Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Geraldine Turner, New Holland Publishers, $29.99.
It’s true. This is a disarmingly honest memoir from one of Australia’s most renowned stars of the stage, Geraldine Turner.
Her decorated career spans more than 40 years during which she has starred in acclaimed Australian productions of great musicals including Chicago and Anything Goes.
Turner tells of the many years of commitment required to make it to the top and imparts emotional stories of her relationship with her parents and siblings. She describes frankly the highs and disappointments of a life in show business, the challenge of maintaining personal relationships alongside a demanding schedule of rehearsals and performances, as well as, the rivalries and camaraderie amongst those who have made the stage their life.
As she remembers: “I was taken to a pantomime at the old Theatre Royal in Brisbane when I was five. I came home and apparently announced that I wanted to be on the stage. I don’t remember this but my mother told me, over and over, as if to instil that memory. Perhaps I never said it. This was the beginning of my mother trying to live her life through me. It was always there, that pressure to please her. Nothing was ever enough. I was never enough.”
Geraldine is brutally honest. Growing up in Brisbane in the 1950s and 1960s in a dysfunctional family fraught with alcohol abuse, violence and mental health issues, she could hardly have imagined the places her talent would take her and the esteem in which she would one day be held.
“I just didn’t want to sit down and write a book about myself in which I said ‘I did this, then I did that and after that I did something else’. It’s too boring. And I didn’t want to whitewash my life. … It’s about mistakes I have made in my own life and it’s a family history.”
