Angela Punch McGregor

A veteran actress of stage and screen who has done everything from playing Anthony Hopkins' wife to teaching the tricks of the trade to a young Cate Blanchett, Angela Punch McGregor has endured the difficult middle-age years (in which many actresses are frequently discarded in favor of their notably younger or older counterparts) to become one of Australia's most respected thespians. From her first role as a runcible spoon in The Owl and the Pussycat, the aspiring actress inherently know that the spotlight was for her. Enamored with drama teacher Ross MacGregor as she refined her skills on the stage, young Punch eventually embarked on an enduing post-student/teacher romance after attending NIDA and later spotting her former coach in the audiences of one of her shows. Bringing her stage skills to the small screen in the early '70s, Punch MacGregor appeared in such television series as Class of '74 and Alvin Purple before making her film debut in 1978's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Remaining true to her stage roots, Punch MacGregor appeared as Juliet to Mel Gibson's Romeo shortly after the release of Mad Max, a role that earned her the ire of many star-stricken schoolgirls. (She claimed that the young girls frequently applauded as she drove the dagger into her chest during the play's emotional climax.) Through the '80s, Punch MacGregor appeared in such outback exports as The Best of Friends (1981) and The Delinquents (1989) (in which she played Kylie Minogue's mother) and though her onscreen career would wane somewhat in the '90s, she remained a notable stage fixture until stricken with an unexplained illness in a 1995 production of Nick Enright's Blackrock. Although she at first suspected leukemia, she later traced the ailment to an overexposure to antibiotics, a discovery that lead her to take a four-year course on natural medicine and open a part-time clinic in her home. Punch MacGregor later claimed that her momentary departure from the stage was also driven, in part, by insecurity and career burnout, but the turn of the millennium once again found her back on-stage in a production of Great Expectations and stepped back in front of the lens for director Alkinos Tsilimidos' Missing Tom (2004). - Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide