The Power Of Two

Rachel Ward and Bryan Brown have a new film, a new grandchild and after more than three decades of marriage, they can still take each other’s breath away. Samantha Trenoweth gets personal with the golden couple of Australian film.

- Samantha Trenoweth

The sky is mid-winter blue. Sunlight fractures in shards across the inky Pacific. High on a cliff top, in a razor-sharp breeze, half a dozen actors clink glasses, make languid conversation and evoke the illusion of summer on the set of Rachel Ward’s new feature, Palm Beach. Old friends Sam Neill, Greta Scacchi and Richard E. Grant are here, along with new friends Jacqueline McKenzie, Heather Mitchell and Claire van der Boom, as well as Rachel’s husband of 35 years, Bryan Brown, and their daughter, Matilda.

Rachel calls action and for the most part calls the shots. The only slightly meddlesome one is Bryan, who disputes the need for his character to shed tears in this scene. She indulges his spirited mansplaining with goddess-like calm.

Later, she confesses: “I respect that’s something he wants to say but I do wish he didn’t want to say it now. Could he not have said it yesterday or over breakfast or two years ago when we were writing this?”

Bryan is lead actor and producer of this friends-and-family venture, an idea he hatched after a house party in Wales. This is neither the couple’s first cinematic joint venture nor their first difference of opinion – not by a long shot.

They shared their first kiss on the set of The Thorn Birds in 1983 and married months later in Oxfordshire, where Rachel had grown up. Bushfires were blazing as they flew into Australia to spend their lives together in what seemed to her like “an apocalyptic place”.

Since then, Rachel and Bryan have produced a trio of fine progeny (Rose, 34, Matilda, 32, and Joe, 26), worked together on a number of much admired films (including Beautiful Kate, which Rachel also wrote and directed) and the pair have become almost emblematic of the arts in this sunburnt land.