From Ita’s lisp to Blanche’s vulnerability, Asher Keddie has made celebrity roles her own. Yet there’s more to this versatile actress than mere mimicry, as David Leser discovers.
Ita Buttrose and Asher Keddie are at dinner in a small chic restaurant in Sydney’s Surry Hills, a week before filming is due to begin on the ABC mini series, Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo.
Asher is … how shall we put it? Perspiring. And not just because the night is steamy. Next to her is one of the most famous women in the country, the woman she’s about to try and embody on the screen as a 30 year-old magzine editor launching the ground-breaking magazine, Cleo, in 1972.
It’s only the second time the two have met and Asher – never one to be easily intimidated – is suddenly aware that her every movement and expression is being scrutinised.
“Will you stop that?” Ita commands.
“What?” the actor replies.
“You’re sitting like me.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes, you are .”
And then they both burst out laughing, to the blessed relief of everyone else at the table. Here – for the student of characterisation and subplot – is a delicious example of the observed (Ita) observing the observer (Asher) and both observer and observed approving of what they see.
“Her hands were imitating where mine were – on the side of my face or under my chin,” Ita happily recalls to the Weekly now (a magazine she, herself, edited in the mid 1970s) and I have never seen anyone doing that before.” (If truth be known, Asher Keddie’s been doing it since she was a child.)
davidleser 