Alison whyte yarra glen

But she insists this is the way she likes it. Freddie keeps saying, 'Do you need to stay in town? The children attended school in Perth for nine weeks and Whitlock, who runs the Yarra Glen Hotel, flew over at weekends.

Now we're doing the back-to-back two shows on at once thing and we've survived halfway, so we're all right, we're doing great," she says. Whyte plays a s housewife confronted by neighbours who don't want her home sold to a black family and, 50 years on, a lawyer for a white family buying into the now-black suburb.

The actor says the play has plenty of moments of black comedy, but must be played straight to make the laughs work. After Rising Water, which had some light moments but was essentially a forensic look at materialism, consumerism, ambition, the Aussie ego and disillusionment with contemporary ways of life, Whyte now has a chance to draw on her well-established comedy skills. She played a flame-haired producer with a temperament to match. Though its first season premiered 17 years ago, Whyte's po-faced schoolmarm of a character, who struggled in vain to maintain order in an out-there newsroom, is fondly remembered by many.

And it is still seen by many a media-studies student. The character set the tone for a career in which Whyte went on to establish herself as a performer with an impressive range. As the fraught, grieving Queen Elizabeth, she was gut-wrenchingly believable, and the role demanded huge amounts of intense emotion. It's funny. If you're playing someone who's grieving, you do tend to lose weight. There's a physical response; grief is a very physical emotion.

A world away from this work is TV, but she has excelled in that medium, too. She won a Logie for her work in Frontline and had a longstanding role in Foxtel's Satisfaction, playing a housewife-turned prostitute. Bruny Island: A home that guarantees goosebumps. AFL stars notch premier off-season property trades. The timber design, stunning views and short walk to the beach had drawn in a lot of interested buyers, she added.

Whyte and Whitlock, who live in Yarra Glen, sold the contemporary pad because they had become too busy with work to travel to Tasmania. We even had chooks in the pub! We had six people on the roof hosing it down because there was fire all around the town.

Later, she learned that Whitlock had driven back past burning tree heads and fallen power lines along Skyline Road, emerging from the smoke "like Conan the Barbarian" to fix a broken water pump on a friend's property and to rescue a stranded neighbour. Tasmanian-born Whyte married Whitlock in after a love affair that began "at first sight" in when the pair were students at the Victorian College of the Arts.

The couple have lived in Yarra Glen, where they have "10 rather crispy acres at the moment", since Before that they were in inner-city Abbotsford, where they owned The Terminus Hotel for many years, but a frightening incident in which Whitlock was assaulted with a knife while walking the family dogs was enough to prompt the move away from the city.

When she's not juggling parental and landlady duties, Whyte somehow finds time to squeeze in an acclaimed acting career. Optimism, written by Tom Wright and directed by Michael Kantor, retells Voltaire's classic satire of enlightenment insanity through a naive, cheerful man-child who tries to stay optimistic in a world gone horribly wrong.

It's a really good piece of theatre and I'm really excited about presenting it to an audience. And it's fun, which is fortunate because we have to live with it for such a long time. It's not like we're doing a three week show and that's it. The show has been invited to the Edinburgh Arts Festival this year and to Sydney next summer. Some time in between, Whyte will begin work on the third series of Satisfaction, Foxtel's raunchy drama about six prostitutes in an upmarket brothel.

Whyte recently won a pay TV Astra Award for most outstanding actress for her turn as Lauren, a something divorcee who turns to prostitution after the break-up of her marriage. It's almost like my skin is a costume itself. I'm so glamorous in that show, I'm totally unrecognisable in real life. I love it.