TV mum Grace Sullivan turned actress Lorraine Bayly into a household name and ultimately defined her long TV and stage career.
The breadth and depth of Lorraine Bayly’s working life – stage actress, soap opera matriarch, TV Week cover star – too much to fit into one audio track.
But the one role she will forever be associated with in the annals of cultural history is Grace Sullivan, Dave’s indefatigable, reliable wife and mother to John, Tom, Terry and Kitty. the Sullivans.
The programme, which premiered on 15 November 1976 and celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, appeared on Australian television in the late 1970s and early 1980s and established Bayly, who has died aged 89, as one of Australia’s biggest TV stars.
There would be other shows, many of them brilliant. Willy Loman’s wife Linda on stage in Ensemble Theatre’s 1997 production of Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman at the Sydney Opera House. game Calendar Girls (2010), with Rhonda Burchmore, Cornelia Frances and Jean Kittson. And the 2015 national tour The Sound of Music.
And on television, one of the show’s original hosts Play SchoolWith John Hamblin, John Waters and Anne Haddy from 1966 to 1978. The Man from the Snowy River and miniseries 1915 (both 1982) and 1920s period drama Carson’s Law (1982-1984), in which she gave an often undercredited performance as progressive attorney Jennifer Carson in a show that was much bigger than critics at the time acknowledged.
But at the center of Lorraine Bayly’s story is the woman whose reflection she saw in the mirror while sitting in the make-up chair on set. the Sullivans: Grace Sullivan is the matriarch of a World War II-era Australian family living in the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1940s.
In a November 2016 interview to celebrate the show’s 40th anniversary, Bayly said she based Grace Sullivan’s smaller character notes on her own mother.
“He had a great sense of humor, but he could still be pretty serious,” Bayly said. “Grace’s hairstyle was my mother’s hairstyle, she used to wear it when she was young. And I wanted the strength and seriousness to be there as well as the little mannerisms that she had, the mannerisms that she had, her sense of humor.”
the SullivansProduced by Crawford Productions, the studio founded by the legendary Hector and Dorothy Crawford, the film was in many ways the story of Australia. The country is coming of age, but it is also losing its innocence.
Although set in the 1940s, it was filmed in the late 1970s in the long shadow of the Vietnam War, which was still a controversial issue at the time; The Australian lives he touched often had to grapple with grief, pain and loss in silence.
The emotional impact of these stories increased as Grace sent each of her sons off to fight. the Sullivans It grew from a simple soap opera into a cultural institution, a twice-weekly series; thereby exploring the complex relationship between the natural ease of Australian life and the burden of war often pressed upon us by forces beyond our national control.
Grace’s family struggled with duty and sacrifice. Eldest son John (Andrew McFarlane) opposed the conflict but eventually joined the medical corps. Middle son Tom (Steven Tandy) served in North Africa, Greece, Crete, the Netherlands and Malaya.
Youngest son Terry (Richard Morgan), meanwhile, dreaming of the air force, was forced to settle for the army, serving and eventually being imprisoned in Singapore’s infamous Changi prison. And daughter Kitty (Susan Hannaford), who later became a nurse, lost her husband, a war correspondent struggling with the trauma of war, to suicide.
But through it all, Grace Sullivan was driven by sheer force of will, a reflection of every indomitable Australian mother and an ever-graceful presence that welcomed joy and heartache with both humor and humanity.
That is, until Grace herself was cut in a season that shocked Australia. Landing in London in July 1944, Grace was killed when a German V-1 flying bomb crashed into her son John’s flat. after 598 the Sullivans′ Episode 1114, Grace was gone in an explosion of masonry and black that pierced the heart of the nation.
We can count the episodes that made such an impact in the history of television on one hand. Then, in 1985, the nation watched in tears as Molly Jones (Anne Tenney) contracted leukemia. One Country Application. And in 2005, our hearts were torn in two when Frankie’s (Claudia Karvan) daughter Lou (Alex Cook) died suddenly.
Fame is a strange thing. And television is a unique medium. Famous writer and director Aaron Sorkin once said, “It is the most sincere of mediums.” “In your bedroom, in your living room. A member of the family.”
This closeness is why the character of Grace Sullivan remains so deeply embedded in Australian culture, and why the news of Lorraine Bayly’s death leaves us all with such a heavy heart – anyone who has looked at Grace Sullivan and somehow seen their own mother reflected on the television screen.
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Michael Idato is general culture editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect with: X or email.
