The Bimbo Bites Back

SMH Saturday September 17 1994

It’s been 10 years since Rachel Ward, having lost her battle with Hollywood, slunk off with tail between her legs to these Antipodean shores, but neither time, distance or defeat seems to have mellowed her countenance. Indeed, it would appear that Rachel, far from having given up her assault on Hollywood, has merely rearmed.

Now, pointing her recently enhanced breasts at the politics of feminism, homelessness, the environment and countless other “movements”, she is ready to do bloody battle.

“I consider it my responsibility, as an artist, to illuminate the perils of this world and to inspire people to make better choices and to lead better lives,” she says, speaking at her beachside residence. “It is the responsibility of people who find themselves in positions of power to work within the system to change it. My gestures are incredibly impactful on the world; I have a responsibility to that.”

No doubt about it, Rachel’s in fine form. Looking much younger than her purported 36 years, her face is both wrinkle and make up free. “Beauty comes from within,” she insists. Just as well, considering her opinion that the cosmetics industry is an instrument of oppression. “I owe it to my sisterhood not to condone an artifice that keeps us all slaves to the male fantasy,” she says.

Arguably her recent breast enhancements could be judged as “condoning an artifice”, but when I point out this apparent contradiction, the star fires back.

“Using whose values? In whose terms? Please. I don’t see any rules about anything. If I feel like doing something to enhance my chances in an industry that is notoriously harsh on women over 25, then it’s my choice… personal freedom of expression is very, very important to me,” she says angrily.

One imagines that “personal freedom of expression” also qualifies as an explanation for her participation in the latest form of bimboid self-promotion, breast cupping on the cover of national magazines, or why she opts for high glamour with maximum coverage for those famous gams whenever sighted at trendy watering holes or high-profile events.

I’m tempted to ask how Rachel reconciles the responsibility of her social conscience with the almost limitless options sanctioned by a “personal freedom of expression”, but I think better of it. I’ve seen that spine-chilling glint in her eye. The one that froze the nation of would-be adulterers when caught in spectacular Panavision close-up just before she castrated Richard Dreer in the 1989 classic film, Cut ‘em Off and Hang ‘em High.

The rumours of tension between Ward and Dreer, Ward insists, were greatly exaggerated, but Dreer, who sustained 15 stiches in his upper thigh during the castration scene, admits: After that I kept my distance. Rachel was enjoying it way beyond the call of duty.”

Rachel, whose devotion to “the method” is legendary (she allegedly even did her own shopping at a local supermarket for three consecutive weeks in order to truthfully duplicate the experience of an ordinary housewife), dismissed Dreer’s comment: “If you can’t work with fire, get out of the frying pan.”

Rachel has made a career of playing femmes fatales. Earlier, they were ball-busters with a twist of light-hearted mischief or a breakable spirit, but slowly her characters became darker and less redemptive until ultimately they have become downright murderous.

In Revenge of the Virgin, her latest cinematic assault, which opens nationwide next Tuesday, she bares not only those newly constructed missiles but also perhaps the blackest depths of her soul. It’s an ugly, unsettling performance and, sitting beside Rachel on chintz sofas strewn with teddy bears (she collects them) and sipping Earl Grey tea while her young son frolics happily in the garden with his nanny, its catalyst begs an explanation.

One of five children, she comes from a well-to-do family disrupted by divorce. An introverted child Rachel lived in her own fantasy world, so much so that she was diagnosed as semi-autistic. “My best friends were my teddy bears and pets… in particular a hamster I called Papa.” Her voice drops to a whisper her teacup rattles in its saucer; she bites down hard on her lip forcing the pain that is clearly bubbling to the surface back behind her teeth. I sit and wait for its inevitable release. Rachel is not exempt from the contemporary compulsive need to confess.

“Sometimes, after I finish a scene, I’m blown away by the depth of my pain,” she says. Ten years in therapy failed to expose the nucleus of her sorrow but, determined to “know herself”, she tried suppressed memory therapy and gained some answers. “I was violated,” she gushes. “By a hamster. Papa was my best friend, I took him everywhere. He lived in my bra, nestled between my breasts. Then one day he bit me. I still have the scar. Look. Physically it’s small but, mentally, I was deeply scarred. I guess I’ve never really trusted since.”

A paradigm of the Me-Too Generation, particularly in its reincarnation as the New Age Recovery Movement, Rachel concedes her well-publicised substance abuse was a consequence of this tragic event and her four failed marriages symptomatic of such inevitable distrust. But, having survived the ubiquitous rehabilitation period, Rachel has emerged spiritually renewed, crediting the love and support of a “beautiful human being” for her recovery. The “beautiful human being” to whom she is now married, is actor Bryan Brown and, she assures me, despite the pictures in women’s magazine of Gary Sweet with his tongue in her ear, this time it’s forever. “Nothing that’s been written between us is true, It was all interpersonal,” she says enigmatically. “I’d just ask that, since my marriage and family are the most important thing to me, they be treated in a respectful manner.”

It’s more like: “I’m Rachel Ward, and that is my life and who are you to judge that I’ve been married X amount of times in X amount of years?” I ask.

“Right” she says. “Basically, yeah. That’s exactly how I feel. I’m coming into myself, owning my life. Claiming responsibility for everything that happens.” I thank her for sharing that with us and, although she agrees to be interviewed only if we talk about Australia reneging on its Earth Summit agreements, cost-benefit analysis in our economic system, unbridled capitalism and the like, I ask if she’d care to put any other rumours to rest while she has the opportunity. “Look, I really am a very private person. I mean, Bryan’s penile implants and our preference for eight-ply toilet paper is really nobody else’s business.”

She assures me, though, that their toilet paper is unbleached and made from recycled paper and that she instructs her baby’s nanny to use only cloth nappies. Disposals, she says, are largely responsible for our overflowing land fills. As we speak, an elderly Filipino maid stumbles through the front door carrying a huge cardboard box full of groceries. Rachel forbids the use of plastic bags or any cleaning products that aren’t free of chemicals and phosphates.

“Unbridled consumerism is the environment’s biggest enemy and, by anyone’s standards in that respect I show enormous restrain. I haven’t updated my BMW for two years and, whereas I may once have bought a favoured t-shirt in every colour, I now limit myself to only two or three.

The environmental movement is only one of many for an actor who’s looking to add the weight of intellectual clout and political convictions to a CV full of air-headed, sex bomb roles, which is probably why the endlessly contentious forum of women’s issues (any will do) provokes her most sincere outrage.

“There really is a war on in this country,” she says over a second pot of Earl Grey. “I can’t quote the exact state and the sources, but anybody looking at the state of things today, it amounts to a war on women. According to my information, one in four women will be assaulted in their lifetime, and 50 per cent of wives will be assaulted by their husbands. Fifty per cent! That’s over one in two!”

Her final tirade, though, is reserved for Hollywood and a system that continues to stigmatise women who no longer embody the prototype male fantasy and continues to make ideologically unsound films like Pretty Woman, which she claims are “subliminally irresponsible and destructive; kick in the teeth to the women’s movement”.

Rachel slumps back into her sofa. Doing PR for a strong value system and a highly developed sense of social responsibility is hard work and inevitably takes its toll.

She looks thin and pale beside the plump cushions. Battle-weary lines have appeared between her brows and in the setting sun she seems, like her favourite crusade, a touch battered. But the strains of a laughing child filter up from the garden and her face instantly radiates with maternal love.

“Being a mother has changed my life. I’m basically a compulsive person. But there are a lot of things you let go when you have a child and you want to give that child a lot of time, which I do.” As if on cue, the nanny and child appear and are introduced. Curiously, Rachel cannot remember the child’s name and has to be prompted by the nanny. Understandable, I suppose, considering the child was adopted only last week.