Danielle Cormack

Danielle Cormack's resume of screen roles ranges from 70s hippies and confused Generation X'ers, to Amazonian warriors. After winning a best actor award in 1997 for her work in Harry Sinclair's Topless Women Talk About Their Lives, the next three years saw Cormack taking on key roles in another four features - including rural romance The Price of Milk and comedy/drama Via Satellite.

Cormack began her acting career on stage. She won her first screen role as a teenager, joining the cast of successful soap Gloss. In 1992 she appeared in the first season of the long-running Shortland Street, playing a nurse from the sticks who falls for doctor Chris Warner. The theatre roles that followed included the Steven Berkoff play East, which she performed across New Zealand and at a festival in Zurich.

Over the next few years Cormack appeared in surf and crime show High Tide plus a succession of short films: co-starring opposite fellow Shortland Street alumnus Marton Csokas in stylish noir A Game with No Rules, Erik Thomson in Snap, and Joel Tobeck in hour long soldiers' tale The Call Up.

She also joined the cast of a no-budget weekend project, begun by writer/director Harry Sinclair. The bite-sized episodes which resulted became the TV show Topless Women Talk about their Lives. Playing an Auckland woman whose romantic life tends towards confusion, Cormack enjoyed the experience of not knowing what scenes she would be acting until the day. 

When Topless Women became a feature film, director Sinclair incorporated Cormack's real-life pregnancy into the plotline. After the birth of Cormack's child, the filmmakers reconvened to fake a birth scene in a veterinary clinic. Cormack's performance would win praise from Variety and Screen International, as well as the best actor award at the 1997 Film and TV Awards, part of a Topless prize tally that included best film, actor (Joel Tobeck) and supporting actor (Willa O'Neill).

In 2000 Cormack re-teamed with director Sinclair to star in The Price of Milk, a fairytale romance set on a diary farm. Cormack played the naive, "slightly eccentric" Lucinda, working on the film for three days a week, over a six-month period.

The three-year period between the two Harry Sinclair films proved busy, with big roles in another three features. Cormack appeared in quirky Australian romance Siam Sunset (which won her an acting award at a fantasy film festival in Portugal). Locally she was nominated for a best actress award after starring in the offbeat Channeling Baby, which LA Weekly writer Holly Willis found a "brash, Rashomon-style story of conflicting truths".

Writer/director Christine Parker had Cormack in mind before she had finished the script, and Cormack was encouraged to provide input into the character. Spanning several decades, Channelling Baby sees Cormack playing a woman who is blinded after protesting the Vietnam War, while the late Kevin Smith is the Vietnam vet whose fate seems to be bound up in hers. Metro magazine wrote that Cormack "lights up every scene she appears in".

The last feature from this period required becoming two people. Via Satellite (1998) is a comic portrait of a dysfunctional family, who go under the media spotlight when their daughter competes in the Olympics. Carol's underachieving twin sister Chrissy wishes she could be elsewhere.

The film marked the directorial debut of Ladies Night playwright Anthony McCarten, who raved of Cormack: "She's talented, she's beautiful, she was right for the character, she's experienced - and she's a bankable star". Critics were equally as enthused. NZ Herald critic Peter Calder wrote that Cormack shows herself "to be the kind of actress the camera loves. It's hard to escape the sensation that we are watching as a star is born." Added Variety's David Stratton: "Cormack's skilled playing as both the distressed Chrissy and the exhausted Carol contributes enormously to the film's success".

The late 90s also saw Cormack appearing in the first of many shows for American company Pacific Renaissance. She played with a French accent for an episode of Hercules ('Les Contemptibles'), while an ongoing role as Amazon woman Ephiny on Xena: Warrior Princess won her a devoted international fan following.

Since the new millenium, Cormack's screen work has concentrated on the small screen, with occasional ventures into features. In 2006 Cormack played Maddie, the mother of the main character in fantasy series Maddigan's Quest. Based around a roving circus, the programme is based on a book by children's author Margaret Mahy.

The following year was devoted to TV's Rude Awakenings, a tale of suburban culture clash created by director Garth Maxwell. Cormack's starred as Dimity Rush, a corporate woman "aspiring to that particular type of life - good car, great home, kids at the right schools, wearing the right clothes. Which is so much fun to play, because I'm in Swannies out in West Auckland."

In 2010 she won a Qantas best actress award for her turn in The Cult, playing outwardly cool as nails Doctor Cynthia Ross, who is confidante to a charismatic commune leader. On the big screen, she was playing a woman worrying about losing her husband in Separation City, Tom Scott's ensemble tale of "marriage, bad sex and requited love", and hooker sister to the anti-hero in Gregory King's A Song of Good.

In recent years Cormack's career has increasingly involved both sides of the Tasman; she has performed with the Melbourne Theatre Company, acted in legal series Rake, and recently starred in Underbelly: Razor, which turns the clock back to Sydney circa 1927. Cormack's role is that of "hearty, fearless, formidable" real-life crime-lord Kate Leigh. She rehearsed for her audition with fellow Kiwi Chelsie Preston-Crayford, who won the role of Leigh's nemesis, Tilly Devine.

Cormack has also handled costume design duties on Katie Wolfe short Redemption, and hosted reggae show Fire It Up! for now defunct music channel Alt TV.


Sources include
Peter Calder, 'A STAR is born' (Review of Via Satellite) - Weekend Herald, 10 October 1998, Page D4
Matt Grainger, 'Right script, right time for success' (Interview with Anthony McCarten) - Dominion, 19 October 1998, Page 15
Bret Ryan Rudnick, 'An Interview with Danielle Cormack'. Whoosh website. Loaded September 1997. Accessed 20 November 2008
David Stratton, 'Via Satellite' (Review) - Variety, 16 August 1998. Accessed 20 November 2008
Holly Willis, 'Winfemme Film Festival' - LA Weekly, 11 - 17 August 2000
Channelling Baby Review - Metro magazine, October 1999
'Underbelly: Razor - Kate Leigh'(Interview). Time Out Melbourne website. Accessed 17 August 2011
Topless Women Talk about their Lives Press Kit