'I'm not retiring': Actress Lynne McGranger announces major career news after winning Gold at the 65th TV WEEK Logie Awards
McGranger took home the gong at Sydney's The Star on Sunday evening, marking a celebrated end to the 72-year-old's three-decade-long role playing Irene Roberts on the famed Australian soap Home and Away.
The actress announced her departure from the show in February and filmed her final scenes in March, with her exit airing in the coming days.
Now, McGranger has traded Summer Bay for standing ovations and even could make a return to TV for the right role.
She is on the road touring with the play, The Grandparents Club in which she plays modern grandmother Liz, who is navigating family complexities.
'I'm not retiring, absolutely not,' McGranger told The Daily Telegraph on Monday.
'If I had the opportunity to come back to television at some point, of course I would consider it depending on the role and the show…but not another 33 years because otherwise I'd be very, very old.'
She described the momentous last few weeks as "the world's colliding" with Irene's storyline ending, a shift to live acting and now a Logies win.
Reflecting on her time on Home and Away, she said she is very comfortable with her decision to leave the show given her record as the longest-serving female cast member of a TV soap in Australia.
McGranger on Sunday evening won the Gold Logie for Most Popular Personality on Australian Television over stars Julia Morris, Poh Ling Yeow, Allison Langdon, Hamish Blake, Lisa Millar and Sonia Kruger.
"Thirty-three years, I've done this amazing show," she said when accepting her award, dressed in a stunning gold gown.
"I'm thrilled and honoured.
"Before I forget, this is going to be pride of place next to my 1974 Wagga Wagga Drama Festival Best Actress (award).
"And it's true, it's absolutely true. That's when I went, 'This acting thing is kind of good! Maybe I will be better at it than I am at teaching'."
Earlier in the evening, McGranger won the Silver Logie for Best Lead Actress in a Drama for the same role.
"I know I've only got 30 seconds, but I'm old," she said at the time.
"I want to thank the beautiful cast of Home and Away, who have just been my family and my friends.
"I love you all."
McGranger, on her final day on the Home and Away set, went out with a heartfelt farewell and was gifted flowers by her emotional co-stars.
"I've had the ride of my life," she said in a statement.
"And I love each and every one of you so much: The cast – Ray, Georgie, Emily, Shane, Ada, James, all the young'uns.
"The art department, the writers, everybody – there are so many unsung heroes. This show is made up of so many parts.
"You're all amazing, and it's been my great privilege to work with each and every one of you.
"I'm touched, I'm humbled, and I'm so honoured. Thank you so much."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Age
27 minutes ago
- The Age
‘Changed the language of what art is': Huge balloon sculpture for national gallery
A playful balloon sculpture, part of an iconic series created by controversial pop artist Jeff Koons, has officially joined Jackson Pollock's Blue poles in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Balloon Venus Dolni Vestonice (Yellow) is a 2.7-metre high yellow stainless-steel sculpture that reimagines a prehistoric fertility figure as a mirror-polished balloon. It's the first of the American artist's balloon series to enter the collection of an Australian cultural institution and gallery director Nick Mitzevich says he's more than ready for a public debate over whether the sculpture qualifies as art. 'There are artists in each generation that revolutionises what art is, that challenges people,' Mitzevich said. 'Jackson Pollock re-thought what painting was. In the '60s and '70s, Andy Warhol re-thought what art could be, that everyday objects could be art. 'Louise Bourgeois revolutionised the way she made work with her gigantic amazing spiders, for example. What Jeff Koons has done from the 1980s, he has changed the language of what art is. History shows these revolutionaries become the middle ground and the reference points for each generation and I believe that of Jeff Koons.' Koons melds pop art, conceptual art and minimalism, employing modern materials and highly polished surfaces to riff on everything from household appliances such as the vacuum cleaner to inflatable animals. He is best known in Australia as the creator of Puppy, a 12-metre-high terrier made from 60,000 flowering plants and 55,000 tonnes of soil which was installed in the forecourt of the Museum of Contemporary Art.
The Age
27 minutes ago
- The Age
Perth dancer's renaissance after horror knife attack pirouettes to the big screen
It was the dawn of the new millennium and 22-year-old Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts dance graduate Floeur Alder was on top of the world. Alder had just returned from a dream four-month study trip to Europe that she hoped would set her up for a brilliant career and was tripping lightly down Mary Street to her Highgate home in June, 2000. Then, without any rhyme or reason, a man emerged from the darkness and plunged a knife deep into her face. He said nothing and disappeared back into the night. Alder managed to make it to her home and pull out the knife before dragging herself to a Greek restaurant in Beaufort Street, blood spurting from her neck. The owner called an ambulance and Alder was rushed to Royal Perth Hospital where she endured six hours of surgery and two blood transfusions, with the knife narrowly missing her jugular. While a skilled plastic surgeon managed to repair the surface damage, Alder spent the better part of the decade dealing with the trauma and healing a body that should have been gracing Australian and European stages. 'I was full of anger and rage,' says Alder. 'I was looking at people coming out of WAAPA and comparing myself to them. 'It made me mad. Their lives and careers were progressing while I wasn't going anywhere.' Adding insult to injury was the fact that Alder is the daughter of Perth dance legends Lucette Aldous and Alan Alder. Hanging over her entire life was the expectation she would match her parents' achievements. In particular, Alder was constantly compared to her mother, the New Zealand-born, Perth-raised prima ballerina who was the resident dancer of the Australian Ballet and who achieved icon status performing with Rudolph Nureyev in his famed production of Don Quixote. 'When mum was 21 she was at the Royal Ballet doing Sleeping Beauty with Margot Fonteyn. When I was her age I was in a hospital bed recovering from the attack. It was so ironic and painful,' Alder says. 'All my life I was dealing with people expecting so much of me. And I had those expectations of myself. 'So when I was recovering from the attack and barely able to move it was very hard for me to take. I was angry all the time.' That frustration and rage, and her gradual understanding that those emotions were not just because of the stabbing incident but spewed up from a deeper, darker place, is the central to a new documentary by Perth filmmaker Dawn Jackson, En Pointe: Dancing on a Knife, which is premiering this month at the CinefestOZ film festival in WA's South West. What began as a modest hour-long account of the trauma suffered by a young dancer and the way in which she used dance to rebuild, blossomed into a deeply moving feature-length documentary about a high-profile artistic family and the impact of fame on its youngest member. 'People used to have firm opinions about me and my family. I feel I've laid that to rest.' Floeur Alder Jackson moves between Aldous dancing in Sleeping Beauty and her daughter's convalescence during what should have been her golden years, weaving a tale in which Alder gradually comes back to life as a dancer and a choreographer, culminating in her directing her parents in a piece called Rare Earth (2004). The making of the documentary became a significant part of the recovery process, something which both surprised and unnerved Alder. 'I was much more involved in the film than I ever thought I would be. I certainly didn't think I would be narrating it,' Alder says. Jackson says there were plans for others to narrate the film, 'but we realised it had to be Floeur'. 'It was her story. We had to have her voice.' Loading The reason for the closeness of Alder to the film is that Jackson herself was training as a dancer in the mid-1980s at WAAPA while Aldous and Alan were teaching at the celebrated West Australian 'Fame' school. 'I remember Floeur being there [at WAAPA] all the time, sitting on the floor and eating snakes,' Jackson says. 'All of the students became really close to her. Her parents were busy teaching and she was an only child so we became her family. I even used to babysit for Floeur.' Around the time Jackson pivoted from dance to filmmaking, she caught a performance of Rare Earth and realised she had a great story to tell, one that had the appalling attack at its heart but opened up into other issues, such as Alder's struggle to come out from her parents' shadow. 'I was struck by Floeur's willingness to embrace her legacy after spending so much of her life grappling with it,' Jackson says. 'When she was at WAAPA the gossip was that she was getting all these great parts because of her parents. But she was getting them simply because she was bloody good.' Financing the film proved difficult and dragged the process over a decade. But it meant Jackson was able to document closely Alder's physical and emotional healing and renaissance as an artist, with her subject playing a greater role than normal for this kind of project. 'The long process gave me time to record my mother's history and her work, which became part of the film. This is not just a film. It is part of the story' says Alder. Her parents are both interviewed extensively in the documentary but did not live long enough to see its completion. While Pointe: On a Knife's Edge has all the stuff of an edge-of-the-seat crime series or podcast — we even get to an emotional meeting with the policeman who dealt with the case back in 2000 — Jackson says it is different because the story is told from the point of view of the survivor. 'So often when we watch these crime series it is about the perpetrator or the police trying to track them down,' she says. 'This deals with what Floeur went through — the attack and her healing and her fight to re-establish a career that was derailed when a random stranger decided to take out his anger on her.' Jackson also sees her film as an important contribution to the growing body of knowledge of trauma. 'Trauma was not as well understood when Floeur was attacked as it is today. It separates you from yourself,' Jackson says. For Alder, the documentary has allowed her to finally tell her story. 'It is my truth. It is nobody else's. People used to have firm opinions about me and my family. I feel I've laid that to rest. This is my story,' she says.
Sydney Morning Herald
27 minutes ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Changed the language of what art is': Huge balloon sculpture for national gallery
A playful balloon sculpture, part of an iconic series created by controversial pop artist Jeff Koons, has officially joined Jackson Pollock's Blue poles in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Balloon Venus Dolni Vestonice (Yellow) is a 2.7-metre high yellow stainless-steel sculpture that reimagines a prehistoric fertility figure as a mirror-polished balloon. It's the first of the American artist's balloon series to enter the collection of an Australian cultural institution and gallery director Nick Mitzevich says he's more than ready for a public debate over whether the sculpture qualifies as art. 'There are artists in each generation that revolutionises what art is, that challenges people,' Mitzevich said. 'Jackson Pollock re-thought what painting was. In the '60s and '70s, Andy Warhol re-thought what art could be, that everyday objects could be art. 'Louise Bourgeois revolutionised the way she made work with her gigantic amazing spiders, for example. What Jeff Koons has done from the 1980s, he has changed the language of what art is. History shows these revolutionaries become the middle ground and the reference points for each generation and I believe that of Jeff Koons.' Koons melds pop art, conceptual art and minimalism, employing modern materials and highly polished surfaces to riff on everything from household appliances such as the vacuum cleaner to inflatable animals. He is best known in Australia as the creator of Puppy, a 12-metre-high terrier made from 60,000 flowering plants and 55,000 tonnes of soil which was installed in the forecourt of the Museum of Contemporary Art.
