She is James Bond in T-bar heels, a saucy feminist superhero a century ahead of her time. Sporting her glamorous drop-waist getups, she can dance a tango, fly a Tiger Moth, or surf a speeding train carriage – all without upsetting a strand of her signature black bob. Not only that, the whip-smart lady detective leaves a trail of smitten lovers in her wake. Who wouldn’t want to be Phryne Fisher?
Essie Davis has won fans all over the world playing the 1920s Melbourne super-sleuth in the ABC TV series Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. Based on Kerry Greenwood’s bestselling books, the show premiered in 2012 and had more than 1 million Australians tuning in each week, before it spread to 180 countries and garnered a cult following in the US and UK.
Now, four years after the final TV episode, Essie has donned the cloche hats again for the big-screen follow-up, Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, filmed partly in Morocco.
“The last time we saw her she was getting in an airplane to fly her dad home [to England] and I think it needed an international story,” says Essie. “You can’t have a really good murder mystery without it taking longer to solve and having a few more potential culprits.”
The pistol-packing Phryne (pronounced fry-knee) is still scaling buildings and uncovering injustices, but this time it’s in jazz-age London and British Palestine. Fans were so keen to see Miss Fisher’s derring-do go global, in fact, that they raised nearly $1 million of the film’s budget in Australia’s most successful crowdfunding campaign ever.
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