Brooke Satchwell once told me she would rule her 40s. She’s proving herself right.

“I wasn’t born to play an ingénue, as much as people think I had the right coloured hair, or the right coloured eyes, or a big mouth,” Brooke Satchwell told me over lunch in 2015. “It’s not my language, it didn’t ever fit properly … I know I’m going to come into my own in my 40s and 50s: I know that’s when all the good shit’s going to happen.”

Well, she was right.

Brooke Satchwell stars in the new Stan series Dear Life.

The observation came during an interview that she’d somehow managed to squeeze into her hectic schedule, sandwiching it between her work on the ABC comedy panel show Dirty Laundry Live in Melbourne and on Ten’s drama series Wonderland in Sydney. The concurrent commitments demanded discipline and stamina from her, as well as requiring a weekly schedule involving a diary blocked out in 15-minute increments.

Satchwell, then 34, cheerfully admitted that she was “running on fumes”. Yet, despite the exhaustion, she was vivacious, funny, frank and self-deprecating. Also: prescient. Because now, at age 45, in the new Stan drama Dear Life, she’s front-and-centre in a role that showcases her versatility and range of skills as an actress.

Well before this starring role as Lillian in Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope’s finely calibrated drama of love, death and organ donation, it was clear that Satchwell was a charismatic and gutsy force of nature – a survivor on screen and off.

Brooke Satchwell, with co-star Jesse Spencer, in Neighbours.

Since joining the cast of Neighbours weeks before her 16th birthday, she’s been recognised as a valuable team player. In 1998, after only six months on the soap, she won a Logie for most popular new talent, the first statuette that the show had received in a decade.

A string of drama series followed, starting with Water Rats, where her guest role “as Steve Bisley’s bastard child” was bumped up to a recurring one. It was followed in the early 2000s by White Collar Blue, Tripping Over, Dangerous and Canal Road. A break from acting that lasted a few years ended with Packed to the Rafters, Wonderland and the SeaChange revival.

Brooke Satchwell with Scott Ryan in Mr Inbetween.

Amid that run, there are also some one-off standouts. An earthy, sexy paramedic and love interest for hitman Ray (Scott Ryan) in Mr InBetween. A determined, terminally ill patient endeavouring to end her suffering in The End. A jury member who’s a victim of domestic violence in the first season of The Twelve, a performance that grows into a quietly devastating portrait of repressed terror.

Beyond those series, there are also intriguing diversions. She provided a steady, compassionate narrator’s voice for Love on the Spectrum. She was a quick-witted sidekick for host Lawrence Mooney on Dirty Laundry Live. And then there was the spectacle of her cutting loose, hilariously, as Tiffany/Aunt Tiffanneh, a white woman with cornrow braids, assertively and incongruously talking black on the ABC comedy series, Black Comedy.

As the substantial and varied CV attests, Satchwell has range. She’s also had to be resilient away from her work. Her relationship with troubled actor-director Matthew Newton made headlines during court cases early in the 2000s. He was convicted of assaulting her in 2007 after pleading guilty, though the conviction was later quashed on appeal.

When the acting opportunities evaporated for a few years following Canal Road, Satchwell worked as a camera assistant, a job that led her to India in 2008, and to the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai during the deadly terrorist attack there. She’d stopped to admire the splendour of the lobby before asking a staff member for directions to the nearest toilets. That pause and query led her to out-of-the-way facilities she otherwise wouldn’t have known about, which meant that she wasn’t a visible target when gunmen stormed up from the beach.

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During the unplanned hiatus from acting, she also learned how to wire a house while working with an electrician friend, expertise that subsequently helped her get back on screen when she landed the role of sparky Frankie in Packed to the Rafters.

Her career and her life have given her a wealth of experience and Dear Life gives her room to draw on a broad range of emotions as her character ricochets between joy and grief. Happily, she’s one of an elite clique of gifted Australian actresses who can speak volumes with a glance. And along with contemporaries such as Claudia Karvan and Asher Keddie, she also has the kind of magnetic screen presence that grabs you and makes it hard to look away.

This new series examines the messy business of life in the shadow of loss, as well as the trauma that affects a host of people in the aftermath of a violent death. Satchwell’s Lillian is at the heart of that whirlpool of pain, although, as this is a Butler-Hope production (The Librarians, Upper Middle Bogan, Little Lunch, Summer Love), it pivots nimbly between darkness and light. Amid scenes of anger or discomfort, there are bursts of biting humour.

Brooke Satchwell in her Sovereign Hill costume in Dear Life.

Over six episodes, Lillian stumbles and spirals. She makes destructive and constructive decisions and deals clumsily with concerned family and friends – as well as manipulative and bitter ones – as she endeavours to find a path back to some sort of meaningful life. Sometimes that struggle plays out while she’s wearing a bonnet and hoop skirt as the job Butler and Hope have cheekily given her is playing an 1850s schoolmarm in the “living museum” at Sovereign Hill.

The skill required to pull off the shifts in Lillian, to make them feel alive and authentic, demands a lot of Satchwell, and she delivers. The combination of her talent with Butler and Hope’s sensibility is a match made in TV heaven.

That feeling about what her future might hold, expressed more than a decade ago, has proved to be spot-on.

Dear Life is streaming on Stan now. Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.

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