From Play School to Prisoner: the seven-decade career of Patsy King

When I first spoke with the stage and television actress Patsy King, a telephone glitch sent her call across the office, leaving me – then a very young television critic – chasing it with youthful enthusiasm. When we finally spoke, her crisp and authoritative voice laid down the law: “I should have said, Erica Davidson calling,” she declared. “That would have fixed them.”

In many ways, those two women were inextricably connected: Erica Davidson, the very proper prison governess in the long-running, ground-breaking Australian television drama series Prisoner, and Patsy King, the actress who breathed life into her, and for whom the role would become a career highlight.

But King, who passed away this week at the extraordinary age of 95, after a brief illness, was in the fullness of her life much more than Erica Davidson could ever have handled. She was an actress with a long and storied career on the Australian stage, and an instrumental figure in what was then the emerging Australian television industry.

King was one of the original presenters of the Australian iteration of Play School. She starred in the iconic Australian drama Bellbird. She was Vera Maguire in the television adaptation of Frank Hardy’s political drama Power Without Glory. And she played a raft of women, typically prim and proper housewives, in Australian drama staples such as Homicide and Division 4.

Away from the television screen, when not working in radio drama, she became one of Australia’s most accomplished theatre actresses, starring in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and The Importance of Being Ernest. In Jan de Hartog’s The Fourposter, she played the role of Agnes, and won an Erik Award - then Melbourne’s equivalent of a Tony Award - for her work.

King was a pivotal figure in the evolution of Australian television, an industry properly born in the shadow of a decade where just one per cent of drama on local screens was locally made. The “Make It Australian” campaign of the 1970s saw actors protesting in Sydney and Melbourne, and a delegation, which included King, travelling to Canberra to lobby for what became an enduring and impactful local drama quota.

“Her early work in Crawford Productions’ cop shows and other Aussie series showed that she was an incredibly versatile actress,” television historian Andrew Mercado said. “It seemed like she could play any type of character, but after Prisoner, there was just one: the iconic, incomparable, incredibly coiffed and clipped Erica Davidson.”

Indeed, Erica Davidson and Patsy King would spend much of their lives travelling in parallel. Erica was the stylish, polished governess in Prisoner, the Ten Network’s ambitious, rule-breaking soap about women behind bars. The role would transform King into a proper TV star and place her at the centre of a passionate fandom which endures to this day.

In the fictional Wentworth Detention Centre, “Mrs Davidson” kept top dog Bea (Val Lehman) in line, sent “meemos” to The Department and tried to reform unreformable types such as Doreen (Colette Mann) and Lizzie (Sheila Florence). In stark contrast to the prison’s bricks and the prisoner’s denim uniforms, the indefatigable Erica sported a perfect upswept French bouffant and wore stylish business suits.

The success of the series internationally – it was replayed in the UK with the title Prisoner: Cell Block H and adapted in the US as Dangerous Women and in Germany as Hinter Gittern: Der Frauenknast – gave King an unexpected kind of global fame, and allowed her to reprise the role in a West End stage production of the series.

Away from her work, Patsy was married to Melbourne Theatre Company founder and artistic director John Sumner for eight years in the 1960s. She was involved in the creation of the Children’s Theatre at Monash University, and she directed at the Melbourne Writers’ Theatre at Carlton’s Courthouse Theatre. In 1953, visiting the UK, she was presented to Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.

She and I reconnected when I worked on the Fremantle remake of Prisoner, Wentworth, and the members of the original cast were invited to visit the set of the remake. Serving as Patsy’s minder for the event, my inner “fanboy” dialled up to 10, she revelled in our reconnection.

“I am at your disposal, Patsy,” I told her. “Naturally, Michael,” she replied, with the self-assurance of a woman who knew she was No.1 on the call sheet. She was charming, she spoke gently but with great authority, and she was sharp and witty. And the twinkle in her eye implied far more mischief than Mrs Davidson would ever have permitted.

Dr Mark Williams, from the Victorian Actors’ Benevolent Trust, described King as “always generous, gracious and an essential support to the whole of Melbourne theatre and television for seven decades”. And Matt Batten, the host of the fan podcast Talking Prisoner, said: “Patsy’s performance left a lasting mark on Australian television and on the hearts of fans everywhere.”

It seems strange that a role which carved out only five years of a seven-decade career becomes the final signature on such an extraordinary body of work. But the endurance of Prisoner, and Patsy’s role in it, is as much about the immense power of television as it is about the richness and nuance of her performance as Erica.

“There is a kind of invisible thread between the actor and the audience, and when it’s there it’s stunning, and there is nothing to match that,” the actress Maggie Smith once said. Patsy’s connection to Prisoner fans everywhere is testament to that notion.

King is survived by her sister, Valerie Logada.