Janet Andrewartha was a magical actor to watch – and a beautiful, classy friend | Elly Varrenti

There was a scene in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s 1986 production of Tom & Viv – about the life of TS Eliot and his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot – where Vivienne, played by Janet Andrewartha, stood on stage clasping the strings of a bunch of balloons. Broken by years spent in a psychiatric institution, Vivienne remains resolute, and hopeful too, somehow. When Janet released the balloons to the sky, it felt as if the audience were all holding their breath, like a single organism.

I’d seen Janet on stage before, but this scene sealed the deal: she was capable of magic. The late playwright Michael Gurr once described the experience of watching Janet in one of his plays as “stopping time”. But it was her work on Prisoner that made her a rising star in the early 80s and her years on Neighbours made her a proverbial household name. Like a lot of those actors, particularly the older ones, she was so skilled that she could make even the soapiest of lines sing true.

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Janet was my friend of 40 years. Tributes are flowing and social media is flooded with heartfelt expressions of praise and condolences, an urgent need to express how much she meant to us all. I’ve spoken to lots of her friends and theatre comrades since she died so unexpectedly last week , within three months of her cancer diagnosis. The same words – masterful, musical, funny, clever, beautiful, classy and gifted – keep on coming up.

Everyone had a crush on Janet. I had a crush on Janet, before I even met her. Her reputation loomed large at the National Theatre drama school when I started there in 1982, from where she’d graduated three years earlier. How did she manage to appear so self-possessed and confident without any demonstrable vanity or visible annoying neuroses? And she was kind too. Charming. Whip smart. A marvellous mentor to young actors. Of course, she wasn’t great at everything – she wasn’t that great a dancer.

Janet and her two younger siblings, Kerry and Peter, grew up in inner Melbourne. Her talent was recognised early. She got all the leads in the school musicals. She was a political animal; we talked politics as much as we did theatre. She was often sending some article or other urging me to “please read and respond when you get the chance”.

There was always a passion project on the back burner she wanted to produce. I worked with her on a project about domestic violence for schools. She worked tirelessly, relentlessly even. I couldn’t keep up. “El, it’s always hard but we have to keep going, we’ll all be dead soon,” she’d say.

She was working on a screenplay up until recently that was set between Ireland and Australia, about Irish girls who were forced to relinquish their children in the 1950s. She asked me to edit it for her. “I know it’s hard to tell a friend if their work stinks,” she said – but it didn’t stink. Far from it.

To have experienced Janet’s work in a Gurr or a Rayson, a Murray-Smith or a Miller, a Shakespeare or a Brecht, meant you could forget you knew her well in real life, that you’d recently had too many whiskeys together whilst sharing stories about ageing parents or boasting or moaning about your adult kids. She was a bloody brilliant mother to Sarah and Eloise.

On one of my birthdays, she didn’t send a bunch of Australian natives as usual but a classy wooden-handled umbrella. The accompanying card read: “I hear your street is under water.” I live in regional Victoria and there’d been floods that year.

Thirty plays. Three films. Sixteen television shows. Two acting awards. What’s in a number? Seventy-two years of life, that’s what.

Janet and I had a texting shorthand that we used increasingly by way of letting the other know we were thinking of them but were too crazy, busy or lazy to call. It did the job.

Janet: LOVE

Me: LOVE