Wendy Tuohy

Sunday  Age

19 March 2000

Posing for a cover shoot for a big American glossy recently, Meg Ryan insisted she choose the outfit. She went for black leather, a jacket open to the waist with nothing underneath, and a thumb dragging down at the top of the pants.

The hair was grungy, no When Harry Met Sally/Sleepless in Seattle fluffy bits, just stringy-straight and blown out, like she may just have slunk off the back of Dennis Hopper's motorbike. Heavy eye makeup, matte lips, no smile. A sort of ``Who are you calling America's sweetheart?" look.

Inside, Ryan insisted people realise there's more to her than the cutie-pie roles she plays. She likes being an actor, but she's not too thrilled with having to live up to people's idea of the universal darling.

It's a line Lisa McCune, aka Maggie Doyle, can relate to. Actually, its ex-aka Maggie Doyle, Blue Heelers' neat country constable, but McCune has the feeling hordes of TV viewers won't let Maggie die.

As she walked across the stage singing ``The Hills Are Alive ..." etc in the starring role of the Sydney production of The Sound of Music (opening here this week), McCune admits she wondered at which point each member of the audience stopped seeing Maggie in a dirndl and started believing in Maria.

She thinks it takes most of them a while - and it probably does, since many who go to see her will have sent in their TV Week coupons year after year to vote Lisa McCune as Australia's Most Popular TV Actress 1996, '97, '98, '99. (She says the eight Logies she won in that time, including ``most popular Australian TV personality" '97, '98, '99, will probably end up as wall-mounted coat pegs when her Melbourne home renovation is finished.)

``Fortunately, the costumes and hair are the one thing that separates me from Maggie Doyle," says McCune, having a coffee before donning the wound-up plaits for a dress rehearsal. Outside, a gang of kids about to be Von Trapped is gathering with its attendant gang of theatre mums.

``I'd be interested to know from someone who saw it, and who didn't know me, how long it takes them to forget (Maggie). I'd love to know the answer to that question, how long it takes them to sit in that theatre and go `OK, I'm totally accepting of who she is'."

Eileen O'Shea, veteran Melbourne publicist, says: ``Lisa, I've seen it a couple of times and I didn't think you were at all like Maggie." McCune is touched, so much so that her cheeks flush hot and we all notice. The girl can't help it, she is nice.

For someone wanting to put a character behind her though, ``television's golden girl - wholesome one day, perfect the next" - McCune is fortunate in that in the flesh and without the Maggie hat she is not nearly as instantly recognisable as, say, Jana or Ray. Unless you were a Heelers groupie, you would see Lisa McCune in the street as a woman so petite she could just about borrow a frock from Kylie - she says she spent a lot of years acting while standing on phone books opposite John Wood. She no longer has prefect hair, and in her tiny red top, hipster cargo pants and Converse One Stars she's out of the dag-zone.

``I remember when I was doing Blue Heelers I desperately wanted to have my hair cut, I wanted to be groovy for a minute, I wanted to appeal to that generation of ... my generation, that are kind of cool. I essentially appeal across the board to families and stuff, and sometimes I do want to be seen in a different light."

The one time McCune, 29, did try to separate herself from the character, breaking out with bouncy curls at the 1998 Logies, there was an outcry. One critic suggested she should give the poodle back its hair. Even when she didn't do radical hair the following year, it made headlines: `McCune culls curls on cue for gold.'

``That was me trying to go outside the bounds of being sweet and nice; as an actor you want to be be seen differently, you want to have a chameleon-like quality," says McCune, of the 1998 effort.

Although she finally got out of the personality girdle when Maggie died on the show in February, McCune is still working on getting the idea through to the industry: ``The TV profile hasn't hurt, but it has actually stopped me getting some roles that maybe I would have loved. It works for and against you. There's numerous things that have been auditioning, and you want to get a foot in the door and they won't see you because they `know' what you can do; but as an actor you want to get in the door and prove that you can do something different. That's your job."

Despite the enduring viewer popularity, she is not confident the ``bankability" the role brought her and the network is guaranteed to continue.

The Maria role, though hardly against type, has gone down well with Sydney critics, who have dipped back into their Lisa McCune-review phrase book: ``The right combination of pert, pretty and proper", ``a fine figure of a Maria", ``wholesome one day, perfect the next".

She has enjoyed a return to singing, and musicals, with which she has a long association. She started out playing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz at children's repertory theatre in Perth.

Her mother, an administrator at the Western Australian Museum, had hired a singing teacher after hearing her little girl singing along to show tune records. After high school, McCune was accepted into both the singing and acting faculties of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, chose acting and graduated in 1991.

Her highest-profile role before starting Heelers in 1993 was a series of Coles ads in which she played a daffy but lovable check-out girl. That's how the sweet thing started, she thinks.

And, although she has struggled with it, she is becoming resigned: ``The characters I play will probably be seen in different lights one day, but I probably won't be. But I don't care as much either as I get older, I'm not as worried about it. I was when I was younger. But it's really about the characters I play, not who I am. I'm like everyone else. I go home and I walk my dogs, and I'm really kind of boring."