SHEILA FLORANCE AND ME

My first meeting with Sheila.
In the 1960s I was an impressionable seventeen-year-old keenly interested in following a career in the arts. My new boyfriend Peter Oyston took me into the ABC television studios to meet his mother who was working as a floor manager there. I knew she was an actress, a kind of alien species I had never encountered except in the movies, and I was nervous, expecting someone formidable.

My first impression was of the usual middle-aged mum – a bit dowdy with a boring suburban woman’s permed hairdo (it was done that way for a play apparently). She didn’t appear one bit unusual.
Then, ‘Hello dear,’ Sheila said sweetly as one does to little children. ‘Would you like a glass of milk?’ A horrified Peter whispered, ‘Sheil, she’s seventeen.’ (Sheil? I thought, I couldn’t imagine calling my mother by her given name).

Then the extraordinary Sheila Florance screeched, threw her head back and burst into ripples of very loud laughter. And this being Sheila, for a long time afterwards the story of her faux pas grew in the telling, accompanied by her Niagara Falls laugh. Even long after Peter and I were married she continued to act out how she mistook her ‘little daughter-in-law Helenka’ for a child.

I also had the opportunity to experience Sheila’s strong work ethic and her nurturing qualities, when as a dancer a few months after our first encounter I performed in those same ABC studios. It wasn’t only because of Peter that I joined the many young people who soaked up the warmth, fun and excitement of her bohemian household. She was the magnet, and this continued until the day she died.

Sheila Florance: On the Inside – my biography of a remarkable woman

Why do so many people still fondly remember Sheila Florance? It was her delightfully eccentric character Lizzie Birdsworth in the cult television series ‘Prisoner’ certainly. But there’s more. I find that spiritual knowledge and understanding sit somewhere near the heart of anything I write, including this biography. It’s not at all a ‘spiritual book’, yet I found myself seeking the spirit of Sheila. Her story, often humorous, sometimes tragic, was my attempt to discover that spirit, which during her life imbued the many roles she played on stage and off, yet which also endures and touches upon eternity.

I believe this enduring quality has meant that people still love her so many years after her death, from her friends who knew her in all her quixotic moods, to the Lizzie-Sheila fans world-wide, who saw her vibrant life force expressed in the character she developed with such care.
Indomitable Sheila lives again in her biography – in her humour and countless tall stories, her pioneering acting career, her courage in the face of restrictions and real-life dramas, and most of all her commitment to living life to the full.
It is available as an e-book, paperback and hardcover. If you would like a ‘signed by the author’ copy you can order it on my website.
www.helenmartineau.com.au

“I bought the book as a kind of duty to the memory of Sheila. But I simply couldn’t put it down. Helen, you really captured her in all her moods and complexity.”
Elspeth Ballantyne, friend and co-worker