Shirley Barrett Biography – Shirley Barrett Wiki
Shirley Barrett was an Australian film director, screenwriter, and novelist. Her first film Love Serenade won the Caméra d’Or at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. She has written and directed two other feature films Walk the Talk (2000) and South Solitary (2010). Her script for South Solitary was awarded multiple prizes, including the Queensland Premier’s Prize and the West Australian Premier’s Prize. Her first novel Rush Oh! (2016) was shortlisted for the 2016 Indie Awards for Debut Fiction and the 2016 Nita May Dobbie Award, and long-listed for the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her second novel The Bus on Thursday was released in 2018.
She started her career in television “with production work on the Logies.” After meeting Verity Lambert, she was given the opportunity to direct for a television series The Boys From the Bush. She continued working in television during the 1990s and 2000s, directing episodes for various television series including Love My Way, Wild Boys, Offspring, and A Place to Call Home.
Her first feature Love Serenade (1996) was a film that explored, “how women can get completely the wrong idea about some men.” It was shot almost entirely on location in Robinvale, Victoria. The story concerns two young sisters who develop a fierce and competitive crush on their neighbor, a brooding and self-centered radio personality. The film humorously incorporates “small town constrictions with visual flights of fancy”. The sisters are played by Miranda Otto and Rebecca Frith and George Shevtsov stars as the washed-up deejay. The film was generally well-received, with Variety describing it as “one of the most striking, fully formed and assured debuts in years.” It won the Camera D’Or (Best First Feature) at the Cannes film Festival 1996, and Barrett was awarded Best New Director at the Valladolid International Film Festival 1996.
Her second feature Walk the Talk (2000) was also inspired by the location in which the film is set, Walk the Talk, in this case, the Gold Coast, Queensland. “Shirley had met Carter Edwards, a variety circuit veteran who appears in the film as Marty”. This encounter “came in handy when Walk the Talk started to develop as a script”. The film is “about dreamers and schemers, isolation and redemption, populated with iconic places and people”, and stars Salvatore Coco as Joey, a desperately ambitious young man, and Sacha Morler as his girlfriend Bonita. After winning a large settlement from an accident that leaves Bonita, a paraplegic, Joey starts a talent agency hoping to “make his mark on the world”.Joey encounters Nikki Raye (Nikki Bennett), “a variety club singer” and decides to represent her as an agent in an attempt to thrust her, and himself into the limelight. The characters that Shirley Barrett created in Walk the Talk are “relegated to the fringes of a hero’s journey”. The comedic effect of the film emerges through the “desperation of these people living on the margins”. Variety described it as “a bitingly funny, hard-hitting and yet compassionate examination of a bunch of losers on the fringe of showbiz.”
Her third feature South Solitary (2010) is “another tale of outcasts”. The film stars Miranda Otto (who starred in Love Serenade) as Meredith a lonely young woman. This time around, she situates the actress “on an island in 1927, tending to a lighthouse so isolated that the only way of communicating with the mainland is via carrier pigeon”. In the film, Meredith and “her uncle George (Barry Otto), a lighthouse keeper who has come to replace the previous one.” They arrive on the desolate island and meet the island’s inhabitants, a family consisting of the mother Alma (Essie Davis), her husband Stanley (Rohan Nichol) and their daughter Nettie (Annie Martin). Similar to her character’s romantic perils in Love Serenade, “Meredith is desperate for some kind of connection with men”, which drives her to have an affair with Stanley. As the film continues, “the population of the island dwindles to two”, leaving Meredith in the company of Fleet (Marton Csokas), “a returned First World War soldier recovering from shell shock”. Meredith is searching and longing for companionship while Fleet “shies away from the confusion and misunderstandings of human contact”. Despite this tension between the characters, they develop affection for one another.
Her first novel Rush Oh! (2015) is set in Eden, N.S.W. in 1908. It tells the story of a family of whalers and their unusual relationship with a pod of killer whales. It is based on a true story. Barrett’s second novel The Bus on Thursday (2018) tells the story of a young woman recently recovering from breast cancer who takes a job as a teacher in a tiny school in a remote country town, where she finds herself set upon by demons.
In 1985, she moved to Sydney, where she studied screenwriting at the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School (AFTRS). In 1988, during her final year at the AFTRS, she made a short film entitled Cherith which won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Short Fiction.
Shirley Barrett Age
She was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1961 and died on August 3, 2022. She was 61.
Shirley Barrett Husband
Barrett was married to Chris Norris from 1992 to her death. In 1981, while studying at the University of Melbourne, Shirley went to a party and met an art student, Chris Norris, who became the love of her life. Typically for Shirley, she didn’t just fall for Chris – she fell for everything about Chris; Robinvale, the eventual location for Love Serenade, was his hometown. The couple moved to Sydney in 1985 when, on her third attempt, Shirley was accepted at the Australian Film Television and Radio School. She and Chris were married in Las Vegas in 1992 by an Elvis impersonator.
They have two daughters. She resided in Sydney. In March 2022, she wrote about her battle with terminal cancer.
Shirley Barrett Children
With her surviving husband, the couple had two daughters.
Shirley Barrett Death
In March 2022, she wrote about her battle with terminal cancer. She died in Sydney on August 3, 2022, aged 61. She died of metastatic breast cancer in Sydney.
Shirley Barrett Cause of Death
In March 2022, she wrote about her battle with terminal cancer. She died of metastatic breast cancer in Sydney on August 3, 2022, aged 61.
