Across her acting career, Heather Mitchell has portrayed everyone from Ruth Bader Ginsburg (in a Sydney Theatre Company production) to the chic bridal shop manager in Muriel’s Wedding.
Her latest role is in Fake, the story of a romance scammer inspired by Stephanie Wood’s memoir of the same name, where she plays the passive-aggressive mother of Asher Keddie’s Birdie. What Mitchell loves about the series is that it’s not sensationalised, but rather a fascinating psychological study of how we can “want something to be true so badly that reason and common sense goes”.
Mitchell began acting in her early 20s and met her cinematographer husband Martin McGrath while working on a film in 1989. Given they have built careers around their passions, it brings Mitchell joy to see her sons discover their own creativity, which is why she cherishes a painting by her firstborn, Finn. Here, the veteran actor tells us about that significant artwork and shares the stories of two other important belongings.
What I’d save from my house in a fire
One of my son’s earliest oil paintings. My son, who is 25, is an artist, though he has yet to discover exactly where he’ll take his artistic talents. But watching him develop his skill over the years has been really exciting for me, and I feel a great attachment to his first oil painting. It hangs in the living room, near the fireplace.
My husband and I have both only ever done what we love, which has given us great pleasure throughout our lives. So I’ve only ever wanted my kids to find the thing that they love. And I feel like your 20s, particularly, is a great time for exploration, and that’s certainly when I explored my creative side a little more. I’m encouraging that in both my sons – to discover whatever that is they want to do, and that painting signifies to me that he’s blossoming in that area.
My most useful object
My earplugs – I can’t go anywhere without them. I’ve tried the wax ones, I’ve tried the plastic plugs. But in the end, I go back to the little yellow foam earplugs, which I carry around with me in a little plastic container.
Without my earplugs, I couldn’t get any sleep. Our apartment has very creaky floorboards, so if anyone gets up in the middle of the night, I hear them. Backstage in a dressing room or on a film set, I can lie down, put my earplugs in and disappear for 10 minutes – I could be anywhere. Plus where I live, there are quite a few leaf blowers, and they drive me mad.
I go for earplugs over headphones because I quite like the silence and the rhythm and sound of breathing. They’re the tiniest little thing but they allow me to have that stolen moment of silence, so they’re just heaven to me.
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The item I most regret losing
The thing I felt most panicked about losing was a pair of my mother’s earrings, which she had bought when she was in China in the 1940s. They were very beautiful, made of brass, and they were probably the size of a 10-cent piece. They were one of the very few things I had of my mother’s, who died when I was 17. So I did love them.
I remember putting them on one day when I was in my early 20s. A friend came over in their car. It was an old Volkswagen, which had a running guard down the side of the car that you could stand on – so someone could drive while you were standing on the outside of a car. We were mucking around driving through a friend’s property, with me standing on the running guard, and one of the earrings dropped. I remember seeing it fall as the car was moving and calling out “Stop, stop the car!”. We looked and looked for that earring but never found it. It was like it just evaporated.
I remember thinking, wow, fancy losing my mother’s earring because I was doing something really stupid. I felt that she’d looked after these earrings for all those years and yet I lost them almost instantly.
So I think the regret lay not in the object itself, but in my mistreatment of the object – that I hadn’t cared for it the way the person would have wanted me to. I don’t regret losing anything that’s mine, but I feel bad if I have mistreated someone else’s thing, even a book that someone loved and I haven’t returned.