Rhonda Burchmore’s husband threatened divorce, but she still went on the ‘horrific’ show

2 months ago 6

Life of a Showgirl is Taylor Swift’s latest album, but it could just as easily be Rhonda Burchmore’s autobiography (actually, that one is called Legs 11: My Life in Front of the Lights and Backstage).

In fact, Burchmore has been such a stage and screen presence for so long that she received an OAM for service to the performing arts back in 2014 – and has continued working steadily since. She has five albums and has played to halls across Australia and the world, treading the boards on Broadway and the West End, the Sydney Opera House and every theatre in Melbourne.

Rhonda Burchmore has been in showbusiness for more than four decades.

She’s been on everything, from Hey Hey It’s Saturday to I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here – Burchmore came third, but she calls the experience “horrific”. More of that later.

Her stage roles have included Into the Woods, Mame, Annie Get Your Gun, Guys & Dolls, La Cage Aux Folles, Hairspray and Sister Act, to name just a few. But you probably don’t need me to tell you who Rhonda Burchmore is. She’s been everywhere, in everything, and her signature red hair and six-foot height makes her one of Australia’s most recognisable celebrities.

And OK, OK, the legs. She’s tall and svelte, and when she’s performing in cabaret shows, which she often is, her long legs garner attention. Burchmore knows the word “leggy” is usually applied to her – she titled her memoir Legs 11, after all. But she’s done with that. “Every time I’d go out, it was about my legs, and it used to drive me nuts,” she says. “People ask me if my legs are insured ... I am insured, but what use is this?” She mimes torsoless legs, walking her fingers across the tablecloth.

Rhonda Burchmore says she loved the sensible shoes in Sister Act.

Today her legs – and arms, come to that – are swathed in an emerald green pantsuit as we sit down to lunch at Bar Carolina, in its fifth week under hospitality legend Karen Martini’s purview. Burchmore has just finished a run as Sister Mary Lazarus in Sister Act, and she says she loved the baggy habit and sensible shoes. “It was the most low-maintenance I’ve been,” Burchmore says. “They said ‘no make-up’, but I said, ‘no, no, no, we’re going to have a bit of mascara and foundation’.”

More full skirts await in her upcoming role, as Countess Lily in a stage production of the animated musical Anastasia. Linda Cho was nominated for a Tony for her costume design when the show opened on Broadway in 2017, and Burchmore says her character’s jewel tones and luxe fabrics are a knockout.

“It’s all those beautiful silks and velvets. Opera Australia – because I’m a certain height – they’re having to make stuff for me, but they’re so strict about the printed stuff, they’re actually hand-painted to match the original.”

She’s performing alongside 82-year-old Nancye Hayes, without whom Burchmore might have stuck it out as a teacher after finishing her education degree at the University of New England. Burchmore’s older sister, Michelle, was a dancer, and at the age of 16 she was cast in a show called Irene. The family drove down from Punchbowl in Sydney to Melbourne to watch her perform at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

“It was this is a very strange, kind of crazy moment because in that cast was a very young Nancye Hayes. And that was the moment that I saw this professional show of Irene with Julie Anthony, Noel Ferrier, and I went, that’s the only thing I want to do.”

Burchmore gained her degree with distinction to make her father happy – “He said, ‘Get yourself a real job, forget this showbusiness caper’” – but she only lasted six months as a teacher. Agentless and not in the actors’ union, she “fibbed” her way into an audition for They’re Playing Our Song and, despite her fibs, found herself cast alongside Jacki Weaver and John Waters, who remain close friends of Burchmore’s to this day.

That keeps coming up, actually – friends, who remain in Burchmore’s orbit whether they met recently or decades ago. The 65-year-old has a genuine warmth about her that draws people, including the famous chef in whose restaurant we are dining.

“Where’s Karen?” she asks, making a windswept entrance into the restaurant. “Karen!” Burchmore and Martini embrace, and Martini says her revamp of the restaurant is going well, with raves from diners and a full booking calendar.

Neither Burchmore nor I have had the chance to taste the new menu before, and we decide to lean into the fruits of the sea – a shared plate of six oysters with mignonette, followed by fried calamari and the fish of the day, which is blue-eye (her) and tuna tartar and tagliolini with crab (me).

Blue-eye with chopped salad at Bar Carolina.

Burchmore, as it turns out, loves fish – and fishing. She and her husband have a property on the Gold Coast, where Burchmore loves nothing more than to put her hair up in a ponytail and wander down to the beach, barefaced and in sunglasses, to cast a line.

What she’d really love to do is host a fishing show, in which she would host famous guests, then cook their bounty outside in some gorgeous locale. This is Rhonda Burchmore, so of course, “it’d be glamorous”. She even has a name for it: A Fish Called Rhonda.

This is not entirely speculative (though calling my bosses at Channel Nine: the concept is available). She was lined up to do just such a show off the back of I’m a Celebrity.

So, what was so “horrific” about her jungle encounter?

“I’d seen some of it, and I thought, ‘oh, it’s all smoke and mirrors’,” she says. “It’s not.

“I’m not bitching about them at all, but seeing how it’s made and filmed, they are very lucky that they have not had major incidents and accidents there because it’s not that well trialled out.”

Her husband had warned her against the reality show. “They’d asked me three times to go on it. He said, ‘I’ll divorce you if you go on that show’. Well, I went on the show.”

Luckily, she and her husband, psychiatrist Dr Nikolai Jeuniewic, remain married, but she does not look back on that time with fondness. “The things you have to do because of the peer pressure to get food for the camp when you’ve got all these people like Billy Brownless and Dale Thomas, these footballers, who are really hungry and get really angry when they don’t get fed.”

She has not rewatched her season. “In the end, I got two things. I raised a lot of awareness about my late sister’s very rare motor neurone disease, and I got to go on safari after it.”

Then there’s the other matter of when the show was filmed.

After six weeks in the camp, the remaining contestants were permitted to have a visit from a loved one – in Burchmore’s case, her daughter, political journalist Lexie Jeuniewic.

“I said, ‘What’s going on back at home?’ and that was the year of all those fires. She said – I still remember, she said, ‘There is this thing called corona.’ ‘Corona? Like beer?’ And then that was the beginning, when we flew out from South Africa, I started seeing a lot of people wearing masks.”

She was at the Melbourne grand prix the day it was cancelled, sensationally marking the beginning of Melbourne’s COVID lockdowns – what Burchmore calls “the beginning of the end”.

With theatres closed and TV production halted, Burchmore was forced to not work for the first time in more than 40 years.

Rhonda Burchmore is starting in Anastasia.

Even now, she says, audiences aren’t what they were before the pandemic. It’s hard to fill a theatre the way it was in the before times, with the cost of living biting and audiences out of the habit of live performance. But she also says behaviour is different.

“I’m not saying in general, but a lot of them now might have been on Netflix and all of that social media on their lounge at home, so a lot of the young kids coming don’t know what theatre is.” Audience members on their phones is a maddening – but not uncommon – occurrence.

It’s not just the audience who have changed over the years, either. She says the age-old showbiz mantra “the show must go on” does not always resonate with today’s younger performers.

“Even in Sister Act, I had some of the younger ones going, ‘Rhonda, why do you turn up?’ Because, you know, if you said, ‘Oh, I’ve got a bit of a sore throat’, they’d say, ‘Why don’t you go home?’ and I go, ‘Well, no, I take a Nurofen, and I get on Dr Footlight’. And I’d say to them, ‘I’m not being a martyr, it’s just that’s how I’ve grown up’. And these days, that’s one thing that does annoy me is this kind of attitude that, yeah, sure, they have to take care of themselves, but it’s a little too precious sometimes.”

She’s sure in Anastasia, at least two actors will be making sure the cast go the distance, eight shows a week.

“I had this conversations with [producer] John Frost. He says it’s very, very different. There’s nothing you can do. And he did make a joke. He said, ‘well, with you and Nancye Hayes being old school, hopefully you’ll stand at this stage door every night and tick them off and make sure they come in’.”

There seems to be little chance of Burchmore herself needing a chaperone to make sure she turns up. When we meet, it’s only been a week since she returned from a trip to Egypt – and in those seven days, completely jetlagged, she’s performed five shows.

“Even though I’m at a certain age, I still adore getting on stage. The roar of the crowd, it still doesn’t get old. In Sydney the other day, we had the sold shows at the State Theatre. I just thought, this is it. It’s what I love to do, and I’ve no intention of stopping doing it anytime soon.”

There are still plenty of roles Burchmore would love to tackle, including that of ageing screen doyenne Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. I ask her if she liked the recent Melbourne production, in which Sarah Brightman was widely panned in the role.

Burchmore pauses. “Not much.”

She has seen some of the greats in the role, including Patti LuPone and Betty Buckley, who originated the role of Grizabella in the Broadway run of Cats. Buckley is pretty stiff competition for anyone to measure up to.

“When I was in London doing Hot Shoe Shuffle, and she was doing Norma in Sunset, she was as fascinated with my tap dancing show as I was [with her]. If someone said, What is the best live musical theatre performance? [It would be] to see her. And she was as a mad as a loon, and we became best friends over there.”

Of course they did.

Anastasia opens at the Regent Theatre December 20 and in Sydney’s Lyric Theatre April 7.