Alan White, the director, didn’t have a problem in casting Hugh: ‘When I talked to people about who I was casting in the film, I’d say I’ve found this great actor Hugh Jackman and they’d go, “Isn’t he the song and dance guy?” And I’d go, “No, he’s a great actor.” And I think that’s what Hugh is all about. He has this wonderful chameleon quality.’
Hugh believed at the time that this was one of the most challenging and possibly best pieces of work he had done. He felt there was a level of truth and rawness to the movie that required an intensity of acting he hadn’t been asked to do before. It was an emotional and challenging role for an actor so new to the art of film. He invested his heart and soul in the production and it made him feel fantastic as an actor: ‘It really did, and I probably exorcised a few demons. Maybe some I didn’t realise were there. And read into that as you will in terms of the parallels with my own life.’ For his performance, he won the 2000 Film Critics Circle Australia (FCCA) award for Best Male Actor and was also nominated for the 1999 Best Actor by the Australian Film Institute.
‘There is no star system in Australia. Everyone is more equal there and maybe that makes Australian actors a little cooler and not as snobby as many in Hollywood. I’ve done lots of musicals, and so had Russell Crowe.
‘Many of us have acted in more or less terrible soaps. But that’s all part of being an actor, you take what you get and don’t try to make big films and be “hot” all the time. I also think that it’s important not to take on a project just for the money, you have to like what you do as well.’
Hugh Jackman
CHAPTER FOUR
Soul Mates
Hugh met his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, while on the set of his first notable role in television on the popular show Correlli in 1995. Unlike the young Jackman, 35-year-old Deborra-Lee was already a big name in Australia. Winner of the Film Critics’ Circle Best Actress Award for the movie Shane, she had also acted alongside Meryl Streep in A Cry in the Dark, as well as with Patrick Bergin in Act of Betrayal. In addition, like most female Australian actors at the time, she also made an appearance in the now cult TV show Prisoner Cell Block H. She also appeared onstage in LA alongside Ed Harris in Scar too and scored a major part in the cop drama Street Legal, with Brian Dennehy and Bill Paxton. Just before Deborra-Lee starred in Correlli, she again hit it big when she starred in the TV series Fire, Australia’s version of the UK hit, London’s Burning.
Correlli, though, was the show that ultimately changed her life. ‘I was playing a prison psychiatrist,’ she said, ‘and Hugh was my crim that I had to sort out, and within the script there was meant to be a chemistry between us, and I remember when we first started working together that he was such an exciting actor to work with. We developed this wonderful repartee with each other and I really enjoyed working with him. I don’t think it was love at first sight; it was just a respect, I think, for the work.’
Deborra-Lee’s upbringing in many ways mirrored Hugh’s, except that while he spent most of his early life living in leafy suburbia, she was on the road. Like Hugh, her own childhood was turned inside out by the loss of a parent, but in her case, the loss was accidental, with the death of her father in a car accident when she was eight years old. Despite the tragic loss at such a young age, Deb described her own childhood, raised alone by a working mother, as a happy one, but with one abiding feeling: ‘I think I always felt different because I wasn’t conventional. I didn’t have a father and I didn’t have brothers and sisters and, you know, I always remember everyone had a brown paper bag with a Vegemite sandwich. I always had lunch money, because my mother worked, but I always wanted a brown paper bag.’
She was schooled early in a gypsy kind of lifestyle as she constantly moved with her mum who was building a working life to make ends meet. Deborra-Lee had attended 12 different schools by the time she graduated, which must have been tough on someone so young: ‘I moved around a lot. I think on a kid it is hard because you come into a new environment and you’re the new person, and there’s all these groups set up.’
In spite of being a reasonably confident and creative child, Deborra-Lee often went out of her way to perform in the classroom to make friends and wrestle the attention in her direction: ‘I was sort of the class clown. I was always the new kid because I went to a lot of schools, so I had to be funny. And I thought, oh, people laugh at this, maybe I’ll just make a living out of it, become an actress. It was a very flippant thing.’
Her mother, Fay Duncan, who re-married when Deb was 11, was a strong and determined woman who went on to become director of the Bone Marrow Donor Institute in Melbourne (of which Hugh and Deborra-Lee later both became patrons). It was Fay, Deb said, who instilled in her the no-nonsense confidence she exudes: ‘She made me believe I could do anything I wanted. My healthy self-esteem definitely comes from her. So I grew up with the idea that women can be movers and shakers in the male dominated world.’
She also credits her mother with the generosity of spirit that Hugh later said was one of the things he loved about Deb: ‘I’m the daughter of a single mum, and in Australia at that time it was very much a macho male-dominated society, but the way I grew up, my mum was the boss, and it means you don’t need to rely on a hunter-gatherer. You go and hunter-gather yourself and create your own autonomy. Mum worked in business: she wasn’t burning her bra, she was just doing it, running the show, and so I guess that’s where I saw that strength.’
Deborra-Lee had wanted to be an actress ever since she could remember, but taking on board advice from her mother about having a back-up plan, she started out working as a secretary in the news department at Channel Nine. She then moved onto a current affairs programme and then, very much like Hugh, considered becoming a journalist until the acting bug took over.
An independent and successful spirit, by her late teens, Deborra-Lee travelled to London and by the age of twenty was at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York studying acting: ‘It just seemed the most exciting place to be.’ The drama school had trained Kim Cattrall, Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn. ‘I became immersed in creativity and learning. Drama school was so much about empowering the person and giving them the tools and techniques and confidence to do what they wanted to do; I didn’t stop working.’ There, she was briefly married but has stated it was just a quickie to get her green card, and she doesn’t talk about it much. She was a rare creature in the Big Apple, and at that time most Americans knew very little about Australia. They would often say to her on hearing her accent, ‘Oh, you speak English so well,’ as if Australia was not an English-speaking country.
After four years she returned to Australia where she worked non-stop, typically cast in ‘tough cookie’ roles until a car crash in 1985 put her out of action for nine months. ‘It was interesting because it was like, right when I was just sort of back from drama school, and I just had so many films lined up and there was a lot going on, and then bang – I had a broken ankle, a compound fracture and I had skin grafts and it really set me back. It was the first time in my life that I had a sort of real reality check, and it just stopped me dead. I didn’t know if I was going to walk again, never mind work as an actress, and my face was crap and my head was aching. I looked like Elephant Woman.’
Determined and on crutches, she auditioned for her landmark cinema role in the 1988 Australian film Shame, in which she played a feisty lawyer riding a motorbike through the outback. ‘That was probably my most favourite job, and I think the experience of me having to sit for nine months waiting to recover from the accident added to the depth of that character.’
When the film was released in the US, she returned to join the other Aussie hopefuls battling to make it in Tinseltown. She spent five years bouncing between Los Angeles and her homeland. In LA she lived with actor Tom Burlinson, and had a ‘blast’, amusing herself by reading scripts by the pool of his Bel Air mansion. ‘Very Hollywood,’ she said. Yet she decided to return home when her breakthrough rol
e in California never came and she became concerned about her lifestyle: ‘There were kids in Africa starving and I was worried about the size of my butt.’
She returned to Australia for the role that would change her life, personally and professionally: Correlli. ‘A psychic told me that if I go back to Australia everything will work out, and she was right,’ she said. ‘I met the man of my dreams.’ And Deborra-Lee got to work with that man on the set of the prison drama. As she mentioned, though, she didn’t believe it was love at first sight, although Hugh definitely thought it was: ‘Yes, and it happened to me. I was twenty-seven, single and not expecting to get married. Then I met Deb. She was very cool and I had a huge crush on her.’
His first abiding memory of her was the initial morning when a car picked him up to go to rehearsals. Deborra-Lee was in the front seat. ‘I thought, that’s cool, I like a person who sits in the front seat. And all I knew of her was from her work, and that she was a big star and she was my leading lady. She kind of took off her seat belt, swung around, pulled down her sunglasses, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Deborra-Lee Furness” and I said, “Hi, Hugh Jackman.”’
On the second morning, the same driver picked up Hugh, but this time Deborra-Lee wasn’t in the car. The driver, who must have seen the disappointment on his face, blurted out, ‘Oh sorry, Mr Jackman, I was given instructions to pick her up second.’ Hugh smiled to himself as they drove to her home, thinking how on that first day, he had been blown away by her forthright, down-to-earth manner, but underneath it all she had a little bit of a star in her as well. He really liked that and said, ‘I found that sexy.’
The sexual tension between Deb’s character and Hugh’s was evident to all during the series and it didn’t take long for this to bubble over into real life. ‘I had a crush on Deb almost from the moment we met. I was embarrassed because I didn’t think my feelings would be reciprocated. Here I was, a fresh-out-of-college twenty-seven-year-old actor. Her New Year’s resolution that year was “no actors and no one under thirty.” I was Deb’s worst nightmare.’ For this reason, he deliberately didn’t go near her for a while, trying hard to give her space even though he was very attracted to her.
Deborra-Lee confessed she did have the ‘no actors and no one under thirty’ rule, but it was due to the fact that she was busy working and she wasn’t looking for a relationship. She quickly broke that rule when she met the most extraordinary man ever. There was a connection, a meeting of hearts and minds. ‘To be honest, I never thought I would end up with a younger man, but Hugh was more mature and worldly than most forty-year-old men I know.’
They became good mates, spending a lot of time giggling like two school kids at the back of the class, but Hugh continued to hold back his private feelings because he wasn’t sure if she felt the same way towards him. After a while, he decided to go for broke and hatched a plan to woo the woman he had fallen so much in love with. He organised a dinner party at his house for about ten people from Correlli and invited Deborra-Lee. His father, a great cook, gave him the recipes for a good old-fashioned ‘how to impress a girl’ meal. The menu consisted of pumpkin soup, snapper and for dessert his old man’s signature dish, crêpes Suzette. All day, Hugh slaved away, getting everything prepared and creating just the right atmosphere. The hopeless romantic didn’t leave anything to chance.
All in all, it turned out to be a strange but rewarding night. Just before he was about to serve the crêpes, Deb’s mobile phone rang. It was one of her very famous friends, who informed her that he was outside Hugh’s house in a limo with Mick Jagger, and Mick was requesting she came down to party.
Inwardly, of course, Hugh was gutted that the girl of his dreams was about to get whisked away by one of the most famous front men in the world. However, he put a brave face on it and went to get Deb’s coat. Unbelievably, she told him she wanted to stay. He was stunned. ‘But Mick Jagger is outside my house on Beaconsfield Place in Melbourne, waiting for you. What are you doing here? Go with him, enjoy yourself.’
But Deb had made up her mind about who she wanted to party with, and it wasn’t the ageing singer. She replied to the invitation: ‘Tell Mick I’m having dinner with Hugh Jackman,’ then she hung up.
Hugh’s legs went to jelly. He thought, wow, how cool is this woman? He went into the kitchen to calm down and get the desserts ready. After a few minutes, she came in to give him a hand. He finally got up the courage to tell her how he felt; he just sort of blurted it out. And to his great relief, she told him she felt the same way. It was as if they had both met each other at the perfect time and were meant to be together.
Instantly, they became an item and went everywhere together. They formed an invisible bond, a rare thing that would deepen and endure as they embarked on what would become a grand odyssey for them both – ‘When I met Debs, I just felt I could be myself completely. When you really meet someone that brings out the best in you, it is a really joyous thing.’
Their relationship shifted quickly from best friends, to lovers, to soul mates. Deb proved to be the perfect match for Hugh. He was naive at times, new to the business, while she had an intoxicating can-do attitude and a knack for making people laugh and feel at ease. ‘She’s pure passion; she has more fun than everyone on the planet. She’s brought out a lot of the confidence to be who I am. She looked a lot like Kim Novak, but she’s definitely from the Ethel Merman school with her humour. I’m a little behind in the wit department, and she’s always saying, “Come on, Hugh, keep up, keep up!”’
As their romance became more serious, Deb took Hugh home to meet her mother for the first time. Fay nearly died because Hugh was covered in fake tattoos and was sporting the mullet haircut of his character in Correlli. Yet after 30 minutes of interrogating him, Fay completely changed her mind. She knew this good-looking young man was the one to make her only daughter the happiest woman in the world.
‘This is no act either,’ said Fay. ‘They have the most wonderful and genuine relationship. They see the world through the same eyes. If I had to design a perfect son-in-law, husband and father, he would be Hugh Jackman.’
People in the street began to take notice too as their relationship became public. On one occasion the pair were shopping together in a supermarket, walking around arm in arm. When the check-out girl looked up and saw them, she blurted out to her colleague, ‘I knew it was too good to be acting!’ with reference to their on-screen romance in Correlli.
A few months later, Hugh showed another huge leap of faith when he proposed to Deb: ‘No matter how much I thought I knew 100 per cent, you never really know until the moment you ask. I’m an actor so I like to exaggerate things and I was determined that the proposal was going to be good enough that I wouldn’t have to exaggerate it. I was working in a show in Melbourne and I had Mondays off so I suggested we go for a walk in the Botanical Gardens. There is a café there where I decided to do it two weeks earlier. So I was nervous and had a mate of mine set up a table with a tablecloth and roses and champagne and breakfast and everything was beautiful so that when we turned the corner right by the lake with the backdrop of Melbourne, she saw the table and said, “wow, they must be doing a Vogue Living shoot or something” and I said “surprise!” She started to cry, which was not in my plan so I knew I had to ask her right away and I did. It turns out there were 40 schoolgirls hiding behind a tree because my friend had seen them coming and made them wait so they wouldn’t interrupt us. They finally come out and say “what’s happened?” and Deb got on the table and shouts, “I said yes” and they all applauded. That was probably the most romantic thing I’ve ever done and I just felt a complete sense of relief and joy; it was the best feeling in the world. From that moment on, I felt like I had gotten all that dating crap out of the way and we could get on with our lives.’
Hugh designed the engagement ring himself. He was nervous and didn’t really have a clue about jewellery or diamonds, but he knew that he wanted the ring to mirror Deb’s personality. He
told the jeweller that he didn’t know what he was doing or looking for, so he just sat the guy down and explained in detail every nuance of his future wife’s personality. It took an hour and a half and he later admitted that he must have bored the guy stupid, but in the end the man said, ‘Yeah okay, here’s the ring, here’s the diamond.’
The couple planned to get married in the spring of 1996. ‘You know, there is a fair amount of thinking before you get married, like who is going to be my teammate on this trip? And then I met Deb and I thought, oh, this is it. I’ve never met a woman like her. She was a force of nature. I can’t tell you how blessed I am to be with her. She makes me laugh. I’m totally inspired by her.’
On their wedding rings they jointly agreed to have matching inscriptions in ancient Sanskrit: Om paramar mainamar, which translates as ‘we dedicate our union to a greater source’.
Hugh explained the idea behind the inscription, which was very close to both their hearts. ‘Deb and I studied at the School of Philosophy in Melbourne and we both believed in the concept of serving others. We had this idea that nothing, no person, no union of two people, no country, is greater than the Absolute. That our life should be dedicated to the service of the absolute, the service of truth, the service of God.’
Their union itself became recognised as the Wedding of the Year in Melbourne in 1996, and it was reported that a famous women’s magazine paid 30,000 Australian dollars for the privilege of publishing the couple’s photos from the happy day. The ceremony took place on Saturday, 11 April at St John’s church in Melbourne. The reception, held in the historic Rippon Lea Estate in the same city, was a lavish event with all Hugh’s family present. Xen Pardoe-Miles, the organiser and calming factor behind some of the biggest weddings in Australia, commented that even to this day, it was one of the best weddings he has ever done.
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