MAGDA At 61, I finally feel free'

In a case of art finally mirroring life, Magda Szubanski is playing a Polish lesbian – albeit a butcher – in a new prime-time TV series. She sits down with The Weekly to talk about the long road towards self-acceptance on screen and off.

- TIFFANY DUNK

Once upon a time, today’s photoshoot would have been pure torture for Magda Szubanski. The preening, the trying on of clothes, the posing – all anathema to someone who had long tried to hide her true self. But today, at 61 years of age, she’s having the time of her life.

“As I get older I give a little bit less of a stuff,” she says as she swirls and twirls for our cameras. “I’ve started to just be playful and have fun with it. And the stylist always brings some beautiful clothes which I snap up, so it’s a replacement for schlepping around a shopping centre for me. I’ve really just relaxed into it a little bit more.”

This attitude is something that was hard to come by for Australia’s favourite funny woman. Moving to Melbourne at the age of four, she was the youngest of three. And her family, she says, “came from terrible trauma on both sides”. That trauma trickled downwards – something that made sense when, at 36, Magda learned the truth of her father Peter’s past: After Germany invaded his homeland during WWII, when he was 15 years old, he became an assassin for a counterintelligence branch of the Polish resistance movement.

Meanwhile, as a pre-teen Magda was herself nursing a secret: she wasn’t swooning over the handsome men in the Golden Age of Hollywood movies she adored, it was the leading ladies who were making her heart skip a beat. And in the 1970s homosexuality was not only considered taboo, it was still a crime.