Pamela Rabe Interviews from the early 1980’s – today

The Reluctant Celebrity

Pamela Rabe used to be self-conscious about her Canadian accent. But she took Australian citizenship because she wanted commitment.

Pamela Rabe probably won’t thank me for this, but she is probably about to become a household name. She is in two movies and two television series, all in the same year.

She won’t thank me because Pamela Rabe is not one of those knocking on the celebrity door. She is thrilled that her work as an actor might be recognised, but any “fame” that might come with it is an uncomfortable notion.

The two movies, already well-received, are Cosi‘, and Vacant Possession‘. The television series, both for the ABC, are Mercury‘, and The Bite. Pamela Rabe is a baddie in both the television series.

She’s not when you meet her. She is soft and smooth and tall and very striking. She is also reticent, which is why I trod the careful path first, through early days.

There was a certain effort to keep us occupied,” she said. I had asked her about her childhood in Canada, where she was the seventh of eight children. “We were sent off to things like music.

With so many children, they were able to form an orchestra of sorts. There was a trombone, a French horn, a saxophone, a flute, classical guitar, even bagpipes.

Pamela was on the French horn and must have been good, because she went on to play in a junior symphony orchestra in Vancouver. “That experience of being a group and creating something had a big impact.

What Pamela means is that her family was not particularly artistic, and so it might have been the music that put her in the right direction. All her brothers and sisters ended up as scientists or paramedics.

It sounds like a successful family,” I said.

Nobody’s a drug addict, nobody’s in jail, nobody’s dead.(more…)

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Three Chatty Women With Style

Three tall women discuss acting, memories and the pointlessness of critics.

Three women are having a natter around a restaurant table. Death is on the agenda. Ruth Cracknell, Pamela Rabe and Pippa Williamson are discussing the recent death of Williamson’s cat. The conversation moves to a dying man’s final words, cremation and fear of death. It’s a way for us break the ice.

They are all appearing in Edward Albee’s play Three Tall Women. It was typecasting. “I’m the short one. I used to be, and probably still am, five feet eight and three quarters in the old term,” says Ruth. Pippa is: “Five, 10 and a half, though I’m probably shrinking.” Pamela: “Just under six foot. I’m not aware of it until people comment. And when I see photographs of myself.”

Ruth says she wouldn’t be short for quids. Her height didn’t damage her career even in the early days. “It was great for Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. Great for radio.”

“You played the seven dwarves didn’t you, Ruth?” Pamela asks.
“Yes, I played Grumpy.”

The character of the matriach played by Ruth in Three Tall Women is inspired by Albee’s dislike for his adoptive mother. But, much to his surprise, audiences have found her fascinating and even warmed to her.

Are memories of family difficult to communicate to others or were his feelings hard to translate? Pippa says everybody’s stories about their lives are fiction.

Pamela Rabe, Ruth Cracknell and Pippa Williamson | Photo by Chris Beck

“It’s how you frame it. How you see it is not necessarily how somebody else saw it,” Pippa says. “My aunts and uncles have a totally different view of my grandmother than my mother has. Each of them had a subjective view of their mother … When you see it in the context of her life, you see what made her who she became.”

Pamela continues that thought: “And that in itself becomes a form of acceptance on behalf of the writer — that he should even choose to investigate what has gone into making this woman.” (more…)

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Carving Out Her Own Room

Actor Pamela Rabe left Canada for love. She now lives and works in both Sydney and Melbourne, yet feels she hasn’t fully moved into all our theatre spaces, writes BOB EVANS.

AS a bald statement, Virginia Woolf’s assertion that for a woman to write fiction she must have “money and a room of one’s own” can sound so blue-stocking bourgeois and so positively Bloomsbury that the first impulse is to write it off as yet another bit of British elitism.
But that impulse evaporates if you read A Room Of One’s Own or see the dramatisation of Woolf’s two lectures to the women students at Cambridge on which she based her book. The play, with Pamela Rabe acting the role of Virginia Woolf, opens this Thursday at the Belvoir Street Theatre. Rabe has appeared twice before on stage at the Belvoir. The first time her identity was concealed under a mask of Japanese inscrutability as she played the Mama San in Daniel Keene’s adaptation of Cho Cho San for Playbox. She was still a virtual unknown in Sydney when she next appeared, playing Alice B. Toklas, companion to Miriam Margolyes in the role of Gertrude Stein. (more…)

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A Woman of Substance

Pamela Rabe has been busy. Her latest roles include Norman Lindsay’s wife, a mental defective and Virginia Woolf. MICHAEL SHMITH meets an actor to be reckoned with.

Like a lot of performers, Pamela Rabe saves her extrovert side for the stage. I am not sure who the real Rabe is, but the person curled up in the opposite chair looks as if she would rather be at the dentist than an interview. “This is terrifying,” she says, eyeing my tape-recorder as if it might bite. “Anyway, it won’t pick up much, as I tend to Mumble.” ‘Mumbles — just discernible — there are, along with lengthy, Pinteresque pauses interspersed with bursts of great eloquence and a couple of surprisingly raucous gusts of laughter. There is an edge of insecurity, too; but one tempered with a quiet confidence and laconic sense of humor. Every now and then, she stops to appraise what she has said, as if she is rewinding and replaying an internal tape-recorder, and corrects it. (more…)

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Significant Others | Pamela Rabe & Roger Hodgman | The Age 1993

Fourteen years ago, when Pamela Rabe and Roger Hodgman fell in love, the sensitivities were so acute they told only their closest friends. Roger, 15 years Pamela’s senior, was the artistic director of the Vancouver Playhouse and Pamela was an inexperienced actor. Their situation was further complicated by the fact that Pamela, 19, was a student at the drama school at which Roger was teaching. They were so wary of becoming involved that they decided to do nothing about it, at least until Pamela left school. “That didn’t work,” Pamela says. “We tried.” Roger says.

After Pamela graduated, they lived together in Vancouver, and when Roger was appointed dean of drama at the Victorian College of the Arts, Pamela moved here with him. But in Australia, their careers collided head-on when Roger became first associate director of the Melbourne Theatre Company, then director. Since the MTC is the city’s major theatre company, the delicacy of Pamela’s position was obvious. “It’s a tricky area, it’s true,” Roger says. “After we came to Australia, for the longest time, we would never give an interview together (this was their first major joint interview). I don’t think it appeared in print that we were married until a couple of years ago. We just wanted to keep the thing as separate as we could.” (more…)

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Red-Hot Play And A Red-Hot Talent

On June 6, Neil Simon’s much-acclaimed play Lost In Yonkers opens at Sydney’s Theatre Royal. DEBORAH McINTOSH spoke to its star Pamela Rabe.

Pamela Rabe came to Australia from Canada in 1983, almost fresh out of acting school. “I remember at the time not knowing what I would be cast in and thinking ‘At least, maybe, I’ll be all right for a Neil Simon play’. And the funny thing is I’ve done everything but!”

Until now, that is. Rabe is to star in Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers, with Ruth Cracknell and Robert Grubb. The play won Simon the 1991 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Best Play, and ripping reviews like “Neil Simon’s laughter and tears have come together in a new emotional truth” and “The last of the red-hot playwrights just got hotter”. (more…)

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