I would walk around that town. I must have walked around it ... They found out, I mean, after the first term, that I'd only been for three days, but I'd always appeared at the right time. I mean, if I think about it now, if it had been my own child, I would have been horrified, but I thought it was just okay. I thought it was terrific.

Well, it was self education wasn't it?

Right, exactly. And I could have got in ... My sister, you see, had gone over there on a Fulbright Scholarship for Art, so she was hanging about on 14th Street at the studio of a man called Stanley Hater. And she had lots of extraordinary friends, sort of painters, of all people, etchers and different people, so I used to hang around the edges of that lot, and they all thought I was very funny too. I went, I think, if I think about it seriously, I got through my teen years by being a bit of a clown. That was the way I managed it, I think.

When did it come to light that you had not been going to school?

Well, when they ... At the end of that term and then ... I mean, I still didn't want to go there. So the solution to it was that I'd been dancing, I was in dancing, and I had done a lot of ballet, and I used to go to Carnegie Hall to my class. And I used to go up in the lift with all these people who were going to the American Academy of Dramatic Art, who would all be talking about these amazing things and I used to listen. And then one day I just kept on going and went up in the lift, and when I got there, they thought I'd come for an audition, and so they gave me these audition pieces, one of which was Juliet, one of which was ... some other bits and pieces. They always do that for auditions in drama schools. So, I went home and actually learnt it all. And then I went back, and I didn't tell anyone. I didn't even tell my father or anyone. And then I went and did this thing on a chair. I always remember it and they took me on straight away. And so then I had to go and say to him, 'Look, I've got this school I'm going to go to'. And then I got into the Barter Theatre of Virginia in the summer, and I went on tour as an assistant electrician and playing children. Because I wasn't ... I hadn't grown much then. And I'd grown to a sort of child size really, but I wasn't into a, sort of, grown up woman's size. So I went down to Virginia and I went on one night stands in that summer, and I did the plays, and I was then seen by someone from ... Margaret Webster, who said, 'I think you should go to RADA', because I was not an American, and so off I went. My dad and mum then had come together and they went on their second honeymoon in England, and I went over there and did the auditions and got a scholarship to RADA. But then I didn't ... I did one part ... I didn't tell my parents that it wasn't a scholarship that paid for your keep.

How long were you in New York?

Two years.

And so that was from what age to what age?

I think I turned ... I think I was there from about fourteen and-a-half to sixteen and-a-half. And, I mean, I was very young. And then I think I went to England when I was just seventeen, something like that, and I went to RADA when I was seventeen. But I had to earn money to live on, so I worked in Olivelli's wine shop after school. It was an off licence, and then I worked in Bertramell Circus.

So why didn't you tell your parents that the scholarship you'd got didn't carry with it a living allowance? Because they could afford to have ...

No they couldn't, hardly at all. They were ... I mean everybody thinks my parents are so well off and everything, but they spent everything they had on ... [INTERRUPTION] I mean they spent everything they had on keeping this huge mass of people afloat and rushing around, and I think they weren't able to afford ... I mean,anyway, I don't really think they thought it was a sensible idea, what I was doing really. I mean my father said to me, 'If you want to do acting, then you have to be successful', which is a silly thing to say in a way. And yet in another way I can see exactly what he means. But I was successful even when I was at RADA. I did a film, for which I got into a lot of trouble, because I still had a scholarship. So then I was in the world.

So without a living allowance, was there some element that you also perhaps felt that, as your parents, this wasn't exactly what your parents had had in mind for you, that you somehow or other didn't deserve the support. Was there a sense that you had to do it your own way?

Well, I think you see, I believe that all academics think that if the child doesn't go to university, they don't really ... aren't really a serious person at all, and that they're not really quite worth paying the money for, because they're going to do something, nothing very ... they're just going to get through or whatever. I'm not quite sure what they thought. But I don't think they took seriously the idea that the acting profession was something that you did if you were in that family. You know, it was that you were either a doctor or ... I mean I have three brothers who are doctors, and a sister. And I remember when my sister, who was a painter wanted to be a painter, she had to go to university and do a draftsman's course, otherwise she couldn't have been okay with them.

Without a living allowance, how did you survive?

With difficulty. But I, I used to ... I actually shared a dig with an American girl called Grace Chapman, who used to sort of ... I had a bike, I went to school on a bike, but then that got stolen and she sort of lent me a bit of money and then I had to sort of pay her back. So I had those jobs. I got one meal a day at Olivelli's, which was a very famous old place. I mean Stan Laurel used to stay there. It was in the next street from RADA. So I'd go there at five o'clock and I worked there until half past eight and I'd get a meal you see, a proper huge meal, which I used to eat a lot of, and then I'd go back on my bike. I mean you couldn't probably do it now. And then I'd get to school the next morning, and they had this fantastic system of what they called Rainbow Corner, where you had to put your name against a colour, and if you were late you got black, and if you had a scholarship and you got more than three, you were out. So I was very rushed at that time. And it was very interesting. I mean RADA was a very extraordinary experience in that, I didn't take it very seriously because I thought well, you know, I've been in a professional theatre. I've played kids, I've played things, I've been on one night stands, I was an assistant electrician. So I thought of myself as being quite, you know, already a professional. And then it was so. I was employed straight away.

What did you get from RADA?

Well I had what they call a hybrid accent. I didn't even know what hybrid meant then, and then I wrote a book called Hybrid because I liked the word so much. It means that ... when I came from America, I'd been in the Deep South and [DEMONSTRATING A SOUTHERN ACCENT] I had a right, sort of, talked like that a bit, and I had a bit of Australian stuck in there, so I had this weird hybrid accent, which they thought was quite funny, so I learnt to speak standard English. I learnt to breathe properly with my voice, and project. I learnt to fence and dance and stand properly and move properly and do all the scenes. And I did comedy Francaise acting. I did lots of things when I was there. But I didn't ... that wasn't where I really learnt to act. I had a teacher after that called Yet Namgren, who asked to teach me, when I was in a play with Michael Redgrave. And I went every day with him and learnt to take the stage and to become, to have control of what I was doing. And I learnt the theory of movement, which I still teach sometimes. And I was very, very ambitious then to learn a skill. I suddenly cottoned on to Shakespeare and got interested in plays and fascinated by people, fascinated by watching what they did exactly. And that's obviously the best part of learning any profession, when you're really going through those huge stretching escalated times of learning and energy, when you want to do it so much. That's what I was like then.

How did you get your first film role?

I was at RADA, and then I had gone to do Juliet at Manchester Library Theatre, right on the cusp of leaving. And someone saw me and cast me for this [film] as an angel. And I did a film called The Angel Who Pawned Her Harp. My husband still sends me up about it. He knows all the dialogue, and says dreadful things. But it was a very sweet film with some very good people, and Alexander Korda saw it and reedited it, and signed me up to a contract, a seven year contract immediately. So I didn't really have any of that time of rushing around and trying. It was all there on a big plate for me. And I was the last person he signed, ever. I then got the leading role in lots of plays in the West End, and I got the role of Helen of Troy in Tiger At The Gates, with Michael Redgrave. It was an American company. I did it in London with him, and then of course, off we went to America, and I thought it was going to be a huge flop. And it wasn't. It lasted for over a year and I won the Critics' Award. So suddenly I had a huge amount of success, just bang, very quickly, very young, and without really looking back or trying. I was just suddenly lifted into another sphere.

And what effect did that have on you as a person?

That's a hard one to answer now. I do know that I, that was when I started really ... because I've always had a lot of energy, but that was when I really never went to bed, I was up and about and raging around all the time. And I did get tuberculosis out of it, finally. I'm a tuberculous person, or was then. But that wasn't for a while. I mean I was raging around a bit before that, before I got sick. But I got - well I don't know - it was like a kaleidoscopic madness of people and restaurants and night clubs and things, and it was just an enormously vibrant, twenty-four hour life. Although sometimes, I mean when I did a film, when I did that film, The Angel and Her Harp, I was sent to Gerard's Cross to do it, and I had this teensy little room at the back of the place, because it was being shot there and they couldn't drive me up and down from London. And I can remember being in there thinking oh, I can't stand this, it's awful. And I used to have to get up so early that one day I caused them to lose a whole day's shooting by getting up and putting toothpaste all over my face, because I thought it was cream. And I don't know what happened, but I was a sort of a weltered wreck by the the time they took it all off. I didn't even know, I was so tired. That's because I never used to sleep much. But I think we all go through a bit of a time like that where we rage about. And if we don't it's ... I don't think you've ever really lived in a way.

Who were you raging with?

Oh, God, you say. Lots of people. I don't know. Friends my age, but then a lot of ... you know, if you were in the film industry at that time you were always sort of picked up by different directors who were much older and [you were] sort of whisked about and shown things and taken here and there. I did work very hard though. I was a hard worker, and I always knew my lines and I was ... but then I mean everybody was in a different way then. Life was ... I mean I don't know whether you remember it, but there were very peculiar night clubs then, where you'd go in and you'd think, do you really have to pay to be here? It's so horrible. You know, people used ... but the dance bands were great, and there were huge big bands like Count Basie and I used to go from the theatre to Birdland, when I was in New York, and just stay there, and they all knew me. I loved them. And I loved the big band sound, and Count Basie and Joe Williams and all that. I once took Michael Redgrave there. [laughs] He loathed it. But, it was a very, very exciting life. When I was in New York I ... See, I sort of fell madly in love with an Italian then and got married. And he'd run away from his home and I was sort of [a] run away from my home, in a way. But he couldn't come to New York. And we'd been married just before I just ... before I went to New York. And of course then his mother came, my mother-in-law, and [she] sort of stayed with me to see I wasn't racketing around too much. And I mean it was ... I was in that play for a year. I couldn't get out of it, and that's when, I think, I got a bit ill.

You were very young, you were away from home and you were spectacularly successful. What effect did that have on you as a person?

Well it was actually, I think probably very, very difficult to handle, and I don't know whether I did it very well, but I'm still here, I survived just about. But there were enormously ... you know people talk about learning curves. That was a sort of ... It just wasn't really very easy to handle in that I still thought of myself as the sort of little kid down the end of the line who ... and suddenly I was this sort of person that everyone was deferring to and rushing around and I could throw my weight around if I wanted. But, I knew that I didn't know my part properly, really. And I really didn't want to be stuck in films in the same sort of copy roles that they put you in, in British Lion. All girls were immediately sort of made into sort of tidged [sic] up creatures that were ... I mean it was true that films at that time, the love scenes came on and you thought, oh no, here we can have a little sleep here. Really the girls' parts in films, a lot then, were very much token, so I didn't really like films. And I got into the Royal Court, where I did a lot of plays and got to know the really mover and shaking world in the theatre. I just had my finger on every pulse at that time, and I had the facility to do it. So in some ways it was a balanc[ing] act between dealing with the big shots, who had all the money, who were actually quite boring and you were fighting them off a lot, and the other sort of Royal Court type of person who was trying to do plays like Look Back In Anger and stuff like that, and they were, they were completely different. And I preferred that world a lot. And I did, I did stay in that world as much as I could. And I was rather sort of snooty about the other one.

How did you relate to the men in your life at the time?

I don't know how you mean: the men in my life. I kept, I, I sort of kept as far away as I could from all those sort of touchy, feely film people, who never stopped sort of groping you, whenever they got a chance. And I found that anathemic, but you know, it just happens. You spend a lot of time fighting people off. And I really didn't ... I had a lot of good friends, young guys and that, and girls, but I didn't want to be attached to any of them as a sort of singular relationship. A lot of actors find someone - actresses - find someone that ... They get a protector sort of, that's my boyfriend, so don't come near, but I still didn't want that. I didn't want someone that I carried around in tow in that way. So I was ... I've always been a bit of a loner. I'm a bit of what Tennessee Williams used to call the fugitive kind. I do a few bolts every now and again, rush off. And I suppose that's what you'd call here, a very large run. But it's because I don't really want to get stuck in a very cliched situation where I can't extricate myself. And that's why I didn't form up those sort of relationships like people do now, where they've ... that's my boyfriend and that's my girlfriend, and now it's not, but I've got another solid relationship. I didn't have that sort of thing if I could help it.

Tell me about your first husband.

Well, I met him in the street. He was Italian - is Italian. His name is Andrea Volpe. And he's, he had run away from his family, which was a sort of Roman patrician family. And here I know that it does have that connection with my father and everything like that, because I had been taught a lot of poetry of Dante, my father being the head of the Dante Alighieri Society, and I had been the little thing that was brought out when Italian boats came into town, and brought out to speak a bit of, you know, oh things like ... [ITALIAN] ... It's sort of like Shakespeare in English. But it's classical Italian, and that's what I think, I had this romantic image in the back of my brain somewhere, and this sort of beautiful looking young man walked up and said ... and I remember it, he said, 'Dove? Una piscina', which is Italian ... and I didn't look very Italian, come on, so I knew he'd said, 'Do you know where there's a swimming pool?' Which is a pretty. So I told him and then I noticed that every time I went anywhere - a restaurant - he's standing outside the door. And then I'd go out there he'd be across the street. If I went at six o'clock in the morning, he'd be there. It was frightfully sort of Romeo and Juliet. I mean he stood under my balcony as it were. And finally I went swimming with him, because that's what he'd asked for really: a swimming pool, and we, I sort of really thought he was ... I just fell madly in love for the first time in my life, and I'd never really had that sort of feeling. And I think it did have to do with all that backlog of all the romantic part of my upbringing and my father's stories of his family. And I just sort of ... He was virtually the same age as me too. We were both ridiculously young. And we sort of got married without telling anyone much, not my mother or anyone, and they were all rather surprised.

Why didn't you tell them?

Well, I didn't want them sort of muddled into it I suppose. And anyway, how could they have done anything from Australia. I was in London, and I didn't tell anyone much. And then I went into this play and went to New York and he was left in London. So he had a job with Korda. I got him a job. Well I didn't really, but Korda employed him as a translator, even though he could hardly speak English, which was quite odd. But he worked there with the Baroness Bugburg and all those people who Korda has as a little stable of people to translate things and get on with people from other countries.

Why did his mother come to New York with you and not him?

Ah, the machinations of the Romani, the Roman people. Yes, she came because I think she could get into America easily, easier than him. And she same to sort of keep, see that I was okay and wasn't shacked up with some black fella or something, you know, down in the Village. And I think really she came to sort of get to know me in a way. She was a very smart woman. Her name was the Contessa Elsa Volpe di Smale, and she was very smart, sort of blue headed aristocratic lady who had a business that made very smart clothes, that she didn't have to do. And she was in gamba as they say in Italian. And also she was ... I think her son being her favourite son ... I think she was a little bit ... we had a bit of a...

But having just got married...

Yeah.

And then you went away for a year, and you were separated. How did you cope with that?

Not very well. I mean we used to send each other these long tapes and we used to have these incredibly long telephone conversations, and it was a bit of a wrench. It was a stupid way to begin a marriage - very, very silly. And it really didn't work at all. So when I came back, I mean everything had changed a bit. We'd all sort of phut. And I was put into a musical, and his mother was still there and she was now ... she'd come to stay with us for good. And that's when I really began to sort of get a bit ... didn't like it at all.

What was the musical?

It was called Zorieka, and that had a bad end. I got out of it in the end. But it was really because of the ... they had a clause in the contract where the producer could veto ... now am I getting this right ... any director. I know. It wasn't the producer, it was the two writers, who were Oxford guys and they could veto any director. So we went through nine directors, including Peter Hall. And they turfed him out too. But they never wanted ... they really wanted to direct it themselves. That's why they did it. And every time they turfed out a director you had to start to learning it again, new, because in fact you couldn't keep that director's work, otherwise they would have had to pay him. So it was a nightmare.

So you'd come back to a marriage that was sort of difficult, because of the separation, a mother-in- law moving in with you ...

Yes.

... and a musical that was a nightmare?

Yeah.

What happened?

Well, everything happened. I sort of ran away, skipped off. And he and his mother went back to Italy. And I ended up in Sicily, and then I sort of ... well I can't remember what really happened after that.

When was your baby born?

Then. After that. After that. And I went to Australia to have Giovanna with my mum, because she wanted me to and she was ... that was her job.

But before that, before you were pregnant, there was a crisis. Would you tell me about that? What happened? With all this pressure on you.

Well I suppose, and I really have never talked about this, I just couldn't see any way out of any of it. I just thought I can't, just can't cope with any of it. And so I sort of made an attempt to get help by trying to kill myself. And it was all rather dramatic and mad and then I ran away, with my Italian maid to Sicily. [laughs] And then somehow - I don't know how - my husband found when I came back, he was waiting at Naples for me. So it was very strange. And then we went back to Rome and then things sort of settled down for a bit, and then I really couldn't stand that sort of incarceration of the Italian wife. I was in that sort of world of where the moglie is supposed to be totally encapsuled in the house. I sort of went off to Australia. I couldn't take it, living with all these servants and everybody was ... everybody played a role all the time. I think the Italians are the most genuine hypocrites in the world. They're genuinely hypocritical. They know how to do it. And I just didn't want that, so off I went to Australia.

What do you mean by they're being hypocritical? How did you experience that?

Well, for instance, in that household of my mother-in-law and father-in-law lived the father's mistress's daughter and the mother's sort of adopted son [and] nobody quite knew how he'd been adopted or why, but he counteracted the girl that was there, who was called Moona, and then there were his real children and their real children, and they all kept this extraordinary game going all the time. It was very sort of difficult to ... I didn't particularly like the play I was in, but I understood Pirandello immediately after that, because ... and I actually translated a Pirandello play after that. Because they did have positions that they took and roles that they played and drama that happened in a very essentially formalised way. And I, being an Australian, that sort of world is very foreign. Doesn't bear thinking about much because it doesn't really go anywhere. It just goes up its own orifice, you know.

And you experienced, I assume, in that atmosphere, a great loss of freedom.

Absolutely. I used to walk around the streets sort of trying to find anything to do. I mean, my husband and I, we had a Vespa and we used to zoom around here and there and we went to things, and that was all the time that we knew those people, like Fellini and all those people. They were great fun. Visconti. But they, again, they were in that extraordinary fixed world of attitudes.

But at the same time, Diane, as you were trying to live this life, you were conscious of the fact that you were in huge, huge demand as an actress at the peak of her ... of her sort of first flush of success.

Yes, that was very difficult and that's ... I mean I ... once I'd Giovanna here. And then I went back to England, I was ... and then, suddenly, everybody was on to me. Everybody. And I then ... suddenly when I was in New York one night I was with Hal Prince and all sorts of people. I had a haemorrhage and I had tuberculosis. And I had ... I thought at first something had happened in my throat, and then I went into what's called the Medical Arts Hospital. I didn't have insurance and I was there. I had to ... I mean I was nearly dead. My dad of course arrived. And I stayed there until I had to go back to Italy on a hospital ship. I went on the Andrea Doria, and I was down to sort of like four stone, five stone, four stone - between that. I looked at my arm and I thought, what's that? And then slowly I was put into the Vatican then, I lived in the Vatican for six months.

Why?

Because the family of ... knows ... knew Professori Morelli that ran it. And that was where you went in Rome if you had that disease. It was a very sort of beautiful place inside the Vatican, run by nuns, and with a very extraordinary man called Professori Morelli, who had white hair down to here and was very sort of ... But I know that when I was there everyone was trying to come and see me. My mother-in-law even came and lived with me in that hospital, and I had lots of people coming in there because it was very chic to go to the Vatican. She used to ... they used to give cocktail parties in my room even, and all sorts of mad things happened.

And what about your baby?

I couldn't see her. Because I might have given her something. I mean obviously that disease, which is very catchy. But when I came out of there I knew I wasn't getting better because I'd had my lung collapsed. And they took me to Cervinia, which is a place, Matterhorn, you know - under the Matterhorn, and that was where my father-in-law had a house. And my mother-in-law used to keep us apart: me and my husband, because I might ... he might catch that disease, you know. So I was sort of kept like a little nun in a room, and then every second day he had to take me to a place called Cervinia, the town, and I had my lung collapsed by a thing called premotoraja, and of course the doctor there was a friend of his father's, and I told him that this doctor was behaving very unpleasantly towards me. And he said, 'No, no. You mustn't say a word because he's a friend of my father's'. So I thought, oh, oh, here we go, and from that moment on I decided to get out of there. That's what I mean about attitudes, you see.

You were being harassed by the doctor?

Yes.

... And you weren't allowed to tell... your husband about it?

He was sitting outside, my husband. No, I told my husband and he said, 'Don't tell him because he's a friend of my father's'. So that's why I ... and I knew that was it. And I also wanted to take my kid, so I started plotting to get out. I didn't have any money. And I will tell you a story that is absolutely true. It's very funny. My father-in-law was a very tall man, who had a red beard and was, I think, a sort of neo-fascist. But anyway, he had mines and different things and lots of workmen that seemed to live under the house somehow, but up in those mountains, there was a lot of mountain streams - not very wide, but you could see trout in them. And I said, 'Oh it's funny 'cause none of your workmen ever go and try and catch trout'. He said, 'No, no, no. Nobody can catch them, nobody'. So I thought, well now. So I got a book from this doctor called La Vita della Trota, Life of the Trout, and I read, so I bet him that for every trout he would pay me some huge sum of money, like 20,000 lires or something. And then I learnt ... well I crawled up to the thing and I used to do this thing and I started catching trout. And once I ... he couldn't go against me because everyone had heard it. So I made enough money to ... I rang up my agent in London, got a taxi to meet us. I then told them I was going, and I got taken to Torino, and then I went to London and I never went back to that family again. And that's how I got out. Sounds mad. True though. Weird. But then ...

Your relationship with your husband?

Well, he sent a lawyer over there. But I didn't ... by that time I had totally ... I did take my baby obviously, but I sort of said to them before, 'Oh I'll come back'. But then I met Sean. I had met Sean when I was pregnant actually, and he was waiting there. I'd sort of rung him up too and a few other people, and alerted them that I was getting out. And I then was cured. I went to the chest hospital and I had a thing called isoniozide, which is the drug that cures, and I really started to get better. But I wasn't insurable for quite a long time. And so that's when the beginning of the whole of the next part of my life. It sort of came to its first, natural end then - when I got out of Italy. But then, it's a bit Perils of Pauline, but there it is, I'm sorry. The next part of my life was when I sort of was doing ... knew Sean and we were all working on all sorts of things at the Royal Court and the National Theatre and lots of films.

At that stage, when you'd decided that you would leave the family, you said that you already knew Sean Connery from earlier times.

What I knew him about was I did Anna Christie with him when I was pregnant with Trevano. I had gone to London to do that television with Leo McKern. He played my dad, Sean played the stoker, but I didn't have anything much to do with him. All I did was sell him my Vespa that I'd had in London because I was going back to Australia to have Giovanna. I did it when I was sort of six months pregnant. And then I came back to Australia, and that's really how I knew him. And he kept writing to me all the time when I was in Australia - very sweet. And then he did sort of help me quite a lot when I was ... I mean he used to drive me in my own Vespa that I'd sold him to the chest hospital. I used to have to go quite often. And it was a period when I wasn't insurable, and so it was a fabulous summer and we all ... a lady gave me a house. Lady Diana Duff Cooper gave me her house at Bognor and so all the actors used to come there. Giovanna was there and we were all there all the time. We had a magnificent, mad couple of months. And then I was better really.

If you had to sum up your first marriage and that relationship, how would you do it?

Well, it was everything that is romantic in Shakespeare. I sort of see it as a Romeo and Juliet thing, but I having played that part, I actually think that Romeo and Juliet would have had a dreadful marriage. Just like mine was in a way. It wasn't dreadful, it was just incompatible. Because I had a lot of things to do and he was a sort of playboy in a way, and had come from a very, very rich family in Italy: very spoilt, really was mummy's boy. But I met him when he'd run away from all that. So I didn't see that side. And you know, Italian mamas are very closely packed with their sons, so that's really what the problem was in the end, I think. You know, looking back on it now.

And was your relationship with Sean very different from that? Was that part of the attraction? What was your relationship with Sean like? What drew you to him?

Well, well I've always been the 'darling', I mean in a way. I mean that's what my husband always says to me, my husband of now, says, 'Oh you naughty thing, you're the darling'. I've never been the one who pursued, I've always been pursued, and so what's drawn me to people is them being drawn to me, more than anything. And he was very, very good to me when I was ill. And also we worked with the Laban method and he went to voice, voice production. I took him to Jusberry (sic), and he did a lot of work because he had a lot of work to do. Because I mean he was absolutely non-acceptable by all that crew of people as an actor on the stage.

Why?

Because he had a terrible accent ...[IMITATES ACCENT] ... and he was sort of huge and had been second mister, you know, he came second in Mr. Scotland, and always had lots of hairs on his back, and was very rough as far as they were concerned. And he was also working class, which at that time I think still, and I still think, England needs its class distinctions. They wouldn't know what to do without them. They like it. And he was really working class. And so until that person has proven themselves, which they can do much easier than they could then, they're unacceptable, really, basically.

And he was prepared to put the work in to prove himself?

Are you kidding? He was very, very, very ambitious, and he was very good with money. He'd been on tour in the chorus of South Pacific, and he was a sort of political animal then. And he'd sort of saved enough money - never spent any money - to buy himself a little mews house which we painted blue then, and ... It was sort of a working relationship really I suppose, much more than ... I mean I suppose we all have this dreadful thing called a work ethic. I mean, I don't know where it comes from - it must be some genetic horrific thing because Aborigines are wonderful at not having it, and I would love not to have it really. Sometimes I think I don't and I really like to loll about for a lot of the time. But I do, I am a very assiduously hard worker really, and he was like that too. But fun, you know, it can be. It's not really like work when it's nice and fun like that.

Were you a lot of help to him in showing him the ropes, because you were already established?

Oh yes, of course I was. And I mean I also thought it was a terrific joke. I loved it, that he was so sort of rough diamond compared with all those creepy actors that I knew. [laughs]

Not to mention the aristocratic Italian family...

Well exactly. Right, right you've got it. I probably went whoosh, straight round in 180 degree swivel, just to be out of all that.

How did he get on with Giovanna?

Terrifically well at that time. He just loved her. But you know, your ... the whole tapestry of your life is so interwoven with so many people that you can't just say, 'There's Andrea and there's Sean'. There were whole lots of people wandering in and out and being part of one's life - so many people that it makes it seem as though you go plop, plop, plop, but you never, never, never do. And you're never committed to anything, at least I wasn't then, in that way. Although, I mean Sean made it his business that I didn't see many other people [other] than him. But I did still have lots of other friendships. And that's when ... I think we're getting up to the time when I'd been at the Royal Court for a while and then done lots of things with Tony Richardson. I'd been to the Mexican Film Festival with him and we'd been off to Mexico and Chichén Itzá together with John Osborne and everyone. And then what happened was, they were doing Tom Jones, and all the people from the Royal Court were shoved into ... I was ... and we all went down to the country to have this rip roaring time with Albert Finney and Suzanna York and Tony Richardson, and all the really good filmmakers. And we were encouraged to sort of think up mad things for our parts and look in the book and suggest things. It was a great. It was the nicest film I've ever been on. They always had a huge American car, boot filled with champagne, and everyone was drinking away and having a good time and we had great big barbecues and great big ... And it was a summer film. So I was there all the time and that's when Sean came down sort of very ... and that's when he was thinking ... I mean he had shown me this book of Bond, and we had a big laugh about it and said, 'The only way you could play this part is if you're funny and say funny things'. Because it's so horrible and he's such a beast, and the thing is this: my mother, who was so funny about those films said, 'But dear', she said to me, 'Who gave James Bond permission to kill? Was it the Queen?' [laughs] I mean being very practical, those people of her generation were horrified by the possibility that there wasn't any ten commandments anymore. But when I'd done Tom Jones I was always very pregnant, actually, even though I played a pregnant lady and I had to wear a huge thing, I was pregnant. And I really didn't want to get married. But ... so I upped again and went to Spain with my sister. And I was an Australian citizen, and this is a bit complicated, but you couldn't go into Gibraltar, where I wanted to have the baby, more than three times as an Australian. You had ... you could only be British. So ... and then Sean arrived and I had done my three goes, and I was supposed to have a caesarian and I said, 'Don't be silly, I'm not having that'. So he decided and we ... that we were going to get married and then I'd have a British passport as well as an Australian passport and I could get across the border whenever I liked, but then there was an enormous fracas where I sort of did a bit of a skip again. I mean, I realise that what ... what we ... what I realise is that I probably am a person who skips off when things get a bit difficult and I can't hope to get them into order. I think I'm better at it now though. But I was a bit of a bolter. But then it all worked out, and we did get married and I did ... then I went and had this baby. And after that then Sean got to be very successful, but I was the one who was sort of left holding the baby, if you see what I mean, in a way. In the ... in that ... he suddenly, after we got married, said, 'No, no. You can't work anymore. I don't want you to work', and suddenly reverted, as it were, to being, I suppose, the Scottish husband, who said you can't do anything ... because ... you know.

Did he say why? Did he say why he wanted that?

No, because that's not what they do. They don't talk in 'whys'. They just say no. And what's frightening is that at that time I suppose there was no equality of sexes and things. (TO CAMERAMAN That thing's going out all the time. Did you know?)

Diane, could you tell us about your marriage to Sean Connery and what it was like during those years after your son was born and you were living with Sean. Could you describe that period?

Well, it's very hard to describe in one way, because unless you've been through the sort of onslaught of people and publicity fanaticism success in that way, and that was the sixties, and the sixties were a very strange decade, in that I suppose you could say they were decade of the Beatles and Bond. They had a peculiarity in that they were still sort of innocent in a way. I mean I'm not saying the whole world was innocent, never has been and never will be, but I'm saying that the idea of that sort of English dominance of the pop world and the world of big huge films ... although of course they were financed from America, but they were made mostly by English technicians and in England, and it became a sort of dream I suppose. It was like a mad dream. People would be waiting outside the door and hiding in bushes and sitting up trees. Everybody I think who's been through that world of complete sort of enclosement by love, let's call it that, or, or obsession, knows that you really can't describe it very much because you never know what's going to pop out of a bush as you go out the door. I mean when my dad was staying with us then, we found a ladder up the back and a girl climbed up and into his bedroom. [laugh] He was very shocked and at the same time quite sort of, thought it was pretty extraordinarily nice. Anyway, she ... lots of people used to do stuff like that. I would be in the back yard, for instance, having a sunbathe, and suddenly a voice would come through, 'Are you receiving me, Mrs. Bond?' and things like that would suddenly ... You were never alone, and you were never not being watched. It was ... at first it was sort of funny, and then it wasn't funny. And then we had lots of robberies, people wanting to come in every time we went out. We found out that it was being done by the same people. They had taken a room. We lived in Uxbridge Road, Acton Park, and they'd taken a room and were looking with binoculars to see when we went out and went in and it was ... It was like living in a fishbowl really, but worse, because fishes at least have got the glass and we didn't. And also, I don't think anybody knew how to cope with it much. Sean immediately took up golf and rushed off to golf courses. And I tried to ... That's when I started writing, I suppose to try and spend time with my children inside and be at the same time thinking about things and doing things because I've always had that problem of having to ... otherwise I have a low threshold of boredom. So that's when I started doing that. And I think really it got more and more ... As each Bond film became more and more successful ... And we went to Turkey to do From Russia With Love, we went to Bermuda and we went to Nassau, and we went to do all these films, and we were always picked up by a huge amount of people, merchanting [sic] people, merchandising people, and minders and things, and carried about, like sort of two ... I often used to think we were sort of like, you know, queen bees sort of being taken around encapsulated in things and never allowed to live a life much. And I think it was very peculiar for our children too. As far as the ... we had this very [big] house that we'd been doing up, and it was an old nunnery. It had been with the Adoratrice nuns, Spanish nuns, and it had a lot of work to do on it. But it was very ... I mean if you think about it again, if I think about it, I see it in a sort of dream world of madness, a different sort of madness, where I was suddenly not the star person, it was Sean. And people were quite blatantly in front of me, sort of you know - ladies would sort of play up to him and he wouldn't know what to do. And in fact, it was a sort of ... when we were by ourselves it was so totally different than in public because he was sort of going bald and had to wear a rug on his head, and I had to sort of shave his back and do all those sort of things so that he could appear as this totally unreal ... and people started ... and that was the worst thing ... started calling him, you know, Bond and things, instead of Sean. And he was very, very worried that he was going to be submerged. So there were a whole lot of people we consulted, including RD Laing, and all sorts of things happened as far as adjustment: doing other parts, not that part. But then nobody wanted anything but that part. It's the way it is. Once the public becomes fixated by a character. I think they have ... now it's sort of Superman and comic characters, and it probably is getting through that stage now, but most people, most Hollywood stars, sort of ape comics. They get very big musculars and stuff like that, and they have to work out continuously, but then it was sort of different. People were left to their own devices more. And there were lots of stunt men around and people trying to sell things and buy things through Bond, and we were sent caviar and Dom Perignon champagne - cases of it, until you loathed it. Yes, you did! And so that's all I can really say about that part of the time: it was just a really, a sort of, magnificent rat race. You know, sort of a totally fabricated life with all the trappings. I suppose there are people who can really get used to that and love it. But it wasn't me: that person, that could do that.

Diane, you also ... what was happening with your career? What was the story with that?

Well, I had been at the Royal Court, you see and then I did ... I went away and did Tom Jones, and then Tom Jones came out and all three ladies in it were all nominated for Oscars, for the Best Supporting cast, and I think Sean got a bit sort of shirty at that. And I then thought, well look, I'll go into the National Theatre. I went ... because the National Theatre you'd only play about twice a week. And I thought ... well I just you know ... So I went in and I did The Idiot with Derek Jacobi. And I was sort of playing a couple of nights a week, maybe there'd be two nights together, and then there'd be a break of about three or four nights and then there'd be another night and then there'd be a break, and then there'd be two more nights, so it wasn't every night. But in one of those nights, we were ... we received our very first robbery and when I came back I thought the children had gone mad, because the room had been completely devastated. I thought, what has happened there? I just didn't think of it as a robbery and it was just a sort of rape in a way. Your whole house, you know. People do very unpleasant things when they get into your house like that.

Like what?

Well, they throw everything, and then they piss on the walls and they write funny things. It was a bit devastating to know that you were so vulnerable. And I was. We all were. And things like my wedding rings and everything went and they took shotguns and 500 rounds of ammunition and those sort of things are very worrying, because, well they just are. And one didn't even know how it had happened. So we did have a time of rather unpleasant people watching the house and the police and all those Italian Mafiosi people who appeared out of the woodwork, saying, 'We'll do it, you know, we'll get them'.

Were the children in the house at the time?

Upstairs on the very top floor, asleep.

And they weren't touched?

Didn't hear anything. It was all happened downstairs. This house had sort of four levels and it all happened on the first two floors. But it makes you very twitchy when you have ... living in a life like that. And I was doing things, like I did Camino Reale, and I did all sorts of things for television, and I was trying to be a sort of homemaker as well, and be a good mum and all that stuff. And trying to sort of cope with this, handle this new, bizarre situation. I think everyone who's been in it will recognise what I'm talking about, but you just ... it isn't fun.

Did you choose the theatre so as not to be competitive in his arena of films at the time?

No. No, not at all. I had to buy myself out of that Korda contract, because when Korda died when I was in America, I was a civil servant. The company was taken over by the British government. So I became one of the few actress-civil servants in the world. And then I got ... they kept on, they didn't know what to do with me at all, so I bought myself out of the contract, which is really peculiar, but I did. And then ... so I really had never been as interested in films as I was in the stage. It just ... it's a different thing, it's a different discipline. I really didn't like to get up terribly early in the morning and rush around acting all day in that sort of dib dob, you know: you sit down and you wait for the lighting for about five hours it seems like, and then you do about three minutes acting. And that isn't ... that's not how I wanted to conduct my career. So I was great friends with all sort of ... George Devine and Tony Richardson and all of those people. So I went back to the Royal Court and I had done with Sean a Pirandello play that I'd translated from the Italian, called Vesgire i Ignudi, which translates Naked, and George Devine had commissioned me to do two more for the Royal Court, and then of course he died. So every time I started something which I thought was terrifically exciting, the sort of rug went quickly away from under my feet. But I did put it on at the Royal Court. I'd done it at Oxford and I called myself I.S. Nadia, because that's an anagram of IS Diane. And I got this fantastic review from Harold Hobson and when I brought it to London, they said, 'Oh, at the Royal Court call yourself your own name'. So Harold Hobson gave this play a review and said, 'If only Diane Cilento had seen I.S. Nadia's translation she'd know'. It was exactly the same! But I mean those sort of things happen and one realises very, very clearly, that it is do with one's sex. Because I.S. Nadia sounds like some Indian gentleman from the Punjab or somewhere. Certainly not me. But as soon as it was me, I sort of got the - you know. I thought it was very funny. I thought I'd expose it, and then I thought no, it's stupid to do that. So I didn't. So then...

That's an enormously interesting play.

It is. Do you know that play?

...And an interesting one for you to be in at that time.

That's right because it's about the exposure to the press of a person who has been present when something has happened that the press loves. And the story's been written which is incorrect and she then tries to kill herself. It's very interesting, yes. I was attracted to the play, because it was very ... it is a terrific play, but it's very seldom done, because it's so harsh. It's a harsh play. Anyway, let's get on. Where am I at now?

Well, you'd put on this thing at the Royal Court. You were looking for a future doing this, and then?

Well, then certain things happened. We went to Spain to do a film that Sean was doing called The Hill, and it was a sort of mad, very violent film about soldiers being marched up and down a little hill and he was in a pretty bad state. It was very hard work [coughs], and I then left that set, and went to Spain further down, with my son. He was only a baby, not very old, and we ... my daughter at that time was with us, but she had gone to Millfield - not Millfield - one of those lovely Steiner schools, and so she was being looked after there. And I went and bought seventeen acres of a finca, near south of Marbaya in a place called ... What was it called now? Anyway it was just south of Marbaya, where I had been when I was going to have Jason. And I bought a finca which had lovely fruit trees and acequias and little canals all through it, and a very small house with a sort of fireplace. I'd sort of put the fire in like that, and bend down - it was great. Very beautiful - looked after by some lovely people who were from the village there and that's where I thought I'd write, and where Sean could get away and we could get away, where there was enough land and enough driveway to sort of keep the sort of paparazzi out. Except I didn't know that they would be sitting in trees around my house. Once we were driving up the front, and knocked one out of the tree, virtually in front of the car, but not ... We didn't run over him. We thought about it, but we didn't. But that world - some very excruciating things happened there, like once I gave a party, and I'd invited about eight people, and 2,000 turned up, because someone at that party, I won't name names, quite a well known person, had said, 'Oh, come to this party, Sean Connery and Diane Cilento are giving this party', and we saw this queue of people down the road and couldn't believe it.

What did you do?

Well I ran away first, and then I came back. But I had to tell them all to go away. And they all expected drinks, because this person actually had taken money from those people to go to the party. This is not a joke. It was a terrible, terrible scene. Sean was going to ... I don't know.

You were fair game.

I was fair game, and I didn't have enough protection. Now people spend a lot of money, a lot of money, I should say that people who are in that position spend literally a good percentage of how much they make on security. And on protecting themselves from that sort of intrusion, and that sort of, that sort of vulnerability.

When you were going to the locations where the Bond films were being shot, what was your status? How were you seen? I mean, here were you, a serious major star yourself, but what was your position when you went on location with Sean?

Oh I was very well treated. But I ... you know, there's a joke about the Bond thing is that I think in one of the ... I knew Ian Fleming very well too, who I liked a lot, and we ... he came on location in Istanbul with us. But there's a joke that when he got Bond married off, she's shot in about three minutes, because he couldn't have him married, it wouldn't work. So she gets topped at about sort of, on ... as they drive away from the church or wherever they get married. They're in an open car and she's sort of immediately shot. So I did feel a bit uncomfortable most of the time, because, I mean, some of the times ... and we went ... I mean Sean did a film called Shalako with Bridget Bardot and I was on location. And we, we got to be friendly enough, but she had her entourage and he had his entourage. But stars in that time are very ... were very [much] treated extraordinarily like ... [GESTURES AS IF WRAPPING PRECIOUS OBJECT] Well they still are ... but enormously carefully, because they might sort of suddenly disappear or walk away. So we were all treated very well.

How much work did you have to put in to looking after Sean, because the pressure must have been heavily on him?

Oh, yes, and I think really, he always wanted to do different good things. He directed a film in Scotland about ... He had a great friend who was a Scottish shipbuilding man, and he tried to sort of reactivate the Scottish boat building things. I think that really the esperance of everybody, a lot of people at that time - young actors and people, were always [drawn] towards very creative work, and trying to do something that changed things. And of course, at that time, remember, the whole world was really getting into dope and we were all sort of moving into another ... I mean we were great friends. I did a couple of shows with Peter Sellars, and we were great friends with them. And lots of comedians Sean liked and we had them over a lot to eat and it's always sort of more comfortable, I suppose, to be with people who don't want something out of you. And the whole of that world is to do with ... I always think people are like sort of cuts of meat, you know, in the butcher's shop, that you might be a prime cut or a spare rib or whatever you are, but everybody wants to eat you. And really to be with other people who were in the same bracket, [who] didn't want anything out of you, was sort of more comfortable. And I think a lot of them played golf together. That was ... A lot of that set of young Turks, who had made money and had become famous, you know - footballers and comedians and people - used to go out to Richmond and cheat a lot at golf. And I used to watch them. I used to play with them sometimes. But, I mean, I remember an absolutely mad golf game with Rex Harrison and Rachel Roberts and a thunderstorm happening and we were all ... I mean it's just very, very mad and funny. But that was ... It was more comfortable to with people who didn't ... who weren't trying to get bits and pieces of you, and sort of eat them.

Do you think Sean's resistance to your pursuing your career, and his desire to have you at home, was because he actually needed you to look after him at that time, when he was vulnerable?

No. Because I don't think sitting by the hearth, being ... playing hubby and wifey was on the cards, in either of our minds, if you see what I mean. It just wasn't there. And the excitement of life wasn't that sort of cosy acceptable ... It just wasn't in there. That wasn't part of the equation at all. We were always doing different things. And it was just sort of not competing I think really. And I feel that most ... I mean coming from that family I think most people in families, or in relationships do have that problem, that even unconsciously they don't know why they have it. It's sort of like my mum and dad. When my mother started getting much more famous, my father sort of crumpled a bit. But I didn't sort of crumple like that. I just wanted to do my own thing again. But I also was becoming more and more interested in ... I think there's a time in your life when you ask two questions, and those are sort of pivotal questions. And one is who am I? And the other one is what am I doing here? Because once you've had all that stuff and it's what the world says you're supposed to want: fame, anything you want, stuff being given to you, people taking you here and there, and all that, once that's happened, and it isn't ... and you think oh, is that what it was, is that it? Is that the best thing they've got to offer? Well I don't really, I don't really think that's enough. I want more than this. I can't make sense of this because it doesn't satisfy me. And it isn't because you want more, at least in my case it wasn't, it's just because you want a different quality of things. And, so that's why I began ... and it always happens, I think, to everybody, with a series of coincidences, that you think, that's a bit weird. And it did with me in that way and I ... Sean was over in New York. I was at this house that we had by that time, because we'd moved from that house where we'd had all those robberies, it was too vulnerable, and we'd moved to Putney, and we were in this very Victorian house on the corner of Putney Common, and my little son by this time was about six or something, had gone out and gone to Wimbledon Common and I don't know exactly what happened, but he came back and he had been sort of attacked. And I had to get the Flying Squad in and he gave his descriptions, and I rang up Sean and I had lots of people ... I was writing a script with people from the Living Theatre then, and anyway, to cut a long story short, I got messages through the letterbox and threats and all that sort of stuff. So I just felt desperately vulnerable again. So I moved again and I moved to another house, and when Sean came back I wasn't there. I just left. So I just ... because he didn't really take any notice of what was going on with us. And what was going on was that Jason was in a problem, in that he had been severely shocked and he needed to be reassured by the male figure, and I don't think, I don't think Sean was occupied with thinking about that, and that's why I realised that it wasn't working, and I left that. And then I ... I was also into a set of people who were very ... Living Theatre and all sorts of people like that, who were ... and everybody at that time was beginning to get into a drug scene. We were all - everybody - nobody was left out of that scene I don't think in the sixties. Everybody had their little go at it. And it did open a huge lot of people's minds - LSD and things like that. And they ... the whole ambience of the world shifted. I do believe that. It happened. If you listen to early Beatles songs and then you hear after[wards] they'd been sort of introduced to a few magic substance, the whole of the music changed and became quite different in its direction and much more introverted and sensitive to what was happening in people. And I think everybody began to do that. And I think the sixties were a very pivotal time in people. People who lived through that and were conscious of it, knew that it would have many victims, which it did have. Lots of one's friends just psst, because there was one thing that I think was very obvious. It wasn't really the substances, it was the energy that you had being opened, and if you squandered it away, it's like having nothing in the bank and then a huge overdraft, and then dead. It made you realise that there was a way you could attain all those sort of states without taking substances, and that's really, I think, what a lot of people began to turn to, including myself. And I went to Denmark to do a film called Zero Population Growth, with Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chaplin, and the film was supposed to be about the future, where we were all polluted. And then they used to put this stuff onto the set, this white stuff. It was actually made from margarine and we all started getting sick, because it was polluted. So they had to stop the film. It was backed by Seagram's whisky, which was always very funny I thought, and we all stayed in Copenhagen while they perfected their pollution so that it wasn't polluting. And while we were there, there was a guy who'd been on Easy Rider, there was all these people, and we used to meet every day at four o'clock and have tea together and tell each other what was ... what we'd done, because we didn't really know what was going on, and at this time, someone gave me this book which he had thrown across the room, and I immediately picked up, and I started reading this book and moved out of the hotel and went into an apartment and started being ... reverting to my usual thing of being [a] total fugitive person in a way. And I ... I mean we did do a lot of very funny things. I think Geraldine Chaplin and I were thrown out of a live show for laughing. Because Copenhagen had all that sort of sex scene at the time. I think that's why they were making the film there to tell you the truth. And ... but I began to read this book, and I thought, I don't really know anything at all. I'd left school so early, I'm really, really thick and stupid. I don't know any mathematics because there was a lot of that. I just couldn't, I couldn't get over how stupid I was. So I ... When I went back to England, and as I said a series of coincidences like that began to happen, and I thought I'll have to learn something. So I thought I ... I was doing a film with Tony Curtis and Roger Moore - it was - oh, what was it called? Mission Impossible or Persuaders or something, I can't remember. Anyway I went into the studios because I'd got picked up by the police, I'd missed the ferry, all these coincidences had happened and I thought I'll look, I'll put an ad in the Times to see if I can remember. And I thought, I'll write it from what I look (sic) and I looked on the Times and there was the name of this book, and that there was lecture being given that night about it.

What was the book called?

Well, it was called In Search Of The Miraculous, actually, [by] Ouspensky. But I just couldn't understand it, you see, and I thought I'd ... Anyway I went to this lecture that night and it was full of very strange people. A cross section of the most ... I thought well I can dine out on this story of meeting these bizarre people. But more and more coincidences happened and I started ... The person who was giving that lecture lived sort of next to me in Coombe Springs in Kingston. And I started going to classes and meditational practices and I would never have pursued it. In fact, the first three times I thought I still was in the vein of thinking: this'll make a great story for all my friends, meeting all these bizarre people. But then the proof of the pudding happened, in that I began to do it and it began to work. I mean I had a different sort of energy. I began to get a different sort of feel about my observations.

What happened to take you on the journey to discovering some new way of looking at the world?

I think it's a very strange escalated coincidental world that you get into. And I think ... I don't think that I'm unique in this, I think it happens to a lot of people, where suddenly a whole lot of things happen which they can't ignore, because they're so odd. For instance, with me, after I'd got that book, and after I'd missed the ferry, I too threw this book across the room a few times, and I was caught in a place called Esbjerg, on the coast of Denmark. I had my car there and I had to put it on the ferry. And I thought I can't read this silly book any more, I'm going a bit cracked. In Denmark at that time, there wasn't anything except pornography in the shops, so I sort of bought the book, and then I threw a lot out the window of the hotel, and then when I got to England there was no car on the road and I was driving down to go to this film, having lost a few days. I had to start the next day, and I thought everyone's gone, where are they? Of course I didn't realise it was Cup Final day, and I was driving at about 106 miles an hour down the motorway, and when I got to my house in Coombe Springs, I took some photos out of my bathroom window. And this is true. When I'd bought ... I'd gone to this lecture and this man had been talking about this school, and actually I was sitting in the audience thinking thank god I don't have to go to anything like that. So as a sop to the thing that I wasn't going to do anything about it, I bought his book, which was a book called Witness, and when I got home I went to bed and I opened the book, and there was a picture of exactly what I'd taken out of my bathroom window. The same trees, except there was a building in it. And I knew it was, and then I looked at the book and it said Coombe Springs, and I realised that this book had been written about the place that I was actually living in. And that this house, which was called Ajamashantra had actually been there where I'd - just opposite where these trees were. So it was ... so I got very ... I remembered the number of the number to book the lecture, because it was exactly the same as my number except it had one number different. So I, on a whim, at about midnight I rang that number. And this philosopher, who was the man who'd given the lecture answered it straight away, and I think I said to him, 'This is getting beyond a coincidence'. And he said, 'What do you mean?' and I said, 'Well I seem to be living in a place that you've written this book from'. And he said, 'Yes, you live around the corner', because that's where I told him. And he said, 'What do you want to do?' He said, 'Do you want me to come round and see you?' So I said, 'Yes', and so in the middle of the night, this hugely tall man, about six foot six or something, walked in and said, 'What do you want to know?' So I said, 'Everything'. He said, 'Well that's a very good beginning'. And that's when I started taking these ... He said, 'Come tomorrow at seven-thirty', so I thought he meant seven-thirty in the evening, and so I went there at seven-thirty in the evening and he was having coffee with his wife, and he said, 'What are you doing here?' I said, 'You told me to come at seven-thirty'. He said, 'I meant seven-thirty in the morning'. I said, 'But I had to go to work then'. So I began to go and have coffee with him in the evenings, then began to go in the morning when I wasn't working. And I was extremely sceptical at first. And he kept talking about the school and everything and I - I thought I can't do this.

Who was he and what was he teaching?

He was a philosopher called John Godolphin Bennett, he was a physicist and a mathematician and he had, sort of had, the most extraordinary life. He'd been our man in Istanbul and he sort of learnt from all sorts of philosophers as well. And he was an extraordinarily terrific person to be with, very funny and very interesting. But I thought he was a bit nuts actually. But at that time it was almost as though it was a sort of toss up between whether I continued in my life, which was with that whole crowd of very druggie people and everything, or whether I began to take some sort of hold. I think nearly everybody at that time was sort of nibbling on little substances quite often, and you know, it got to be ... You knew that you mustn't be doing this any more, because it was getting a bit silly. So I then thought, well ... He then showed me this place which was going to be the school. He took me there, and it was a broken down school, where ... it was the school that If had been made about. It was that school. It had been empty for seven years. It was a total wreck, and I thought this is ridiculous. But I thought, I'll never be here, I've got two children, and a cat and a dog and a life and things. And so I accepted a film in Greece when I knew this film was ... this school was starting. And off I went to Greece, with my kid, and I put my cat - I gave my cat to a lady and put my dog in a kennel, and I rented my house to the Korean Ambassador. And I thought this is a very clever way of skipping out again, which is my pattern as I see from this interview really. And when I got to Greece, I met the director, who I knew, and he said, 'Well you're going to help me raise the money for the film'. I said, 'What?' He said, 'We haven't go the money'. And so it was a film with Christopher Plummer, and of course the film fell through. And I was left there, I went around, Greece quite a lot with my kids and sort of took photos of things and made tarot cards out of them, and ... but then came the time when I had to come back. And I went to stay with my agent and that was almost impossible with kids and things. And then one day I sort of surrendered and said, 'I'll go up there', and I took my cat and my dog and I rang him up and said, 'I think I might be coming up there to see you', and I thought, I'll write a book while I'm there, I won't take any notice of it - any of this stuff. I was still very much resistant to being a sort of disciple or acolyte or whatever. He wasn't a guru or anything, just a philosopher who had extremely good and very practical ideas. But I thought, well I'll go up there and stay in this place and see how everything is, and of course I went. I was writing away and thought I'd stayed away from all the lectures, and I had this mad dog, called Stella. And she kept running out and going into the lecture room, and then she'd sit at the feet of this man, and after about five times when I used to have go and get her, and all the students would laugh like anything, he sort of leaned down to me when I was pulling her out from under his legs and said, 'Don't you think your dog is trying to tell you something'. So I then threw myself into the whole thing, and really it was hugely difficult, but enormously rewarding, to have to work like that. I mean there were 120 people in that place. Twenty children and ... one of whom was mine, and my daughter by that time had got a scholarship to Millfield, so she was doing well. And my son went to the school there. And so for ... I lived there for a year, and in that time, he taught, and lots of people taught. He had lots of people in to teach and we did lots of movements and we did lots of practical work in the gardens, and we learnt how to make ... You were given decision exercises where you had to decide to do something off your own bat, something you'd never done before. I think mine was building a chicken house. Anyway, you had to go and find pieces and do it properly and all that changed my perspective about what people did in the world. They didn't just go to theatres and make up and go on the stage. They did a lot of other things that were in fact, very interesting. A lot of things I couldn't do. I mean there were people who taught you mechanical things, which sort of gave me a terrible headache. I couldn't cope with them. I'm not very mechanically minded. But I began to ... I mean I was a chief cook and you'd have to cook for 100 people. So you had to do it. You had helpers, and the next day you'd be a kitchen boy. So you always were doing something different.

What was the philosophy? How could you ... Is there some way you could describe the type of philosophy that he was teaching?

Well, it was, I suppose, the discipline of Sufism. But Sufism is a very peculiar philosophy in that it is itself in the time and the place in which it's ... in which it's appropriate. So it isn't as though it's a dogmatic anything. In fact it's quite the opposite. It's turning the world upside-down so that you do do an Edward de Bono, you do look at it in different ways. You don't just see things and say, 'Oh that's how it is'. You look at many different ... and you put yourself into that different perspective. And it sort of taught an enormous amount of self, of being able to in fact take on any job or any task without panicking and with a sort of clearer eye to what it was about, it is about. And it was a lot of meditational practices too, which were practical. Things with breathing. All the old, basic, esoteric ... if you'll forgive my using that very overworked and under-understood word. It was a basis in living really. And I was very interested in ... and of course living with that many people you become institutionalised. It took me a long time to do that, but I did. And then I took 14 people from the students who were nearly all Americans, or from somewhere else. I think there were a couple of Australians, some South Africans, some South Americans, Germans, Israelis, not very many English. The majority were Americans because this philosopher had been on a lecture tour in America. And we went ... and I'd bought a sort of farmhouse, a very rundown one, and we all went there and began to build it up, and reconditioned all the houses. But we were still very institutionalised in a way. We sort of had little bells going. [laughs] And when I think of it now, I resented it being institutionalised and it took me about a year to get out of being institutionalised. But in that time, I ... having to earn some money to keep this place up, I went and did a film, I did several films, I did Hitler, The Last 10 Days'. Can you imagine going from a school like that, into a bunker, which I was in with - Alec Guiness was in it - and quite a lot of people and I was playing this Nazi woman who was an aviatrix. So I suddenly went from this esoteric school into the bunker. And then I did a film in Scotland. Now, this writer of this film had come to visit me when all the people that I'd had there had gone and the place was virtually gutted, except for me and my son, who were sitting on a deck chair. And he came and had drinks with us, and asked me whether I'd do this film in Scotland. And that of course is my now husband, Antony Schaffer, who had written it. It was called The Wicker Man. And up I went to do that and that brought in a few bits of spangly money, which I ... We did things with, and I had a little herd of cows, Friesian cows, and I had pigs and I grew strawberries, and ... But I was sort of doing things in the theatre too. I directed a play at the East - Joan Littlewood's theatre. She was a great friend of mine.

Can I ask you, the group that you took off, after you'd finished this year at the official school, to set up your own thing, were they all like-minded people? In other words, was it a little bit like Blank House?

[laughs] Yes. They were all other students there. And some of them had kids. I had kids. And we were up in Wiltshire in this rather beautiful place. It only had ten acres. It was called Scott's Farm. Some people called it Rat Castle, because it had this very old house, walls were as thick as from you shoulder to the tips of your fingers. It was very old. And we reconverted this, made walls, did everything. And it was very good, with a work force like that you can get an awful lot done. And we had ... We converted barns into ... a barn into a meditation room, we had stables and we had beautiful courtyards, and we put up sort of greenhouses and all sorts of...

And you entrepreneured it, really, in the sense that you kind of gathered, you were the driving force?

Yes. And then I had this weird thing, I had a sort of a desire that came into me. I don't know how. I'd met ... I'd never seen whirling dervishes in my life. But I had this sort of dream and I wrote to a sheikh that I knew who'd been a teacher there at ... and a friend, called Bulentin Raaf, who was an extraordinary man. He again was a great big huge man, very ... and a philosopher, and an archaeologist. And I said, 'I would like to make this film'. I'd made a film with the BBC called One Pair of Eyes, for BBC 2. They'd done the thing on Scott's Farm, and I thought I'd have that director, who'd directed the One Pair of Eyes. So we had to do this huge thing of going to the embassy, and going to the embassy, and getting permissions to do this, because Turkey at that time was suffering from Midnight Express. Everybody had seen that film and was terrified. So it had no tourists hardly because everybody thought they were going to be put in gaol or rushed away to something - it was very frightening. But it wasn't. I went there and then this silly director from the BBC hadn't put his name down in the embassy, so suddenly I found myself with this crew of nine, and no director. He couldn't get into the country. So I had to do it. And I was taking in ... The whirling dervishes are extraordinary turners, you go to Qonya. They are a group of people called the Mevlevi, and they are outlawed in Turkey, but they're allowed to perform in the week of Rumi, Jalal al-Din Rumi's death day. So off I went to Qonya, and filmed solidly for a week. They all looked after me because of course I had that connection, because they're Sufis. And I was allowed to film the innermost and most extraordinary things, like their private parties. And I came back from there having seen a completely working philosophical, practical lifestyle, let's say, and I set to work to edit it - which took me forever. And then I got Bulentin. Bulentin and I both did the voice overs. And it was put on and won a couple of prizes. And was at the ... it was put on on BBC 2. I think Australia put it on too, and I think they bought a copy of it for their archives at the ABC. And it was really, I thought now, I know what I want to do: I want to direct films and be in that side of things. But I really, I suppose, as I always do, had too many fingers in too many pies. I had Scott's Farm there and I'd ... My dad got sick so I came back to Australia and I bought this piece of land here and I didn't know what to do with it, and so I really, by 1976, I had ... I decided to show this film and another film I made in Florence, at the New Age Conference, where I had Buckminster Fuller and all sorts of people in it, which was very fascinating. I decided to go on a lecture tour of Australia. And I'd use this place as a sort of, a school, and try to bring out these ideas from all that I had worked on. So I went on a lecture tour here.

Before we get to that, can I take a step back, because there are a few things I'd like to clear up about Sufism, and your relationship to it ... because you know, of the fact that most people aren't terribly clued about it. Could you tell me what ... tell me a little bit about Sufism, because all that I know about it, officially, is that it's -or that most people know about it - is that it is the mysticism, the form of mysticism that comes from Islam. So what I'd really like you to do is to just tell us very quickly and simply what Sufism is and how it relates to Islam, and how it relates to you and your thinking.

Well, if you are really truthful, yes, it is related to mystical Islam, except that Islam really is the most recent religion brought by a prophet, let's say. But there can be ... and the purists will perhaps argue, except that I can show you many books in which this is written ... you can have mystical Christianity, mystical Judaism, which is probably called the Kabbala, mystical anything. It really is the inner octave of man's journey. It's not the outer one, two, three, four, five, six going along like that. It is the discovery by - I suppose you could call it hermeneutics - your own observation of the way in which the world really is. Not what you are fed by spinners and doctors of various different professions, including the medical one, the whole of our ... This philosophy is really centred on your own journey, where you've got to be in that journey, because everyone is at different places in it, and how it can be, as it were, made for you to have the full flavour of life, rather than not see things. There are three journeys in Sufism. One is the first journey, which is where you don't know, you're totally bewildered and bemused. The next ... and then getting here to be where you are as a human being. The next journey is when you suddenly say, 'I've got to know things, I want to be educated'. And that doesn't mean ... although in my case it did mean going back to school for a time, but then the ball passes to you. The rest of your life is that. But then there's a sort of, a sort of separation, where you know that you're not your body. And you know ... Some people know it when they're four, some people don't ever know it, but you know that in fact there is ... there is the reality of you, the essential 'I', and then there's the other part which is the one that you want to show to the world, and you make it up and tizz it about. But interiorly you know who you are, or you start to learn who you are. And then, once you've made that separation and you believe that there is ... that in fact you are not the instigator of all your actions, then you hopefully make a place for other people to begin to be aware of that. Not that you're trying to really teach them anything because you can't teach people anything. They're going to go their own speed anyway, and they're going to go their own direction. But you just make things available so that people see things in a different way, or maybe not. And if they don't, then tonpu. What does it mean? It wasn't anything too drastic.

Where do the whirling dervishes fit in to Sufism?

Well, there was an incredible Persian poet, who came to Qonya, called Jalal ad-Din al-Rumi. And all Sufism mostly took ... most Sufi poets and most ... they're generally writers of beautiful poetry. Jalal al-Din Rumi came and lived in Qonya. [INTERRUPTION] Jalal al-Din Rumi was a wonderful and extraordinary poet, who instigated, through the loss of his great friend, Shams al-Din Tabriz ... And nobody quite knows what [happened to] Shams al-Din Tabriz. Some people think he was thrown down a well because Rumi's followers were envious of him. But he began to write, and he began - because these people were so phlegmatic - to teach them how to turn on their own spot. Now it's very difficult to explain this to you, but they called the place where they taught them the kitchen as the whole of this philosophy is based a lot on food: how wonderfully prepared it is and what an art it is, and also upon you being cooked: you are food as it were.

So what comes from the whirling? How does the whirling work?

Well the whirling is a meditation. There is the sheikh, who takes the position of the axis of the world. Then all ... there's a dance master who cunningly has white shoes on. The other ones used to whirl in bare feet, until 1957. But he has little white shoes on, and he put his foot out if they're to go that way. And if he doesn't show, they go that way. So they form a large circle with the sheikh sitting there. That's the sort of axis of the world. And he sits on a sheepskin. I don't know what the significance of that is exactly, but he does. And then they do what is called the Sema. And they whirl, and each one unfolds into a sort of sphere. The right hand is raised to receive Rachma, which is the blessing or the spirit of ... I don't know what you'd call it ... Prana or whatever they call it - I don't know. Anyway, then it passes through their heart and they look through the finger and the thumb of that hand and that attractors, let's call it. But that is how they whirl, and then they cross their heart at the end. And they're never, ever, ever giddy. It's the most amazing thing. But it takes a long time to learn. When I shot film on a guy doing it, I wanted to put him into a square to make a sort of circle within the square. So I went to a night club that had a square and put him in the middle and said, 'Turn', and he couldn't do it, because he had to go through the ritual beforehand. And then he could do it. I mean actually it's a very ... it's so beautifully crafted, the whole ceremony. It is only the Mevlevi that do it, although there are many other sects of Sufism, many, throughout the whole of Morocco, Ceylon, it goes right through to Damascus. And the teacher through whom I came was the teacher who is called the Sheikh, the Great Teacher. And when I was with Bulent, who was the person who did the film with me - he had a place in Turkey at a place called Bodrum, and we went down there, and all of us, the students around him, would translate the works of this man, the Great Teacher, and that's what his life work was. But it was done in the most peculiar way, because we all sat there very early in the morning with lots of black coffee, Turkish coffee, when our brains were supposed to be sharp, and we all wrote down what he said, and then we went away in the afternoon and obviously got our notes together. And the next day we came back and started the day's translation by trying to work it into a cohesive thing of what it was. And that was a very wonderful time, going down to Turkey to do that. I lived in a mandarin grove on the sea, and we all were down there. I mean when I do look back on my life, I do see that it is very bizarre. But all these things have happened and they have been part of my own journey, which I know is not ordinary, but to me it seems to have flowed along in a completely right way, a completely cohesive way. And this was part of that discovery of the whole of where you go next. And I didn't want to repeat myself with the theatre and ... although here I am in the theatre. But I didn't want to keep going and spending six days a week in the theatre and doing eight performances a week. I didn't really see that that was my future. But I am quite bold as far as trying things. So that's why, when I came here, I started this place as a model of that. And people did movements, and we did philosophy and we did practical work, and we build houses and we looked after animals, and we had our own bees and we had goats. And really it was an experiment to see if it all worked. And it did. What I think has happened in the world now is that people are so worried and pragmatic, they wouldn't think of taking a year off, or six months off, to do something like that at the moment. I don't see it. It changed. I was giving ten day courses after a while, but I knew that was just a sort of a little flash in the pan. It was much better if they came for ten months or a year. Because that way it becomes part of you. You live it. Otherwise it's like these very quick ... and I don't like to mention names, but all those very quick transformation courses that you do over a weekend. Many's the time I've had big arguments about that because I think it will last you for a little while, but then it goes away. Your understanding hasn't really entered into the fibre of your bones. It's there as a concept, but you haven't actually suffered with it. Does that make sense?

During the period that you were involved with Scott's Farm and that sort of work and making the documentaries, you were also continuing to some extent with your career as an actress, weren't you? What were you doing at that time?

Well that was the time I was doing ... well I did a couple of films, maybe three or four. And then I did ... Joan Littlewood asked me to go down and do The Streets Of London by Dion Busico in her wonderful place in the East End. So I did and I loved it. We had a very good cast, and then it transferred into the West End. It wasn't a success in the West End, because it didn't have all those wonderfully funny cockney kids in it, whom I couldn't take. They were sort of huge people. And also it was because really it wasn't quite ... I mean it's a melodrama, and it wasn't quite into the ... It was a musical too, but it had a huge success in the East End, which was lovely. So I was very, very busy all the time. And I was running back and forth to Australia.

Why was that?

Well, because I had ... By the time I'd sort of come here in 1975 to see my dad, and accepted to do Taming of the Shrew at the Royal Queensland Theatre Company, and come up here afterwards and then got this land. And then of course what happened in England was that Mrs. Thatcher came in and there were a huge amount of problems with money being able to be brought back and forth and people weren't allowed, and I was arrested for bringing money out of this country in Perth once. I mean it was nothing, it was just that I couldn't change my travellers' cheques in time - write them all out and do it, I was off on the plane. So, anyway, that happened, and then I had to make a choice as to whether I kept Scott's Farm or here, because I couldn't cope with the financial strain of trying to keep both of them going. And so what I did, I went back to Turkey actually with Bulent, to do another film, our sequel to this turning - two films in fact. And I had a whole crew there and I had a disaster because there was a revolution, and they dropped the camera, and I could not get another one into that country that I could use. So I had to go around doing all the places that I would have been on, but without the camera crew, and I had David Lezares - everyone was sitting in the bus and we couldn't shoot it. It was really desperate. So I thought I think this is trying to tell me something. So I ...

What did you think it was trying to tell you?

Get out of Europe. That's what I felt. I felt I had to, I felt that every time I tried to do something, some sort of hugely ... again, I suppose coincidental thing[s] happened that thwarted me. And I just felt that that was the choice I had to make. I'd choose here. Well after all I am from here: Queensland. And I came back here and began to throw all my energy into here.

Could you tell me about finding here, about what happened?

Well I was shooting a documentary here. And it was ... it was called Individuals, and my theme in it was that individuals went to the furthest away place to get to live in a very extraordinary place, and that they fetched up there, which is true actually. There are ... there were some absolutely extraordinary people living in Port Douglas at that time, one of whom was an actor in the play with me, who was also the chef of the Nautilus. He never wrote much, but he was the chef, and he had ... and so I picked three people. I picked a man called Arnie Peterson, who had made about 200 million pounds in the 1960s with Carmen Curlers - you know, those hot rollers that ... and he had got into terrible tax troubles all over the world and had ended up here, and had owned a vast sum of things. He's the person who tried to make oil palm plantations in the Daintree, and that's the ones that you see outside Port Douglas today. But I chose him and then I chose a wonderful little magician called Bamboozleron, who was eighty-two, who used to do a show every Saturday night in the Exchange Hotel in Port Douglas. And I got him to choose them out of the audience as his assistants. And then I told their lives as they did funny tricks. And then I'd freeze frame on them sort of holding a big ball up, or eating a piece of razor blade or being a thing... Anyway, that then hit the bottom of the harbour. It was being made by a filmmaker in Brisbane who ... And also, the whole thing happened with Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Arnie Peterson who ... that's the reason why that road went through. And I was on the opposite side and everything went into a great thing. The man who was his agent here actually said on film, 'Well you know, for six days we bought and on the seventh day we rested', and they bought the whole of the Daintree for a dollar an acre. So he then started selling that off at 25,000 every five acres, and that's how there's a lot of mess going on up there now because of all that. But he ... they withdrew the film, because it was very hot stuff by that time. And again, I'd been in this weird position of having made something that was a little bit too risky to show. So that's how I came up here, and being, as you well know ... as soon as you're looking at the land to film it: I looked at this land and I thought, I think this is the most extraordinary, pristine land I've ever seen in the world, and I've been to lots of places. So I thought, I think this might be where I have to be. And when I came up here it was raining like the clappers, and I was taken to this water hole which I have here, which the owner didn't know was there. And I just knew: I went and put a down payment on the land that day. Took me a while to pay it off, but I did. And I didn't quite know why, but I just had an immediate sort of knowledge that this was it, as a place, for me.

And so every time you tried to do a documentary film, and to work as a documentary film making, you were baulked, but in the process of doing that, you discovered other things.

Yes. And I mean, I would bite my nails with fury when these things happened. I mean, I can remember getting tremendously drunk on Turkish vodka, which can really do it to you. But I was at the same time extraordinarily angry that these things had just sort of phut away. I couldn't do what I was wanting to do. But I think all of that is there to sort of ... the thwarting that happens to you is there for a very special reason, especially if you're an impatient creature like me. I mean: born impatient.

When you bought this land, did you have, what was part of the attraction, the dream of what you were going to create here?

No. It wasn't, not really. It was just the sheer energy of the [place] and I mean configuration-wise, it fitted exactly. It has its own water. It has incredible energy, it's sort of lay lined up, it's fabulously potent, this piece of land. Even though it was a failed cane farm and had impacted soil and everything else, I knew it was, the way it is, the way you come to it: between two waterfalls, two rivers, passing through that meet at the bottom when you pass over a bridge to get here ... Everything about it felt exactly right for what ... I didn't really know what I was going to do. I don't think anybody ever does know exactly what they're going to do. But I knew that I would take the little tiny house and build great big verandahs around, which is the first thing we did, when we came here. And we - three of us - came here and worked and worked and worked to get those things done by the first course. People joined us, of course, and helped.

When did you work out that you were going to turn it into a - at that stage - a school?

I went and talked about my decision in London to Bulent and a few people, and I did have a sort of image of what ... that that was the model. Because at that time anyway, if you remember, there were many places where people wanted to get knowledge. Most of them fell apart, the communities that were made, because they didn't have any real knowledge behind them. They were very much into personalities. And that was really what I was trying to avoid. I was trying to go by the teaching as it were, rather than being the personality, but of course it always follows that people will follow a personality. And when I gave the lectures here in Australia, which I did in various capital cities and places, people came with me I think, perhaps at first because of [me] being a personality, but afterwards not - because they met something else. And the ones who did come just for personality probably left after a little while because the work was too hard, and they really weren't sitting in some hazy dream of smokos and sort of dropping out. They were having to work very hard, building houses and slashing and building gardens and all that. And it wasn't ... I mean the whole thing wasn't like a community where people just went and dropped, sort of flaked out.

Were people surprised to discover that you were there working like that: I mean the movie star, there slashing and building?

Oh yes. There were bets on me here that ... I mean I know someone who made a lot of money out of me. Because some people bet that I'd ... it was the six months and if I got ... and if I was here longer than six months then they had to pay the other people. And I knew ... That that was a big thing in the pubs here, I know. And don't forget it was very different from now. It wasn't a destination. It wasn't Port Douglas, destination of the Barrier Reef. It was nothing, nobody. I was the only person in this valley except a tin rocker up the road called Mr. Materlin. And there was nobody here. I did things all the time to earn money, like I did For The Term Of His Natural Life. I went to Adelaide and I talked about here to some people and when I came back they'd bought a piece of land up the road in this valley. But you see I think you can't go by anything about what people think personally, because there is always underlying that a big movement towards something. And at that time there was a movement towards really beginning to look deeper than ... and I think we've gone a long way in these last twenty, twenty-five, thirty ... I'm not talking personally, I'm talking about people have actually become much more sensitised to what is the underlying - the subtext or whatever you want to call it. We began to think of it as a cliché, but, you know, once it's your own vision, once it's your own vision, then it is different from other people's, it doesn't matter how much bidding goes on in the newspapers about it. Of course you always read things about yourself that ... I think the Murdoch press wrote that I'd started a nudist colony. And what can you say? Okay, sometimes we go into the rivers or the waterfall or the things without clothes on, but it's not a nudist colony. But nobody wants to know that. They only want to know what fits into their pigeon hole.

No, you said that there were three of you who worked to get it started. Who were the three?

One was a boy from Austria who'd come with me out on my lecture thing, called Michael Pohl, and one was a boy who had been in Taming Of The Shrew with me. And he was a dancer who'd come here.

And they were committed to the philosophy?

Yes. Well you see, it's hard to say words like that: committed to the philosophy. They loved what they were doing and felt very fulfilled by doing what they were doing, and we did have to work extraordinarily hard. Then I was joined by my niece, and then lots of people started coming, because energy attracts energy. And where there is a lot of energy flying around, as well as propagating it, it attracts it. That was ... It was a very hard time. I mean, when we came here that house was filled with bats. They all flew out. I thought wah! The night we got here, we got here at about nine, and they thought it was their house, not ours! And it was filled with frogs as well. I mean they used to sit on all these little windows. You'd wake up and there'd be hundreds of little frogs' bottoms above your head. And ... but once we got going, slowly it ... not slowly - it got going very fast. And ...

How did it work out financially?

Oh, that's always been the great bugbears, trying to shovel money together to keep it going. And I mean it doesn't ... We did grow all our own stuff and we did have all sorts of animals and bees and things. We were virtually self sufficient. We ground our own grain and made our own bread. And everyone learnt that as a thing, because making bread is a sort of seven stages exercise that sort of is part of ... it's almost a mirror of what you do when you go on your own journey. And you do have to face the fire at some time and go into the oven. But it has a catalyst too - that is what you put in to make the dough rise. And it's sort of an analogy. So that's why they learnt it too. Sounds a bit vague, but it isn't. It's practical, believe me: you get muscles doing it.

It sounds as if what you were creating here was not so much a school of philosophy but a whole experience for a total way of life.

Hmm, well that's what philosophy really is meant to be. So that you have ... I mean everybody, when they're doing anything, gets the idea first. They can't just start building a house without a plan. So philosophy really is the plan of what you want to live, isn't it, really? And if you have to live it ... and I don't think philosophy works unless you do live it, you've got to put it into practice.

So when did the idea of the theatre happen?

Ah, well. [laughs] By that time ... then I got married here. That's another jump, because Tony joined me here.

Okay, before we get to the theatre then, let's talk about that. Tell me about your third marriage.

Ah, well. Antony Shaffer is a twin, twin of Peter Shaffer, and both of them are frighteningly clever. I mean Tony wrote Sleuth, Peter wrote Amadeus, Equus, Royal Hunt Of The Sun. Peter's written ... I mean Tony's written <>Death On The Nile, Evil Under The Sun, Frenzy, all sorts of films with Hitchcock and other people, so they both have an incredibly vibrant twist of mind. They never bore you in an instant, either of them. And I was doing this picture called The Wicker Man, that Tony had written. And he and I and Edward Woodward used to go out and have a bit of a drink after the filming, and we ... I mean he seemed to me, Tony, to be one of the most depressed ... as far as his idea of the world went, so I thought, because he kept saying he'd never met anyone who could ever impart anything to him except rubbish. I mean he was very sort of ... I thought ... I said, 'Well I know someone who can give you a bit of lift about your life', so I introduced him to John Godolphin Bennett, whom he found absolutely rivetting and fascinating. And then he started coming to Scott's Farm all the time. And he started being there more and more, and then we sort of formed a relationship and then I thought, well I can't go on like this: he was married and everything, and when I came to Australia, I sort of said goodbye forever and all that. And then one day I was coming out of the theatre, it was boiling hot, it was a matinee, and I still had my makeup on [for] this Taming Of The Shrew, and this bizarre figure got out of a taxi with a full overcoat and a suitcase and a hat pulled down like that, and as I came down the stairs I thought ... We were all walking out and this voice came across and said, 'Not so fast'. [laughs] And there he was! He'd come all the way out there, and he, he was sort of determined to ... to, I guess, be here. And he did, he helped in the beginning, and did lots of things. And then he found himself to be rather ill. He had a tumour. And he went back to England and he came out here to ... and that was it. He was here and we got married here.

So he had a tumour on the brain?

Yeah.

And what happened with it?

It was operated on and it was completely cleared. But I suppose I thought after that, that as he had ... [laughs] I was casting, or trying to cast, Rudolph Valentino for a film then, another one that fell through. But he sent me from the hospital, a picture of himself with a completely shaven head with this awful scar, and about ... He weighed about sort of nothing. And he said, 'This is ... my name is so and so, Joe Bloggs. I'm going for the part of Valentino. Would you consider me?' And I mean, anybody that does that in the height of their awful illness has got to be a terrific person, verbally funny, and he really is, and he's got ... he's got just the sort of right temperament for me. Actually, if the truth be known, he doesn't take any nonsense from me either. So, we got married here. My mother was here, in a wheelchair, and all my family came up. My brother gave me away. I got married in the garden up there, under a Bauhinia tree, and a lot of butterflies came down, and a woman said to Tony, 'Did you have these butterflies trained for this?' He said, 'Of course, madam', and you know, pretended. So it was a very good time, and that's when this house was built. And that's when really ... as we were spending a lot of time here, I had built a stage - we had built a stage for people to do their movements and things on, and people started loving it so much. That's when Kristin Williamson and David came up here. And we just had planks out in front that people could watch from, but it was very nice, a sort of natural amphitheatre. So I thought that I would actually put in a ... People kept saying to me, 'Where can we get something to eat and something to drink? We can't come all the way out here and just sit and watch things and sit on the earth and not have anything', and I couldn't keep carting them off to different houses. So I thought this'll be for everyone, and I'll build a thing that would have a bar and a restaurant and everything else. So quite unadvisedly, because you're out in the middle of ... I mean it is ... it was a very ... it is a very potent idea. And I think it will catch up. I mean the public will catch up with this different view of entertainment and ecology and being in a place that is very special, rather than ... I mean the world is getting so small now. This place then did take off, and we do have a lot of people coming in here. It is a destination. So it wasn't such a silly idea. Although a lot of people would argue with that and say it was a very silly idea.

I expect the reason they'd argue with it is that it's so hard to get people to go to the theatre in areas of intense population, to do it here, where there aren't so many people, must make it difficult to fill the seats.

Well, sometimes it's not. I mean, if I have David Helfgott here it's bursting at the seams, and it is a wonderful experience that no one will ever forget. And everyone ... and the same thing with the laser show. There is a great difficulty in that everyone is fighting for their tourists here. I mean Port Douglas is, you know, 'Don't let the tourists out of here', you know. We've got to keep them here, because obviously that's money, and everybody is fighting for the dollar now. I mean it's become much more ... I think probably people are much more concentrated on trying to keep their money working for them and making ... there is so much more ability to have money working for you, because there's so much more information about how to do it. And I think people have also become fascinated by the Internet and other things, but they'll get back to real people in the end. It has never been that the theatre ... Okay, troughs and peaks: this is a trough. Finally people are, you know, sort of like really flesh and blood, and when there's one sitting in front of you, it's different from a shadow. Or a little tiny screen. Maybe we'll be able to move people three dimensionally into different spaces, but there's still the fascination of a flesh and blood person doing it for you.

Theatres require a lot of financial backing. How did you organise that?

[laughs] Well, actually the Queensland government gave me some. They gave me a hundred thousand dollars. And there was a huge amount put in by other people, like Peter Shaffer and Tony Shaffer and my mother. I'd been left some money. My mother had said to me ... That's actually the reason basically behind the whole thing, was that when my mum died she said (sic), 'I'm ...' and she did have everything sorted out, even with all those children and grandchildren and everything, that we were all left a certain amount of money. She said, 'Don't buy a car dear, or something like that. Do something with it that's worthwhile'. So that was the first money that went into it. And then it's been a sort of [laughs] gaping mouth ever since. But I mean the last two years it's sort of paid for itself, but that was with a huge effort and a great deal of work by very few people: volunteers, people that helped me. There are people who've become besotted by making something like this work. I'm sort of one of them but there are others. And people do volunteer and love being here. And I think really ... I mean, one can be a dreamer and an idiot, and I don't think that I care about whether people think I'm that.

When you look back through your life, and all the different enterprises that you've been involved in, what part of your personality do you think is involved in that desire to gather together a small group of people to do something different?

Oh, look, I've never thought of it like that, but you may be right. Um, I suppose it could be that that's what my childhood was like, with my mother and father and all those children. I mean my mother had all sorts of children living with us as well as her children, and helped them, and gave them lots of stuff. And I suppose it's ... I don't know. I really never actually examined it properly. I don't really feel that I need people round me. I'm perfectly happy by myself and I look forward to a time when I don't have to do all this. I wonder if I will have withdrawal symptoms. I don't know. But I have lots of other things I love doing. I mean I like writing and I like painting. And I never feel lonely. And I have all sorts of dogs that won't leave me alone, and sit on me and I don't really feel lonely ever. So I don't think it's to do with me wanting people around me. I know it's not that. I don't know.

You have a strong idea here of hospitality. Where does...

... that comes from everything, I suppose: from my family, and also that's part of the whole tradition of what I have, of my philosophical tradition, that everybody should have the best you can give, as well as you can make it, because after all, that's right, isn't it? I mean if you start being mingy (sic) about people who are sitting at the same table as you, you'd be a pretty paltry, little person. I don't think that's ... It's silly. I mean if it's there - it's better, it's nice. Why not?

Nature has always been very important in your life, hasn't it? When did that begin, and how did it all develop do you think?

I think really it began when I was a child at the beach, where I just felt as though I was part of it and I was in it all day. And I never felt frightened, or I never felt out of place in it, and I always sort of really loved it, even sort of dead leaves and things, I thought were great. And I still do, strangely enough. It gives me a huge sort of joy to be ... I don't like being in cities in that way all the time because of that thing. Because you can virtually hear the trees going argh because they're so overworked. And you can always see with trees and ... I love growing fruit too ... when it's been overstressed by human participation in its bringing about what it's doing. I think, I think nature has put up with a lot from us. We're pretty bad at it.

And yet you went away and were involved in what you could call an intensely urban life, where you were at the theatre and involved in the film industry. What did that do for you? I mean how did you deal with the fact that you were actually, you know, something of a nature child?

Well, when I first went to New York, you know, I did actually, for three weeks, I wouldn't go outside, because I was totally overpowered by this huge black thing, and it was cold, and I thought, why did they put this here. They must be mad. People's hands are sort of freezing and I'm ... and it's all dirty and hideous and everybody's so bad tempered. And then once I'd got my ... They sort of sent me to the shops to go and walk around a bit, because I was really terrified and I felt nothing but fear for the physicality of New York when I first went there. Then I really ... I moved around and said, yes, this is pretty exciting. But it did take that long to adjust to just that thing of never walking on anything, unless you consciously made an effort to walk on dirt, you were actually walking on concrete all the time. And I did have ... I used to cry a bit sometimes. I mean even in London and everything when I was a student because I really did miss seeing the sea and being outside, and you know, London does close in for the winter, with the skies there, and it never seems to come up and open up for you. So yes, I have always felt the ... missing nature if I'm not in it.

And how has that affected key decisions in your life? Have you made decisions because of this 'missing nature'?

I'm sure one has sort of unconsciously, that's been a factor in making decisions about where I went. But I also, you know, I mean everybody can be also overcome by that terrific excitement that there is in the city when you're going round to hundreds of places. You don't think of anything else. So I suppose really I've had a pretty good balance of both. But I'm now a bit addicted to this. After two weeks in the city I think it smells pretty funny and there's nothing really to do: you can't walk outside and pick a lemon or, you know, sort of get a few herbs, you have to go to a shop and get them. How ... what an imposition, you know. You get spoilt: you're just spoilt by the ability to have so much around you that's growing and useful and nice and part of your food.

When you were away from Queensland, did you miss the particular environment of Queensland?

Definitely. Especially when I went to London, which does ... I suppose it's about as opposite as you can get. I think really you miss the sky, and you miss an open sea and you miss blueness. And ... Although funnily enough when I first went to England, all those little green, green paddocks with little jumping lambs and things, I thought, this is ridiculous, this place is ridiculous. I didn't actually love it. I don't like that green colour as much as our green colour, which is much more grey. [PHONE]

Is there any particular environment that you feel more akin to than any other? Any part of nature that you feel you belong?

Yes, the rain forest. I love its excessiveness and I feel very safe in it. Also, you can't stop looking at it. It never is not having enormous amount of hidden treasures inside it: looking at it. It's got ... The rain forest is extraordinary, especially this rain forest, an antique rain forest, which is obviously the little bit left that Australia used to be when it was Gondwanaland. There's about ... I think one percent or two percent, and that, I think, is even being eroded by cane farms and things. But happily enough, this is that part of that little bit that's left. It's odd, because it clearly needs exactly the right configuration of mountains, sea, rainfall: everything has to be just right to grow it like that. And perhaps, as you've probably seen in different parts of Australia, there are little pockets of this magic place in Victoria and Tasmania, where the rain forest has been left in tact. And when you get there you know you're there. And that's what I like the best. And I like water holes. And waterfalls. That's it. Oh, and beaches. But I do like the tropics better than the cold. I've never felt akin to places with snow or huge mountainous snow, avalanchy-type places. That's not my ... I've never been to them much.

Was it hard for you that you lived at a time when in order to be a success as an actress you had to be an ex-patriot?

Yes. But you know, the thought never came into your head really that you could follow your profession here. Not really. It was always ... as it still is in a funny way a bit ... that you have to be recognised in America or England before you're recognisable as an actor, actress or whatever you want to call it. And I think really, that is ghastly, and I do think it will change. I think it is changing, but I think: yes, it's still there. I don't think in Australia, the acting profession is taken as a serious profession really. It's sort of like the hobby profession for most people, and especially in a place like this, you notice the amateur actors - their friends come and tell me, 'You're wonderful, darling'. And of course they really think that they've cracked it, that that's what it is. Little do they know that acting is such an incredibly hugely ... a skill which you have to go from go to woe. It is a very hard discipline. It has nothing to do with making up your own words and your friends coming backstage and telling you you were great. It's actually a very lonely process. Although rehearsal is the best of time of acting. It's a discovery that is actually really probably lying in bed or sitting on the loo that you find: argh and you know. And then when you put it into practice it works. That's a great feeling for acting. I love it.

What is it that you know?

You suddenly get hold of the sort of entrails of that person, and you absorb the possibility of being able to completely create that creature, whoever they are. Sometimes you can get bored with them and think, oh, do I have to go and be that person again, what a drag. And I did get like that after a while. Sometimes I really didn't like the people I was playing at all.

What part do you remember that particularly made you feel that way?

Well I did a play - I just was thinking about a part - I did a play called The Big Knife, and I was playing a sort of Hollywood starlet who was completely vapid and a dizzy bimbo type, and she was so stupid, and wasn't funny stupid like sort of you know Billie Holiday day was - and then a Judy Holiday type of part. It was a sort of silly, sad creature, and I used to get angry with her. [laughs] But once when I was playing her I ... because she was supposed to be a bit drunk, I did get a bit drunk playing it. To try it. It was only on the matinee, but my God, I never did it again because I was so out of control. Of course I thought I was wonderful in it, and the guy who was playing opposite me - who happened to be Sam Wanamaker - came and said, 'You're flying, what are you doing? You must be out of your mind. You can't play a part drunk', so I just ... I stopped doing it then. But it was really because I wanted to feel how it would feel to be her in that way, not knowing what I was doing. And I didn't.

You were an astonishingly successful actor. I mean you went and you very, very quickly started winning awards for acting. You were very good actor, not just a film star, as they say, a really good serious actor. Where do you think that came from?

Well, I do think if I look at this, that I listened to the story telling and I never felt ... because my dad used to imitate everybody doing it ... I never felt out of place by pretending to be someone else, if you know what I mean. I think often people get embarrassed if they are sort of telling a story and they have to be someone else, you know. And I think that was the beginning of not feeling - there's a ... because acting is really make pretending real. It's a baby thing and you can do it - it's quite childish. And that's why, you know, I've had Aborigine kids here who've been acting and they can do it so incredibly well. But acting is more than that in that you have to remember what you did and be able to reproduce it. And that's where professionalism and amateurism part ways. Because nobody who ... Some people can absolutely do incredible things just off the top of their head, and then you say, 'Ah, that was it, do it like that', and they say, 'What did I do?' And then you've lost it because they then become very self conscious about being good at that bit, and then they're dreadful. And that really is what you have to learn as an actor: to reproduce the improvisational spontaneity, but do it every time. Of course every performance is different. It's different.

For you as an individual, what appealed to you most about acting?

Well, that's very hard to say, because I don't know. It's like anything that you're constrained to do. I mean if I suddenly decided that I would be do anything to be able to cook like Bocuse or somebody, you know, that I would take the trouble to strain every little thing and do extraordinary ... I don't know all the sort of things - the blanching and fiddling about with food. I don't cook like that, I prefer to cook very quickly and simply. But there comes a point in acting when you will do anything to get it right, and that I think is the joy about anything. I mean if you are a painter or a wood carver or a flautist you suddenly become obsessed by getting the thing right and being perfect, or being as near perfect as people could get, or getting as near to it as you can. And you become obsessed with the skill of it. Just like any profession, or creative profession I'd say.

Any art?

Any art. You become fixated by the possibility of being able to do it well. And also it gives you a big charge too. It's also ghastly. I mean everyone knows that every actor makes a complete arsehole of themselves by getting on the stage. But you have to overcome that and get into another dimension, when the audience forgets about that. But lots of people, really like to be somebody else, and I think that was a necessity for me too at that time in my life.

You left your career as an actor really when you were still in full flight with it, weren't you? There were still lots of possibilities for you?

Oh yes.

Why?

Well, I think I sort of OD'd on going to the theatre for six days a week and performing eight times, and I think I also didn't need it any more. I think I had arrived. You see, I mean looking at this in retrospect, I think when you are down the family line and all the others are doing this, you sort of have to prove yourself in a way that makes your life sort of have meaning from a skill point of view. If your family is full of people who are skilful at various different things, and you want to have approval. I think that's part of it too. I think actors need approval. At least all the actors I've ever met.

And what got you to the point where you didn't need that any more?

I think because I had arrived at a place where I was more sure of who I was, and I didn't need to be told that it was okay to be like me. Because, you know, one always feels as though one's a bit of a freak. I mean I think I probably am, but anyway. But I mean we all do, because we live inside our skins and we can't really see what other people think of us and we think: if they behave in a funny way towards us it must be something we're doing wrong or peculiarly. So we spend a lot of time worrying about ourselves. And I think what happened was, I changed my point of reference. I stopped being - looking at out of the old bigger persona maniac's eyes and starting looking ... I changed my balance. And I think that I started looking out at things in the world in a different way, which I think was much more less like an actor and more like a person with more horizon. Because actors have to have tunnel vision a bit, because they have to play their own part. They're not playing anyone else's, whereas a director has to see the thing as a whole, and I became much more interested in seeing the plays or the construction of things as a whole.

You did move into directing and you directed both for the stage and also with documentary film making. How did you find directing, and what do you think it was in you that was drawn to doing that?

Well I sort of fell into it by mistake, and had to pick it up very quickly. But luckily when I did that, I'd already been to that school, which had sort of given one the confidence to tackle anything if one had to: a necessity. And so I found it very interesting, in that ... Documentaries I found very interesting in that I never ... and I don't think documentary people do know exactly what they're going to see. They may have reccied it about twenty-eight times, but they still don't know what they're going to get on film. So what I found terrific was I ... If you have a good cameraman - when you have a good cameraman, what happens is that you're pretty sure of getting some interesting looking shots. The joy of it for me was going into the editing room and fiddling around and putting all those things together, like a sort of jigsaw puzzle. That was joyous, and I think putting music to it and making the whole thing come together, I think is a very wonderful experience. It's different from acting, because there it is in front of you. You've got it there, you can see it again, and you can also say, 'God, I shouldn't have done that', but at the same time you can say, 'That's a whole piece of work from the beginning to the end, and I've somehow done the best I could with it'. And it's all of a piece, and that's what I think is the joy of film making, especially documentary - even though you haven't got control over your material exactly like a film director, like Hitchcock or someone, who knew every ... done his story board and every single shot was sort of worked out - sometimes by his wife. But they thought very alike. So in some ways, documentary making - I like the hazard of it. And I love hazard. I think hazard is an ingredient if we didn't have, nothing could happen.

So you're a great risk taker?

How did you guess? [laughs] No, I think ... I don't like that term 'calculated risk', because it's a tautology really. I think risk is part of being alive and I think if you don't take risks, I think you sink into a sort of crystallised, cemented state, and you may look wonderful or be wonderful, but at the same time you can't move out of that, and I think that's the beginning of death, in the least good sense of the word.

One of the things that affected your early career as an actor, was the fact that you - the way you looked. That you were at a time when physical beauty was absolutely crucial for a young actor, a young female actor, to get an opportunity. You had what it took. How did you feel about that and what was your ... Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of your relationship with your body and your appearance?

Well, actually I'd slightly disagree with you, especially in England, where I think actresses need to be a bit ugly in a way, because they're not taken seriously unless they're slightly sort of quirky looking. I mean I'm not going to name names, but there are a lot of people who are what you call jolie maid. But the thing is that I think it's a double edged knife. One, I can ... you can see that people get very nervous and twitchy about you if you don't fit into a sort of pigeonhole, and my problem I suppose was that I was too ... as soon as you go into a studio, and I had signed a contract with British Lion, they start fiddling around with you. They fiddle around with your hair, they fiddle around with everything. They change your ... sort of put funny huge ... change everything: huge eyelashes, and this and that, and you look at yourself and you think, who is that? And they've turned you into a sort of bimbo mostly. Because that's what they feel comfortable with - with a blonde person of a certain age. They like that, because then they don't have to worry about you. If you sort of have a few things to say off your own bat - you're not supposed to be like that at all, you're supposed ... It's the sort of Marilyn Monroe syndrome, isn't it? I mean, if poor old Marilyn probably had come out with the exactly what she thought, which sometimes she did, I mean she couldn't have been considered by the majority of men in the world, in that position, the sort of total sex object. So it's a bit of a straddling of two worlds. Who am I? I used to put on wigs a lot: black ones, which I did in Tom Jones, or red ones. I went red for Hombre, anything to sort of try and get away from the sort of starlet look. And there was a starlet look where you had your hair blonde and you fiddled around with it. Everyone ... they tried to make everyone look exactly the same. There was A Look. And it didn't matter how you resisted it, as soon as you sit in the make up chair they're at you. You can't do anything, [or say] 'Get off', you know. But I think as soon as you start acting on stage, no one can fiddle with you. You see, you do your own makeup and at the Royal Court of course, and with Tom Jones and things like that, I did my own make up. Whereas in most films everybody's [got] two or three make up people patting you down and fiddling around with your hair and twidging and tweaking you. And after a while too, that gets incredibly irritating.

In your life in general, do you think it's been an advantage or a disadvantage to you that you are physically beautiful, or conform to an idea of beauty that's the standard idea of what beautiful is in the western world?

Yes, I think really, especially when you're young, you don't realise how many things are sort of allowed you because you are attractive physically. And then when you're not so attractive physically, it all slightly changes. And you think, what happened? You realise what happened, you got older. I don't mind getting older at all in a way, because I feel sort of as though I'm free of that saddle that one was wearing about people's ... It's people's image of you that you're not really like, that is the problem. I think really ... I think freedom, I think Franz Kafka who said that freedom was the word that had misled man and woman more than any other word. I think freedom is an inner state. I don't think ... I think you can be very free in gaol even, but I think you've got to feel well-being and a feeling that you're not attached to anything so much that you suffer terribly if it's gone. And I'm talking about beauty or whatever: youth. I think you can't ... I mean why? The wrenching and horror of that in most people's life is just sort of, I find, something they don't need. They should get away from it, because it is such an awful thing. It can confine them and make them not free. They're caged by the feeling that they have to apologise for being old, or apologise for being ugly, or not so beautiful, or whatever it is. I think really we are in a very odd society, which doesn't respect anything over forty years old, or just about. And I think this is a very odd. It's never been like that in society, ever before. I mean in other countries age is respected in a different way, knowledge is respected in a different way. Here it's sort of ... What I don't like is when people shout at old people, as though they're all deaf. [VERY LOUDLY] 'How are you dear? Are you all right?' It's just really ... I've always felt embarrassed by that thing of ... I mean some people love it. And I think a lot of old people play old, because that's the way they're supposed to be. You always play the role that's required of you, you know.

Are you worried at all yourself about age? Is there any aspect of it that bothers you, apart from the way you'll be treated?

Well, I don't want to get gaga and sort of Alzheimic and lose my brain. But then if I was I'd probably be jolly happy, like a sort of little vegetable: ho, ho, ho. But I don't think I'd like that. And I don't want to cause anyone ... I think this is one of the big problems too. I don't want to have to cause people a lot of problem[s] of having to look after me if I was completely incapacitated. But everyone knows that incapacitation is one of the most powerful situations in the world. Everyone has to sort of ... I don't want that either. So I suppose we're all in for it. It doesn't matter who we are. Unless we get dead early. We've all got to go through that thing of having to cope with the fact that we are incapacitated and getting more incapacitated as we get older.

Does death hold any fears for you?

No. I actually I heard the Dalai Lama the other day say, 'What a very interesting adventure. It'll be such a good adventure dear'. But I mean I don't quite see it that way, but I do think ... I do not think that I ... unless ... I wouldn't like to have a very painful death, but I don't think anyone would. I mean, I just wouldn't like to be in that situation of ... and I think everyone feels like that. I don't think there's any one of us that would say, 'Oh yes, I want to go through a long drawn out suffering'. No, I think it's a very interesting thing that we are becoming much more energised for much more of our lives, and I think that's ... I mean I think our lives are divided into three things anyway. We do honestly have a time when we really don't know what's happening, and we're all ... [GESTURES INCOHERENCE], then we do have a voyage of discovery. And then I think the interesting part, which I think I'm in now, is a sort of consolidation of being able to somehow be much more creative as far as innovating things and bringing things out, and sort of living your own vision. Because it's there, it's come into focus much more.

What has writing meant to you? At various points in your life you've turned to writing, did this start when you were younger, or what's the history of your turning to writing in your life?

I think at a certain point everybody tries to somehow put their thoughts or experiences into some sort of cohesive form, which writing is, or talking is, I suppose too: sentences, making thoughts have a beginning, a middle and an end. And I think ... well I think really it was because I was trying at first not to ... well I was trying to not to do acting, to stay at home more and be there. And also I love reading books. So I was very inspired by lots of writers, and I knew lots of writers. And somehow I really wanted, in a way, to let experiences that I'd had be put down in words. I don't know. I mean, I went to the Mexican Film Festival with John Osborne and Tony Richardson and Gillian, the critic who was married to John Osborne - or not married to him then, but she did finally get married to him. And I ... It was such an intense and funny time that I wanted to record it somehow. I didn't want to call them their names, because I was writing some pretty rabid stuff, but I just really wanted to remember it as a sort of experience that was very like a little universe in itself: just going to a film festival, twenty-four hours of that. And I thought it was a nice idea to do. So I started out doing it sort of like a little exercise, but then I became, as I generally do, totally fixated by finishing it and getting it readable. And then I gave it to Hodder & Stoughton, forty pages, and they said, 'Oh yes, yes, we'll give you some money for this. Finish it by such and such date', and I was caught. I had to finish it by that date and so of course there was a lot of scrambling at the end. And I suppose it's a slightly shorter book than it would have been if I'd been [not] concentrating entirely on finishing it on that day. But it did set me off, and I really liked it. Of course writing is also very difficult if you get stuck with a page, a white page, and you've absolutely no inspiration. It's a very tough profession. You don't have the director there to say, 'Come along now, let's get on, we're going to rehearse now'. No. You have to be a self starter to be a writer.

And that first book was The Manipulator.

Yeah.

And then the next one was The Hybrid. How did that get written?

Well I felt in The Manipulator I had been a manipulative myself, so I wanted to try and write something about what I felt was sort of allegorical, because it's about a person who is a hybrid. I mean they're half black and half white. And what do you do? It's becoming a much more ... a question that people are asking now. You have to acknowledge both sides or else you're sort of cut from part of your own genetic heritage. So in some ways I suppose there are many more hybrids than there were, but this was about a guy who wanted to be both things very much. And I have met people like that now: real hybrids, who actually do ... I made it a blue-eyed person who was a Negro - half - and half sort of white person, with blue eyes and black skin. So it was an allegory in a way, and yet I made ... tried to make the people very real. And also I suppose it was a thing about fame. And about corruption. And pollution of a place. Because it's very like what's happening in various different resort places in Australia and all over the world, where people come in and the thing of making money means that the place becomes a sort of interchangeable resort slum on the sea. And that's what this guy, coming from an island in the West Indies - that's where I set it - goes back and see it's going to happen, and gets muddled up in ... and then gets killed, because he's so against this sort of ... this imposition on nature that we keep on doing. I don't know why we do it, but we do try to make resorts look exactly the same, especially in the tropics, wherever you go: they're drop in, drop out, you know, Hawaii, or ... And that's what's sort of happening in Port Douglas, and I don't know how anybody can change it. It's a view of making everything acceptable to the tourists, which I don't know whether it really is. I think the tourists now wants something a bit different from cement and swimming pools and lying around on lilos and I think people want to do something different. And I think they want to live in something different. But that's how it is at the moment.

What did the critics think of your novels?

Oh, I got very, very good reviews. And they both went into paperback and translated into other things, other languages and things.

But you did stop writing them.

Yeah, I did.

Why?

Well, I really began to ... That was just when I sort of thought I didn't know anything. I realised from ... I mean okay, the first flush of bumping into writing and everything. And then I knew that I was totally stupid. I mean I really felt that I was uneducated. It showed me that I was very uneducated. I mean I was trying very hard to be ... I'd never really had ... I mean obviously academics go through university and a lot of people in this day and age believe that if you didn't go to a university you must be pretty thick. And I think to a certain extent that is, was, true of me, that I didn't know anything about ... that's why I went back to that school and tried to sort of formulate my ideas a bit, and be able to think properly.

You'd hated school. You'd been the terror of the boarding school, and then later, not only did you take yourself back to school, but you became a teacher.

[laughs] Oh, god, yes.

Now, how did, how do you see all of that in retrospect?

Well, actually I don't think it's such a strange thing at all. I think really ... I mean I don't think of myself as a teacher, believe me, I just happened to be ... have accumulated enough bits and pieces of knowledge to sort of ... and be old enough to pretend that I didn't sort of impart anything to anyone. I don't really think people can teach. They've just got to let the person who wants to learn something be able to be in the way of having that possibility. That's what I really think. I don't ... I think teachers are also ... have been through the thing of not wanting to ... The teachers, who are worth their salt, know what it's like to be so bored as a student that you can hardly ... that your eyes cross with ... you know. And I think also [with] teaching you've got to acknowledge that people want to dream. They don't want to have to do things like you tell them ... that you're laying it on the line. I think they [the students] have to be given a time to absorb in a different way. And they've got to have enough energy to have enough [energy] to stop just thinking about where they're getting their next meal and who they're going to have next, or who they're going to fall in love with, or whether their dog's got fleas or whether there are cockroaches on their walls, or whatever. They've just got to have enough space in their head for something else to go in. Because mostly our heads are sort of chocka with rubbish, and we've got to sometimes get rid of it.

Why do you think you were so resistant to learning and to school when you were a kid?

That's a question. Perversity, bloody-mindedness. I think I was born with a peculiar inability to cope with authority. I do honestly think it's ... [laughs] It was born with me. I must have been ... I do think that both sides of my family have been rebels. And I think it might be genetic. I hope it was. I wasn't [sic] just sheer recalcitrance and ... I think it probably was.

You seem always to have hated though, in any way, to be pinned down.

I recognise that. And I do think that I have this. Yes. I know that when I was little I used never to stop running away from people, and running away. And everybody used to think it was sort of funny. But, I think there is something in ... I mean there are ... It's like many people you meet: there are some people who really want to be touchy feelie all over, and there are some people who aren't, and they're rather ... They don't want to be sort of completely overcome by that all the time, and I'm that sort of person, really, I think.

So you've had a history where you didn't want people to pin you down and you didn't want situations, or even a particular profession, to pin you down?

I think, as I said, I think I've got a very low boredom threshold and I think also, I want to sort of spraunce [sic] it up all the time, so that everything is always pretty exciting, rather than slipping into a sort of miasma of dullness. And I think that comes from my sort of nature. I don't think ... I do think it's there and I can't get top side of it much. Peace is evidently a situation of never ... of having no lacks, lacking nothing, and I suppose I always wanted things to be sort of exciting. So I lacked excitement, especially in the idea of schools or being ... I mean I used to have physical things about my teachers sort of - like I couldn't bear listening to them any more, you know. Awful, isn't it, but there is was. I'm sure people have bouts of this too.

And there was no alternative but to get the hell out?

Mm.

And that came up later too, with some of your relationships.

Yes. Definitely. I think though, I've sort of got a bit wiser in that way now, but you can ... Instead of not putting up with anything that doesn't please you or something, I think I'm much more able to handle the thing of ... If something gets on my wick a bit, I sort of say, 'Oh well, you know, okay. That's how it is', and I can surmount those little anthills.

You've had three marriages, and your present marriage seems very happy.

It is, sometimes because we're living in different continents. [laughs] But we do talk all the time and see each other very often, and when we do it's terrific. Because actually, that I think, if I follow that line through it's because my present husband Antony Schaffer never, ever, ever bores me. He always proposes, or I propose to him. We always have a very fascinating time, whatever we do. And I think that's a huge thing in amusement value, and laughing a lot, and being able to do things that are different, and lead you to weird places and things and people and ... I mean after all life is a great big game really. It's here to have to fun in it. It's your oyster. You don't have to go through all that sort of awfulness, unless you really want to. [But] maybe you need to if you want to.

People find relationships and managing love and marriage and those sorts of relationships, really often very difficult in their life. From your own experience of three very different marriages, what did you learn from those three, do you feel? How did you progress on a journey there about understanding that kind of relationship?

Well, I think when ... Each relationship that I've had has been at a very different stage in my evolvement or the evolvement of the people I was married to. Obviously, when you get married very young, when you don't know anything, you are going to make every single cliched mistake that is written in a million books about guidance to marriage. You don't know anything about it, and you don't ... Nobody can tell you anyway. I think then ... You see, I think my marriage to Sean was very much a problem: my profession and his profession together. [But] I think really, if it hadn't been there, one would have been very much less rich experienced in one's life. It was a very interesting and extraordinary part of one's life, [during] the years that are said to be the most potent of one's life. But then I don't say they are, because I think after you get a bit on in life ... Other people may not think that, and they may feel sorry for you, but you're not [sorry]. You have a much more extraordinary time because you are able to look at things with a little more objectivity and a little less dottiness. And I think that's really what's happened in my life. I hope it's what's happened in my life. I mean, certainly at the beginning of my relationship with my now husband, [we] had a lot of ups and downs, and things like: 'Oh no!' And, 'Go away' and 'I don't want to ever see you again', and 'This is over', and all that. But I think that happens in any relationship anyway.

The other major personal relationships that people have in their lives are often to do with their children. And you actually had a mother who was an expert on motherhood.

[laughs]

What kind of a mother was she?

Well I think she probably was an expert on motherhood for other people's children, more than her own. I think she was a terrific mother in a way, because she left us alone. I think that sort of ... I think over protectiveness in parents sometimes can cause a huge amount of adjustment that doesn't work after. And she really sort of was a very light touch as far as we went. And I've tried to do that with my children too, in that I try not to interfere in their lives, but I do try to sort of be there if they want to call me or do, say anything. And I've always tried to make them self sufficient and I've always encouraged them to sort of look after me really. [laughs] I don't mean in my old age, I mean I've tried to make the relationship not one of me being the total protector, but that they can feel as though they are responsible for me and them, and I'm responsible for them and me too. And so it's a sort of reciprocal maintenance rather than, 'I am your mother dear, you must behave as I say and do as I say and this is what you must do'. I've always thought that heavy handed attitude that happens ... I mean how many plays have we had written about it? Drillions [sic]. And finally I don't really recognise the situation because I never had it. I can't imagine anyone doing that to me. I'm not the boss of you. I mean, you're not the boss of me. That's the oldest Australian statement that my brother said, that I had said to him, as I threw an inkwell at him: 'You're not the boss of me'. So I think I probably ... and there's another saying ... I think I probably always not wanted someone to be the boss of me. And I think there is another statement, that I think you learn, which is that love is bondage willingly accepted by the free. And I don't mean bondage in a rather crude way, I mean bondage in that you are joined. And I think if you learn that, I think you've actually made it. And that's what I'm trying for now.

You really can't stand not being free.

No. No, that's right. I can't.

What do you think freedom is?

I think it's the inner state of being able to follow exactly what you intuit. I don't mean that ... It's not inner considering when you say, 'What's the best thing for me now?' I don't think it's like that. I think it's a state of being able to follow what comes towards you and you go towards, without any consideration of that it might be bad for you, or that you're not ... or you might lose out by it, or you might get killed by it. I think that's a ... I do honestly think I'd ... I would put my body on the line for it. Because it's very ... I think it is your life. I think if you worry about the next thing that's going to happen to you, that's when I think you get unfree, because you are always stuck between thinking: but if I do that, this might happen. Cause and effect of what might be, if that peculiar little word ... And you can drown in it.

Were your parents religious? Were you brought up religious?

Well they were of mixed religions, but I don't think ... And I think that was a problem. My father's family obviously had been Catholic, or were. But my father was not, didn't ... although I have a sister who was virtually a nun and is very religious. And my mother's family was very Church of England or Anglican, whatever you want to call it. So, I think with the two backgrounds, they chose not to centre on religion [with] their children. And I think it was quite a right thing. Also I feel that because both my parents worked from the moment ... well before I was born, I think we sort of skipped a generation, you know, that people ... Both parents work now in children's lives and it never phased me that they both worked. And I don't think they had very much time for ... certainly [not] for dogmatic religion.

What happened at school over that? What contact did you have as a child with religious ideas?

Well I think I was sent first ... I think I, I think I went one or two days to some sort of Catholic kindergarten or something and came and told my father that they'd said if I did something I'd go to hell. I think that's when I didn't go there any more. And I did ... I didn't really take much notice of it. I'll tell what we used to do when I was a boarding school. We used to play cricket in church. Now this a game that anyone who goes to church sermons can play. And it is that every time he says, 'And I say to you ...' that's a run. But if he says, 'But ...' you're out. So we used to sit there, and nobody could understand why we were listening so adamantly, and there'd be little gasps every time an 'And' was [mentioned] and if a 'But', you know. I think the actual priest must have felt very strange with all there girls listening intently and making funny noises when he said, 'But ...'.

I don't have to ask who made up that game.

[laughs] It was quite a good game. I think I got up to twenty-six once, runs.

And then of course much later you discovered your own way of looking at spiritual matters, I suppose you could put it. Is that how you'd put it? I mean, how would you describe yourself now? Would you say ...

Well, yes, I do have a very ... The spiritual side of my life and I hate ... that word is so horrifyingly used these days, but I do have what I believe is reality. I think the rest of it is sort of wonderfully illusioned. But I think if you ... If you look at the world as it really is, then I think that is a very, very spiritual experience. Because you see it has so many different layers in which we live. But we really don't want ... We want to blinkered, we don't want to look very hard at anything that's too unable to be coped with because it causes us to have to change our lifestyles. And that's what I've done, I'm trying to live what the ... I believe, is reality for people, for human beings.

Could you give me an example of something that you can look at superficially and conventionally, and that there's another way of looking at, to give an idea of the sort of looking that you're trying to do.

Ah, that's a difficult question. Let me think. I think really I can only answer that from the point of view of saying that when I gave courses here, people would come on a ten days' try out, to see if they really wanted to do it. I mean you can't say to someone, 'Look, you want to stand back and look at your life for six or eight or even ten months. You don't want to have to do that because you can't cope with it'. Some ... So you come on a ten day course to see if it's sort of what you want to do. And you do get a vision in that time. People go on and become pasana meditationists in that way - where they step back completely. Those are very hard for western people to do. It's just really difficult. But if you're doing things that interest you, and your day is very different and broken up into different areas, you're not just ... I mean it must be dreadful to work in a factory, where you're doing the same movement and the same thing. I mean, it must be mind blowingly horrible. That's what I think the whole of the teaching of esoteric [philosophy]... teaching to stand back ... We've got to sort of relearn how to look at the world. And the way to do that is by balancing up the centres of yourself. I mean you've got a intellectual centre, you've got an emotional centre, and you've got a body. They all get out of kilter in the way we live. Some people have tremendous intellectual centres and their poor old emotional centre doesn't exist. Some people ... or their bodies sometimes. Some people are so occupied with their body that their brain is recessed somewhere and doesn't ever look at ... They just think about what their body is going [to do]. I mean we're coming up to the Olympics. We see it every day. Some people pass everything through their emotional centres, so overpoweringly, that after a while all they're got left is old tapes that they run, because it's sort of bing and gone. I think what the first thing you have to learn when you begin to balance yourself up is to balance your centres so they actually sort of vibrate on the same level and are in touch with each other.

In the various articles that have been written about you, and your work here, especially when you were teaching, it's been characterised as New Age, and a commune and hippy commune, and so on. How do you feel about the label New Age?

I think they haven't got another one, that's the problem. It got ... When it was really New Age it sounded okay, and then it got into a ... as everything does, the misuse of the word became tantamount to saying, 'Oh, oh, all that bullshit, you know. Oh Christ, here we go again'. And words like spirituality, enlightenment, New Age - all those words became so sort of polluted. I mean I don't really think about it as a word - what one does. Some people call it The Work. I mean what it actually really is, is your own journey towards your own self: self discovery. But we are all in the same boat. We're all striving or yearning, or whatever we're doing, towards something in our lives, and it isn't death, believe me. Well, in some ways it is. But it died before you die, if you know what I mean. It's changing your centre of gravity, what I was really talking about. It has that connotation of becoming a person who can actually be able to see clearly. That's all that the word 'clairvoyant' means: 'clear seeing'. And I think we do blind ourselves a lot, or blinker ourselves a lot, by not really looking.

Do you think the time for reflection is really absolutely crucial to a full life? I mean has that been an issue for you through your life, the question of making sure that you get time to reflect?

No, I never thought I never had two brains together in my head, at one time in my life. I just thought all that stuff was stupid. I mean, I just didn't. I worked everything by instinct and a sort of ... I suppose I think everybody's like that too, a sort of adolescent enthusiasm for everything that can boulder down walls anywhere. But then I think you have to come round to actually beginning to ... and I think the heart is the reflector. I think the heart reflects what is real. I think if we ... if we trust that, then I think we're on the way to knowing what's going on. But I think we don't trust it much. We love to ... we have a monkey mind, you know.

You're obviously somebody with a very great range of different sorts of talents. You've painted, you've written successfully, you're a very successful actor, you could have had a career as a director. You've run a school, you're running a theatre.

Oh, stop it.

You've done a lot of different things, and I actually ... and a lot of people, you know, see that as a great advantage to be so talented, but it also brings problems of choice, doesn't it? Do you ever sort of think about the road not travelled? Do you ever think, you know, could I have done this, or should I have done that?

Yes. I think I don't do it ... I really don't do it in the way that I seriously feel bitter and twisted about it, because I don't. I think I would have loved, in a way, to have been able to be a film director and create sort of, you know, terrific mood pieces and things like that, or different things. But then when I think about when I have been the director of documentaries, the amount of work, and bored, and fiddling around and I think, oh, God, I'll have another lifetime. That's for some other time because it's so enclosing and forceful in its grip. I suppose, I know that I wouldn't like to be on the stage any more, in some city doing a sort of ... I won't sort of mention any names, but a sort of dame acting role. And I'm not talking about pantomimes. But after a while if you're a sort of actress that keeps on keeping on, you generally get to be called Dame something. I don't ... I know I wouldn't like that.

Why not?

No. Because it's such a position of where nothing could change. Once you're a dame you're a dame. That's it. You've got into a niche. I don't say that you can't play different parts and it's all very lovely, but what parts can you play finally? You're always the dame playing that part. And anyway, I sort of, as I said: acting doesn't hold any of that sort of excitement for me any more. Then, let's see, what else did you say? Well I would like to do lots of paintings and things, but I can't do them until I become completely besotted by something. It doesn't work for me unless I think about it all the time. I can't do a picture unless I'm thinking about it a lot, and I couldn't just do hundreds. I'm not as facile as that. And then writing, I am interested in writing. Yes, I am interested in writing as I ... I think when I mal rit vonduer and get it together. I think writing today ... If I wrote a novel today though, I know that after a while I'd sort of start fizzling out on the characters, unless they were really multifaceted. Because who do you write about today that is not a sort of celebre or an intellectual. I don't know. People are sort of very linear in this day and age. They're not Falstaffian enough for me. Although there are some that are. I can't think what else you said. Teaching. I don't know. That might come again when I'm a bit ancient. People can come and I'll be sort of there.

Or maybe now, for something completely different.

Now, for something completely different! I could go into skydiving or ... I don't know, no. I ... we ... I mean Tony and I did run a restaurant called the Nautilus, so we've done that one. And I do have a restaurant here. But I got bored with going out onto the verandah there and opening the menu and knowing what was going to be there. I think really I suppose from talking to you I realise that I'm a real rat bag really. And I suppose any ... No, I would really like to be extremely good at being a writer or a painter. It's such a wonderful thing. Painters are the luckiest of all. I mean they can go anywhere and sit down and they don't have to have a crew, as films do. They don't have to have the stage. It's the piece of canvas or piece of paper, or even a bit of bark. And no one tells them when they have to finish it or start it. Okay, maybe people wouldn't buy it, but at the same time they could have it around and looked at. And I mean, maybe not. Maybe they'd hate it and throw it away, but it is a ... it is a wonderfully autonomous profession, painting. Enviable.

You had this astonishing amount of early success. And in the midst of it you were overtaken by despair. Could you tell us more fully about that time, and about where that despair came from.

You know, there's a game called Consequences, which starts out where you fill in little things about what the world says. You say, someone met someone at somewhere. He said to her, she said to him. The consequence was, and the world said. I think I suffered from what the world said. I kept, I suppose, feeling this huge discrepancy between what everyone expected me to be like, and what I was really feeling underneath. I think this happens a tremendous amount. We have a huge amount of words written about what people want to read about celebrities. They've got to be squeezed into these little sort of scenarios which are acceptable to the public, however salacious or prurient they are, that's what the public wants to read about them, so that's what they do read about them. But there's a huge discrepancy between what you ... that's there, written about you. I mean even my mum, you know, when she rang me up and said, 'Oh dear, what am I reading about you in the paper'. I said, 'Mum, that's not true, you know'. I mean, for instance, when I was on that film Hombre, they had a picture of me between Sean and Paul Newman saying, 'And which one will she have tonight?' you know. And my mother said... and I said, 'But Mum, that, none of that, I mean that's just rubbish'. And she said, 'No dear, I read it in the paper'. Because people ... As soon as things are printed, people believe it. And so you get a bit muddled, because everyone takes for granted all sorts of things about you that aren't ... that you know aren't true. And I think also you get into a terrific muddle about what you're doing in the middle of all this, and where you're going and what, you know. I did anyway. I lost, sort of lost my cool. I became a bit ... I became panicked about what I [was], who I was with and what I was doing and what was happening to me.

So at that time, at that specific time, when you resorted to something that seemed in so many ways out of character, what in fact were the forces on you that were confusing you, specifically? What all came together to push you into the corner?

Well, I was trying to rehearse this thing. I was trying to...

The musical?

Yes, I was trying to sort of ... as they changed directors and I'd have to start again. I mean anyone knows that if they begin to rehearse something and they've got something under their belt and then someone says, 'No, no. You can't do any of that, sorry. You've got to start again', it's pretty frightening, because you don't know what you're doing. Then, I was sort of having a problem with my mother-in-law and husband and affairs, and everybody wanted to sort of jump on me somehow, and I didn't quite know how to handle any of it. I sort of think, probably, I also probably was getting ill then, and was losing my energy, you see. And that's always been a huge thing with me. I don't think if you're diseased or sick you can have very much energy. And I sort of couldn't understand why I was feeling a bit tired all the time, and I don't know, there was a huge amount of things that came together. And I think I was just really sort of bellowing for help in one way.

So you think that it was more asking, 'Please, please rescue me from this situation', or that you were actually depressed, like some people.

Well I think I was pretty depressed too. What's ... you know, it's a Shakespearean thing, when all occasions do conspire. So many things came together that were sort of ... I mean, when I was in the theatre the safety curtain hit me on the head one night, which isn't very nice, you know. You get a bit concussed by things like that. It was all sort of strange. As I say there are coincidental things on the bad side too, that come together, that can set you on your spinning off. And off you go. And I suppose what happens is that the combination of all those things puts you into state where you really can't see any way out. You feel as though you're like blind: What can I do, I can't go on living in ... I can't go on living. You say first, I can't go on living in this. And what can I do to get out of it. And after a while there just seems to be only one way. I think lots of kids come to it. And I had had all that very quickly, that success. I really didn't have a teenage life where I went to parties or anything. And because I was sort of working from very - quite early on. And I then went ... [I] got into this thing of being wanted by all the managements and all the people. And I mean I just, obviously ... I think many people can't handle those situations at all. They go into it, [and] their head goes into a sort of a whirl and they can't think.

How did you get over it? What actually happened? I mean how, you know, how did it happen and how were you found, and how did you get over it?

I can't go into all that stuff. I mean I, I don't know. It was all a sort of dream in a way. But it wasn't, it was a bit of a nightmare. Well I went away. I went ... I went off to Sicily. And it was spring and I looked at all the trees and I went for swims in the sea, and I got back to nature I suppose. That was a way out. I smelt blossoms and I wasn't running to the theatre and changing my clothes and putting wigs on and off. I was lying in the sun, looking at funny Italian people. And German tourists running in and out of the water. So really, I think that's probably the best way to get rid of all that shit in your head.

Did anybody help you get over it? Was Sean on the scene at the time?

Oh no, no, no. He wasn't.

Did you have any help?

No, I just ... I think really I sort of got pregnant then. That was probably a move to ...

A life affirming move.

[laughs] I think probably, you know, it forces you into sitting still for a moment or two. I think everybody also ... There is a thing in all female beings, unless they're very different, where you know that you've got to stop being a daughter and start having a position where you're a mum rather than a sibling or ... It sort of changes. Roles change.

How old were you when you had first baby?

I can't remember. Not very old. Too young really. I can remember anyway, as she was so tiny, I had to take lessons in ... My mother was worried I was going to drop her down the sink or something. Any way she did give me lessons in bathing, or a big lady did. And she was so big, this lady, that she could hold my baby in one hand. Because she was only five pounds or something. It wasn't a huge child. But it grew. I mean, she grew. Anyway I think that, all that part of my life I ... was a long time ago, but it is ... I mean you do, if you put yourself back into it, you can remember that your head was filled with fluff or butterflies, or you couldn't really think straight. At least I couldn't at that time.

How important is it to you, your Australianness? How Australian do you feel yourself to be? You've spent a lot of time away. What does it mean to you to be Australian?

Well, I'm very glad I'm Australian, having been round the world a lot and had a look at everywhere else. And I do like coming from this part of Australia, which is very ... somehow does ... it's got a sort of something that chimes with my personality. And I like it that we are not a hugely populated country, and that we have such diversity, and such empty spaces. And I really think that the space is what makes Australians Australians. I think the actual feeling of space. And I think we're a very arrogant race. But then of course, we were bound to be, coming from what we do. And I think I reflect that in part. And I think that we're also got enormous chips on both shoulders most of the time about our, our cultural ... although I think Australians are, as I've seen, there are some extraordinary talented people here. I mean, more freely talented, and I used that word quite ... than nearly anywhere I've seen. We're not very discipline, compared with say Japanese talent and other talent in places. But I think the Australianness is not able to be taken out of the person, even if they're ... if they live in England for ... or America, or anywhere. There's still something nitty down there that's very ... Nearly everyone I've ever met, who was born in Australia, has an Australianness that you can't scrub off, or get away from. And I don't particularly want to get away from mine.

Could you find words to describe what it is? What the essence of that is for you, that you can't scrub off.

Well, I think it's an innate vulgarity. Yes. I mean Australians are wonderfully able to use vulgar terminology. They just are like that. They can do it and they have a sort of ability to see [the] cryptic side of things and not ... They don't take bullshit much. I've never ... although they can be very rubbishy themselves about it. I think also there is a side of us that's frightfully Victorian and ghastly, sort of, underneath - a sort of rigid Victorianism sort of. There's a sort of prurient side of Australians too, that can be quite funny.

You yourself have said that you have a great deal of difficulty, which you feel is innate, with authority. Has that changed as you've got older, or is it still with you? How do you deal with authority now? And what kind authority do you come in contact with?

Oh I come in contact with the council all the time, and I'm getting better at the police - with speeding and stuff like that. But I still have a bit of ... When I first came to do the theatre I had tremendous problems with the council, because they just really didn't know what I was doing. And I'm sure they were incredibly threatened by what was happening, and they just didn't image it. I mean, one council member asked me what we were going to do here at night. And I said, 'Well it's a theatre, you know'. He said, 'I don't know, I've never been to one', and you are in sort of a territory which you don't know quite ... I had a lot of trouble with the building inspectors. But I don't have that quite so much now - quite so much, hopefully. And I've sort of taken on things, like I'm a member of the Regional Arts Development Fund board. And so I'm sort of stepping into those sort of roles, which I don't think I can do very well. But I do stir it up a bit. That's my role anyway really: stirring things a bit. [INTERRUPTION]

Diane, you've had the most extraordinarily varied life. There's hardly an adventure to be had in this world that you haven't had. Have you found it fulfilling and what's ahead for you?

What do I know, how do I know? But I ... Well I don't think that you ever finish your adventure until you get carried off. At least that's what I hope for. But I think, you know, there's an array of doors that you can go through and the ones that open to you, I think you ... those are the ones you should take, while they [are open] because they'll close up some time. But I think, really, what's ahead for me is that I am trying to establish this theatre, which will create another type of entertainment, a sort of eco whole experience: very evoking, or evocative thing, in the middle of the rain forest, which is a total fantasy in a way, but that's what we want really, all of us. And then I hope to delegate and make my own appointments. But I think up until then I'm still trying to follow through with the laser to give it a bit more of what it can do, because it's such a theatrical, such a rivetting and extraordinary discipline, and I'm very fascinated by images in light. They seem to me ... and that's why I started this thing of darkness and light ... because they seem to me to be where we're going. I think the laser as a concept in that it's used for everything: for printing, for surgery, for ... using it for entertainment is also, I think, part of its job. To show us really what light's about, so that we can look at images in light and be overpowered by them. So I'm trying to do my next thing, in the near future, to include dancing, and a myth, music, flying: in fact, a sort of multi techno and talent - physical talent, somehow. A spectacle of that sort. Whether it'll come off, I don't know. Again, it's skittering along on a razor's edge. The first thing you have to do is make a CD of music and sound, and then you choreograph the laser to that, and then you put the actors in, so ... or the actors and dancers in, and I do have a very good person doing the choreography for that, who's coming on my next ... the next production of Heavy Metal Hamlet that's supposed to be coming here in the middle - in the beginning of July. So really, that's what I'm occupied with at the moment and I can't really look beyond that, except to a holiday, somewhere nice, with my old man, you know. That's the way it goes.

Since you've put your energy into the theatre you haven't been keeping up the sort of teaching side of what was here. What happens now though if someone does want to come and live with you and learn from you?

Well that's ... you see I think that's important, that that will show me that people are ready to do that. You see, when I started this, although I did bring people with me, and they wanted to come from that lecture tour, I haven't done much since then. But to get people in, is what I'm saying. But if people come to me I never say no. They come and stay. Whatever capacity they want to come in. Say a student who wants to learn laser, a person who wants to teach yoga, a person who wants to teach, I never turn down too, because they can teach here, if they want to. I think it's a very important thing that you try to gauge what people are doing. The people ... People's way of thinking does go in waves, and I think there was a time, certainly in the seventies when this was begun, when people really would take six, eight, ten months off, to take a look at what they were doing: stand back and try and look at their life. I don't think we're in that stage now. I think we are in a much more escalated time where we say, 'What? I can't get away even for the weekend'. I mean okay, but you know. And especially as we're out of range of cellular phones. So they feel cut off from the big old world out there that's steaming on, even though we've got Internet and all that stuff. Somehow it's just a bit too far away for comfort and just a bit too frightening: the jungle and the thing and the bats that fly around and the little widgies that get into your bed in the night and take a nibble. And it's all just a little bit too savage. So, I don't think everyone thinks like that though, but when a whole group of people comes to me and says, 'I've got to be here. Do be here and let's work together', then I will. Until then, I'm not doing it.

Everything you've done has required enormous amounts of energy. Where do you feel your energy comes from?

Well that's actually ... If I were to give an end product of what the school I went to did, it was to teach you how to accumulate and conserve energy. Because energy: we waste an incredible amount of energy. We don't use much of our brains, we misuse energy just extraordinarily. And I don't think it's bad to have a bit of a flit about with your energy, and use it up and go raging, drinking or smoking, or whatever it is, one ... but you always have a time when you've got to make up for that. I mean we've forgotten how really to manage our bodies, or else we've become incredible body managers, and we can't do anything else but think what we're going to shove in our chops and what we're going to do for energy building exercises, or take walkings. I think we've become ... we're all out of kilter. We've just go to allow it to be and learn the basics of breathing and meditation and different things, which are energy accumulators. Well, they're not energy accumulators so much as they don't use energy that we waste, so we've got it here ready to use.

Why did you call this place Karnak?

It's never just one reason. I can't really explain why, I just knew that was its name. It's not just that it was the city of light in Thebes, where people went to learn. I think there were 250 professions taught in the Karnak environs. It wasn't just that. There are other reasons, which I'd rather not divulge. But it was the right name for here. It's a strong name. And I like names that sort of are almost the same backwards as they are forwards. Karnak. It's how it is. People always ask me that, but it was ancient Thebes and it did ... I have got a picture over there of it on the wall. It has ... It did have these wonderful great pillars. It was all about light, and light is enlightenment. The light is probably the active elements of energy.