How Noel Coward helped launch Ginette McDonald’s career

Is it a long way from gum-chewing Lynn of Tawa to an eccentric medium? Not if you're beloved New Zealand actress Ginette McDonald.

She's currently on stage as Madame Arcati in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, currently running at Wellington’s Circa Theatre.

IMcDonald told RNZ’s Culture 101 that she got her start in acting in another Noel Coward play when she was barely 16, thanks to Wellington thespian and family friend, Bruce Mason.

“Bruce said, ‘Ginette, I'm in Noel Coward’s Private Lives at Downstage, and the girl playing the maid (I've never forgotten this) has gone off to work in a beer factory. So, we need someone to play the maid and also be the stage manager’.

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“Doing the props and everything, which wasn't something I'd ever done, but I was so thrilled. I mean, it was professional theatre, they paid a wage. It was something like $20 a week”.

Mason also had a hand in her creating her infamous character, suburban heroine Lynn of Tawa, for a late-night Downstage revue, she said.

“He said, ‘Ginette, Roger Hall and I do a late-night review here after this play. And why don't you join us and write a character?’

“And I said, ‘I don't know’. You know - gormless. He said, ‘Well, just think of a name. What's the name of your character?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I don't know, Lynn.’

“He said, ‘Well, where does Lynn come from?’ And it was just so quick. I said, ‘Tawa’, and of Tawa, because people always said they were of somewhere, not from and that was it.”

McDonald, 72, went on to forge a successful career in theatre and television as an actor, writer and producer.

Her parents were active in Wellington’s cultural scene in the 1960s and introduced her to the world of arts.

“My parents were not easy, they were difficult, and I've gone on record about how difficult they were, but one thing - they tried to be strait-laced and normal, and they were both incapable of it.

“They were free-spirited, and their great love of reading, I think, united them when times were difficult, they read voraciously, and so did most of us kids.”

Her mother who had grown up in London and was half French insisted the children were exposed to the arts, she said.

“My father wasn't good with money, but we went to everything.”

Her parents were friends with director and producer John O’Shea and McDonald was at school with his daughter Kathy - who would become a life-long friend.

“One day, at our [school] dining room table, there was a shy girl with a long plait, and I'd been told by my mother's friend to keep an eye out for Kathy, because she wasn't having a good time.

“I was showing off and saying, ‘I went to a Rolling Stones concert, and Kathy O’Shea said, very shyly; ‘they were cool, weren't they?’ And I said, ‘did you go?’ Because she seemed unlikely. She said, ‘Yes, it was cool.’

“And so, I said, you can come with me and Jane at lunch time, behind that bush and smoke or whatever naughty thing we were up to,” she said.

O’Shea, who went on to become a very successful film editor based in London, was godmother to McDonald’s daughter, actor Kate McGill.

“I named my daughter Kate after Kathy O'Shea, and Kathy was the godmother.

“Kathy has passed away now, as have so many, but I'm the godmother of her daughter, Molly O'Shea, who's a budding writer, filmmaker.”

McDonald is thrilled, she said, that McGill is forging ahead with her own career.

“She deliberately puts distance a lot of the time between herself and me, and good on her.

“But the amount of people that come up to me and say, You're Kate's mum, you're Kate McGill's mum, and I think, boy, you've really succeeded in life when you've created a child that you know is doing their thing - and no nepo baby stuff about it.”

Half a century after her Coward debut, McDonald remains an admirer of the English dramatist's work.

“He’s so amusing…and he was openly homosexual in a landscape where it was against the law - but everyone knew.

“He wasn't well born, he'd been in theatre since he was about eight, so not a street urchin exactly, but more lower middle class. But he got to the point where he was so successful, he was in the drawing rooms of royalty, he knew everyone in London.”

Never a darling of the critics, Coward’s work was often dismissed as light, she said.

“Even in his day, thespian types, or theatre critics, dismissed him because his stuff was too entertaining. There was no message behind it, it was light and airy.

“Theatre should always, I don't know, elevate people's consciousness or something? I've never subscribed to that.”

Blithe Spirit runs at Circa Theatre in Wellington until April 19.