Everything you always wanted to know about The Flying Doctors. Dedicated to Lenore Smith and Christopher Stollery.
 

Chapter 9 - The other Coopers Crossing regulars

This chapter is part of the book The Inside Story by James Oram. It's a book about the actors of The Flying Doctors and it was published in 1990. You get to know a lot about the actors and about working for the most popular Australian TV series.
Only to obtain second hand via websites like E-bay these days.

The champagne was flowing at the opening night of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats in Sydney, when a voice over loudspeakers suddenly ordered everyone out of the building. ‘Someone’s planted a bomb in the theatre,’ said the voice. ‘Everyone outside, quickly!’

Lenore Smith was in the first night crowd, but with the true unruffled calm she displays as Sister Kate Wellings in The Flying Doctors, she strolled casually into the street without spilling a drop of champagne. That was when she spotted an old friend, actor Matt Kay, wandering down George Street looking at her curiously.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘Nothing really,’ said Lenore. ‘Cats is about to bomb. Would you like to come and watch?’

With that she took the astonished actor by the arm and led him back into the foyer where the party was going full swing. Instead of a bomb going off, a fuse was lit between Lenore and Matt. Two days later they moved in together and a few weeks after that they got married. It was a side of Lenore Smith you’d never see in Kate Wellings.

Cats didn’t bomb, but the marriage did. Last year Matt and Lenore announced their separation, making it failed marriage number two for Lenore (her first was to Gary Sweet, who played Donald Bradman in Bodyline), a state of affairs that would be looked on with horror by cautious Kate. As a colleague commented: ‘If Lenore Smith lived at the North Pole and Sister Kate Wellings lived at the South Pole, you’d be getting an idea of how far apart the two characters are.’

Lenore was born and bred in the inner Sydney suburb of Balmain, a one-time tough, working-class district now domiciled by Yuppies, real estate speculators, artists, writers and actors. Her bubbly, chatty, outgoing personality has to be held tightly in check when she plays country girl Kate, the dedicated flying nurse with a relaxed, easygoing nature. Kate is not a big talker. Lenore is.

‘As a Balmain girl, I have to be careful not to inject too much pace into the role. Everything has to be slowed down to about a tenth of my city speed so things move along at the accepted rate in Coopers Crossing.’

Indeed, life was very straightforward and predictable for Sister Kate until citified Dr Geoff Standish (Robert Grubb) replaced Dr Tom Callaghan (Andrew McFarlane) in the main role. Kate spent most of the time torn between her attraction towards him and the fear of becoming romantically involved. That all came to an end when they finally realised they were ‘made for each other’ in true soapie style and after a roller-roaster romance, ended up at the altar. It didn’t do the ratings any harm, although Lenore insists it wasn’t a gimmick:

‘We played a significant part in developing the characters to the point where they’d be married. We were forever pestering the producers, giving them guidelines. We certainly wouldn’t have done it just to chase ratings. In fact, they told us that once we were married on television we’d be dead meat. It hasn’t developed that way. It’s a great challenge because in my past television, movie and stage work I’ve never been seen as the romantic type.’

Crawford’s Chief Executive Officer, Terry Ohlsson, pointed out there was never any doubt about the viewing public’s acceptance of the romance: ‘People don’t realise it, but every letter they write to us is read and the good ideas often acted upon. For many viewers, the crowd at Coopers Crossing is almost a second family. There are adults out there who’ve followed the series since they were teenagers. If they hadn’t liked what we were doing, they’d have told us about it pretty smartly, I can assure you of that. Sometimes people start their letters with lines like, "I know you’ll never take any notice of what I’m about to say, but ..." Well, they couldn’t be more wrong. They’re our family too, and if someone takes the trouble of writing when they think their letter’s not even going to be read, then they’re the ones who obviously care a lot. You’d be astounded at the amount of mail we get from England, Holland and Belgium. Let’s face it, The Flying Doctors has been playing overseas a lot longer than Neighbours or Home and Away and while our audience may not be quite as big, we’re solid and in there for the long haul.

‘At one stage, the producers of Holland’s biggest television sitcom were going to shoot a couple of episodes in Australia and then maroon the family in the outback and have the Flying Doctors come to rescue them. It fell through because of impossible time schedules, but it will give you an idea of how big we are in Europe and how seriously we take our task. If two brilliant actors like Lenore and Robert think it’s what we should do, and we get the right feed-back from our viewing "family" then that’s what we do.’

Lenore hasn’t had the same success in her real-life marriages, possibly because she doesn’t put as much homework into them as she does on screen. Her ‘instant-bliss’ marriage to Matt Kay was almost a carbon copy of her first failed attempt with Gary Sweet. They met by the lift at Crawford Productions. At the time he was playing Magpie in The Sullivans and Lenore had finished a stint with The Restless Years. An absolute stunner, she was first refused the role of the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl Diane Archer, because the producer and casting director thought she was too beautiful. Gary Sweet had no such reservations.

‘I’d just finished doing a voice-over when I saw Lenore standing near the lift in this terrible raincoat. It was the worst thing I’d ever seen in my life ... but the wearer looked absolutely gorgeous. I said something corny like, "Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?" In actual fact I’d never seen her on television, but I knew her face because of all the publicity. She didn’t know me at all, which was a blow to my ego. We got into the lift and by the time we reached the ground floor we had a date for lunch. We were engaged three weeks later.’

Lenore, in strictly non-Sister Kate style, said it was a case of love at first sight. ‘We seemed to chat all the time. We had similar backgrounds, we liked the same authors and we shared a similar sense of humour.’ They were married a couple of months later in the sunlit, ivy-walled garden of Gary’s parents’ home in Adelaide, only to split up soon afterwards. ‘It ended pretty quickly,’ was Lenore’s brief, and only public comment.

Her second marriage lasted five years until an equally brief statement was issued: ‘Matt and I have agreed to separate. We are still close friends and we won’t comment further.’ Perhaps a make-believe television marriage is what Lenore really wants. Certainly her life is devoted to the screen, big and little. Co-star Robert believes she is one of the most talented and dedicated actors around. ‘Lenore is a highly intelligent, extremely inventive person. She’s absolutely marvellous to work with in The Flying Doctors. We can spend hours working our way through plot ideas and character development. She really knows her job. She could become anything if she puts her mind to it. I personally believe she’ll end up directing movies in a few years. She’s really that good.’

Lenore did two and a half years training with Sydney’s prestigious Ensemble Theatre before joining the cast of The Restless Years, a soapie that pre-dated Neighbours, but showed a curious Australian talent for producing television series like sausages. She also appeared in major Australian series such as Cop Shop, The Young Doctors, and The Sullivans.

Quick pick Chapter 4 Andrew McFarlane - Chapter 5 Robert Grubb - Chapter 6 Peter O' Brien, Brett Climo - Chapter 7 Liz Burch, Rebecca Gibney - Chapter 8 Maurie Fields, Max Cullen - Chapter 9 Lenore Smith

Picture


Lenore