Celia Ireland’s younger daughter Maggie is following her footsteps into acting. She’s currently finishing her second year of study at NIDA. Celia has made sure that Maggie’s got the full picture of how hard acting is as a career – that employment rates are low, and that there’s an element of luck involved. But after decades in the industry, Celia knows that luck has been on her side.
“I feel really lucky that I got a crack at it with All Saints and then another crack with Wentworth and now another crack with Return to Paradise,” she tells TV WEEK.
“I mean, that’s pretty, pretty fabulous.”
In Return to Paradise, 60-year-old Celia plays retired teacher-turned-police volunteer Reggie Rocco. Celia herself studied teaching, “a long time ago”, and when she moved from her home town of Newcastle to Sydney, she planned to work as a casual teacher and do acting as a hobby.
“And then the opposite happened,” she remembers.
“I ended up going from acting job to acting job, and teaching became the casual job.”
This is the third season of Return to Paradise, a spin-off of British series Death in Paradise, and it’s a big one for Reggie. After a conversation with her colleague Felix (Aaron McGrath) about development in Dolphin Cove, she decides to run for the local council. Viewers will see Reggie campaigning – and they’ll see election day.
“It was really interesting because I myself on the odd occasion have gotten revved up and thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to run for local council, I’m going to oppose the AI data centre they want,’” Celia reveals.
“And so I really understand that interest in trying to help people whose voices aren’t always heard or even cared about.
“What I love about the show is that it does delve into some really interesting stuff. It’s not heavy-handed, but I do think it weaves difficult/interesting topics into a very palatable series.”
Another thing Celia loves about Return to Paradise is getting to shoot scenes outdoors on the beautiful New South Wales coastline. The crime show is filmed north of Wollongong, as well as on Sydney’s northern beaches.
“It’s a nice change from my last big show where I was in teals and stuck in a fake prison yard,” Celia says. “It’s a delight, really.”
Playing Liz Birdsworth in Wentworth was the role that won Celia her first TV WEEK Logie, in 2016, for Most Outstanding Supporting Actress. But for Celia, who’s mum to Maeve as well as Maggie with husband Tim, shooting Wentworth in Melbourne for seven seasons over six years was “a huge journey”.
“I look back and think, ‘I don’t quite know how I did it,’” she admits. “Six years of down and back – it was pretty full-on. My husband held the fort back in Sydney with two little girls. But it was a wonderful opportunity.”
During season six, Liz was diagnosed with dementia. It was an emotional storyline, and one Celia admits she wasn’t thrilled about at first.
“Pino Amenta was our producer and I remember him saying to me at a function one night, ‘Oh, we’re thinking of making Liz develop dementia,’” she says.
“And I remember thinking, ‘Oh well, that’s the way they’re writing me out.’ And selfishly I thought, ‘What a shame, because she really is like the mother.’ And then I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Story-wise, that’s a really fertile ground for the other characters.’”
As Wentworth fans know, Liz died at the end of season seven, after being “euthanised by Boomer”, as Celia puts it. But Celia says there were originally plans for Liz to survive the final episode of that season.
“They were going to shoot a different ending,” she says. “There was an idea. But I remember thinking it wouldn’t work. The dementia was getting more and more pronounced.
“I went to [the producers] and had a meeting and said, ‘Look, I think I’m done here.’ My daughter was about to do her HSC and I just wanted to be home. And I just thought, ‘It’s time to go.’”
Now, with Wentworth: Halfway Home coming out, Celia says she “cannot wait” to see it.
“I’m quite good mates with Katrina [Milosevic], who pays Boomer – she’s the central character – and I was talking to another mate, beautiful Jacquie Brennan, who plays Linda Miles, and we were talking about what a fantastic kind of anti-hero Boomer is. I just think Boomer is an absolute genius character. I reckon it’s going to be awesome.”
As for Return to Paradise, Celia would love it if it just kept going, like the long-running original series Death in Paradise. She’s been working on developing her own TV series as well as a feature film, and would like to continue acting and writing.
“I’d be so stoked if Return to Paradise just kept on rolling. I might be close to 70 by the time it finishes, if we follow the British blueprint. That would be my heaven, to do the series and then in the downtime to write.”
Throughout her career, Celia has come up with plans for what she’d do if she wasn’t acting. As well as being a qualified primary school teacher, she’s trained with Relationships Australia and, more recently, she did a pastoral care course at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney.
“I really loved the work experience that I did there,” she adds.
But the acting work hasn’t dried up yet, and Celia keeps saying yes to the great roles she gets offered. As she explains to her daughter, acting has its joys and it has its pitfalls.
“But if you love it, you want to keep doing it. That’s the thing.”
