Away And Home Again

The actress has led a life to rival her on-screen alter ego, Marilyn Chambers. She tells Genevieve Gannon how after 30 years on screen, she’s happier than ever.

- Genevieve Gannon

It would be hard to find an Australian who can’t sing along with the Home and Away theme song. Even if you’ve never watched the show, you couldn’t have escaped those familiar chords that have played in homes across the land for 30 years. The lyrics are part of our collective consciousness, but the words of the eponymous theme song are perhaps truer for one cast member, above all others.

Emily Symons, 48, has gone away and come home to Australia’s second longest running soap twice since she made her Summer Bay debut in 1989 as the ditzy but kind-hearted Marilyn Chambers. The Bay has changed a lot since the late ’80s and Emily, who has swapped the stilettos and shoulder pads of Marilyn’s youth for a chic silk shirt and flats, has grown with it. Her ’90s perm has been smoothed into a sleek blonde style, and the Marilyn Emily portrays now is an altogether more mature, wiser woman.

“She had to grow up with me,” Emily says. “But I’ve always tried to be true to the character.”

The Home and Away establishment has been true to Emily too. Her most recent return in 2010 was like coming back to a family she hadn’t seen in a couple of years, she says, after she had swapped Summer Bay for an idyllic village in Yorkshire. There, Emily tackled the grittier role of Louise Appleton on long-running UK soap Emmerdale. But tragic circumstances cut that adventure short. Her mother, Glenn, was diagnosed with cancer, and Emily began travelling back and forth, supporting her mother through multiple surgeries and treatments until it became clear that she had to come back to Australia for good.

“I just needed to be with her and look after her,” Emily says. “I’m glad I came home when I did. I would have regretted it terribly. I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn’t come back.”