#Marta dusseldorp body series

While her husband doesn’t have the kind of fame afforded by a prominent television career, he comes with a solid reputation of his own, a fixture in Australia’s theatre scene, having worked with the likes of Barrie Kosky and Robyn Nevin, and as resident director of the Sydney Theatre Company. In real life, 47-year-old Dusseldorp is married to Winspear, 44, a fellow actor and theatre director, and they have two daughters, Grace, 13, and Maggie, 10. “Pretty much from the moment I met him he said, ‘I’m not going to live here, in Sydney … I’m going back to Tassie’.” In the series, King is a lesbian, a mother of two, and in a relationship that’s tested by work and life like any other. The role, I’m told, also made her a “gay icon”.

#Marta dusseldorp body series

In 2015 she won the AACTA award for best lead actress in Janet King, in which she plays the pointedly smart Crown prosecutor who gives the series its name. She’s been a constant on our screens, nominated for multiple awards for her roles in the ABC television series Janet King and Jack Irish and the Seven Network’s A Place to Call Home. One assumes things about the way famous actors live, and Dusseldorp is one of Australia’s most recognised and loved. I’d been expecting something a little more starchy, a little more intimidating. I follow her down a corridor and into a crackling warm kitchen with well-used pots hanging around the stove and the promising smell of something baking in the oven. “Mabel’s humiliated that someone snuck through the gate,” Dusseldorp says cheerily and beckons me in. The tall figure of Marta Dusseldorp appears behind the knot of man and dog. He pulls back on her collar as she crossly sniffs the trespasser. Winspear introduces me to Mabel, the family groodle, who barks inhospitably. The door flies open to the scuttle of man and beast: Ben Winspear, thick dark curls leaping across his strong-jawed face, and a ginger-fleeced dog leaping onto my just-washed cords. I spot a beige side door and bang hopefully on a metal knocker. The two-storey, sandstone and brick house hints at a glamorous past – it was once the lodge and stables of a 19th-century mansion – but a grand entrance eludes me. I force open the latch and, with a growing sense of guilt, wander through a rambling English-style garden, which is looking a little scrappy at the end of winter, in search of a front door. I’m trying my hardest not to look like an intruder as I wrestle with the iron gate at the front of a mock Tudor home in a laid-back beach suburb of Hobart. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size