Just a Little Yass Girl

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 945, 20 September 1957, Page 7

Just a Little Yass Girl

ACTING in a radio serial. that runs for 3000 episodes sounds like a safe enough way of earning a living. But the actress who plays a cute angle in the eternal triangle evidently stands in danger of having her eyes gouged or her hair pulled out in handfuls. According to the Australian stage and radio actress Diana Davidson (right), her portrayal of the vamp in the serial Blue Hills brought her a fan mail consisting largely of threatening letters. "You leave that Ted alone," warned one writer, "or I’ll come in and fix you myself." "It doesn’t do to play the fast and naughty flibbertigibbet,". says Miss Davidson sadly. "The women in the serials who have babies get layettes and all kinds of gifts, All I ever got was nasty letters." Perhaps for this reason, Miss Davyidson recalls little about the parts she has played in such radio serials as Simon Templar, Night Beat, Dr Paul and Life With Dexter. Listeners may identify her, however, in Mary Livingstone, M.D, She plays the part of Mary’s sister Penny. Outside her roles as the siren and the vamp, Diana Davidson describes herself as "just a little: Yass girl." She hails from the township of Yass, in the Riverina district of New South Wales. Her earliest contact with the theatre consisted of "playing Prince Charming in green velvet tights" in the occasional dramas of the local convent school. Later, in Sydney, she pursued literary ambitions. "I had visions of becoming a great poetess," she says, "and getting in the Saturday Supplements. I wrote verses about the types on the Manly Ferry and ghastly short stories of the modern school." Meantime, she earned a living as a secretary with the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s newsroom, hoping in time to become a journalist. At an impressionable 17, she saw her first professional drama. "It was a great

saga,’ she recalls, "full of blood and guts, and lasting about five hours." Young Diana knew at once the stage was for her-"The curtain going up for the show was like the curtain going up on me." After a spell at the Independent Theatre School, Miss Davidson played in various companies, including Sydney’s famed but short-lived Mercury Theatre. Today she finds most promise in Australia’s Elizabethan Theatre Trust, a subsidised venture which aims to present worthwhile theatre. With good patronage and meatier fare, she thinks it may eventually make possible "indigenous Australian artists’ who need not travel abroad to achieve success. Married last February to a Sydney businessman, Max Donnellan, whom she calls her "steadying anchor," Miss Davidson has a house in Turramurra and a log cabin retreat in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. She takes an interest in exotic foods, interior decoration: and antique furniture. Though she has devoted the last 10 of her 27 years to the stage, Miss Davidson considers it the least of the arts: "A Gielgud can never compare with a Shaw. I think a lot of people take up acting to escape. Their real life looks inadequate to them, so they enter an imaginative one which looks more desirable. Children do it all the time." Of modern playwrights, Miss Davidson likes Shaw the best. But, she adds, with a grimace, that he is also maddening and quite unrewarding for an actress. "Everyone goes away after the show saying, ‘Isn’t Shaw wonderful?’ Definitely not an actor’s playwright!" She enjoys playing to children. "I’ve played Peter in Peter Pan," she says, "and it’s fun-except for the parts where you fly onstage suspended from a piece of wire. Peter, of course, should never do wrong, but Peter usually does. He usually collects a piece of furniture on the way in. The mothers laugh, and the children cry because they think

something’s happened to Peter. And something has! She’s in the wings having hysterics." Diana Davidson, like Guy Doleman, is at present touring New Zealand in All For Mary, an English comedy set

in the French Alps-with an all-Aus-tralian cast. She will also take the part of McClancy’s wife in the forthcoming NZBS production of The Spanish Captain. —