Danielle Cormack
Danielle Cormack's resume of screen roles ranges from 70s hippies and confused Generation Xers, to barristers and criminals. Cormack's career first hit flight altitude sometime in 1997. After winning a Best Actor Award that year for her work in Harry Sinclair's Topless Women Talk About Their Lives, she quickly followed it with another four features — including rural romance The Price of Milk and a double role in Via Satellite.
Cormack began her acting career on stage. She won her first screen role as a teen, in successful soap Gloss. In 1992 she was on hand for the launch of another soap. In Shortland Street, she enjoyed played a "virtuous nurse" from the sticks who falls for doctor Chris Warner. She talks about the role in this video interview. After completing her one year contract Cormack was the first core cast member to leave; two decades later, she was still being referred to as "Danielle Cormack from Shortland Street". Cormack acted in Steven Berkoff play East, a role that took her across New Zealand and to a festival in Zurich.
Over the next few years she appeared in surf and crime show High Tide, and a succession of short films: co-starring opposite fellow Shortland Street alumnus Marton Csokas in stylish film noir A Game with No Rules, Erik Thomson in Snap, and joining Joel Tobeck for hour long soldiers' tale The Call Up.
She also joined some underemployed actors and writer/director Harry Sinclair on a no-budget weekend project. The result was bite-sized episodes of Topless Women Talk about their Lives, which screened late at night on TV3. While playing 20-something Liz, whose romantic life tends towards confusion, Cormack enjoyed the sensation of not knowing what scenes she would be doing next.
When Cormack got pregnant, she worried she might lose the gig. Instead the news helped motivate Sinclair to turn Topless Women into a feature film, after he decided to incorporate Cormack's real-life pregnancy into the plotline. After her child was born, the team reconvened to film a fake birth scene in a veterinary clinic. "It was really interesting going home ecstatically happy about being pregnant", said Cormack, "then coming to work and going through the emotional trauma that Liz has from having to have the baby."
Cormack's performance won praise from Variety, Screen International, and Rip It Up, and a Best Actress gong at the 1997 Film and TV Awards — part of a Topless tally that included awards for Best Film, and for fellow actors Joel Tobeck and Willa O'Neill. Read more about the film here.
In 2000 Cormack reteamed with Harry Sinclair as co-star of The Price of Milk, a quirky fairytale romance set on a dairy farm. Cormack played the naive, "slightly eccentric" Lucinda. This time her shooting schedule was three days a week, over a six-month period.
The three-year period between Topless Women and The Price of Milk proved busy, with big roles in another three features. Cormack won a Best Actress Award in Portugal after co-starring in Australian romance Siam Sunset (producer Al Clark called her "absolutely electric"). Locally, she was nominated for Best Actress for Channelling Baby, one of her favourite projects. The role encompassed blindness, parenthood and trauma.
Cormack had been in director Christine Parker's mind before she finished writing the script, and the actor was encouraged to provide input into the character. Spanning several decades, Channelling Baby saw Cormack playing a woman blinded after protesting the Vietnam War; the late Kevin Smith was the Vietnam vet whose fate is bound up in hers. Metro magazine wrote that Cormack "lights up every scene she appears in" (read about the film here).
The last feature from this period required her to play two very different twins. Via Satellite (1998) is a comic portrait of a dysfunctional family facing the media spotlight when one of their twin daughters competes in the Olympics. Carol's underachieving sister Chrissy wishes she could be elsewhere.
The film marked the directorial debut of Ladies Night playwright Anthony McCarten, who raved of Cormack: "She's talented, she's beautiful, she was right for the character, she's experienced — and she's a bankable star". Critics were equally enthused. NZ Herald critic Peter Calder wrote that Cormack shows herself "to be the kind of actress the camera loves. It's hard to escape the sensation that we are watching as a star is born." Added Variety's David Stratton: "Cormack's skilled playing as both the distressed Chrissy and the exhausted Carol contributes enormously to the film's success".
This late 90s period also included a number of TV shows for American company Pacific Renaissance. Cormack played with a French accent for an episode of Hercules ('Les Contemptibles'), while an ongoing role on Xena: Warrior Princess as Amazonian mother Ephiny inspired fans and fan fiction overseas.
Since the millennium, Cormack's screen work has concentrated largely on the small screen. In 2006 she played Maddie, mother of the main character, in fantasy series Maddigan's Quest. Based around a roving circus, the programme was born in the mind of children's author Margaret Mahy.
The following year was devoted to TV's Rude Awakenings, a 'dramady' of suburban culture clash created by director Garth Maxwell. Cormack starred as Dimity Rush, a right wing corporate woman "aspiring to that particular type of life — good car, great home, kids at the right schools, wearing the right clothes. Which is so much fun to play, because I'm in Swannies out in West Auckland."
In 2010 she won a Qantas Best Actress Award for her turn in The Cult, playing outwardly cool as nails Doctor Cynthia Ross, the confidante of a charismatic commune leader. On the big screen, she was a woman worrying about losing her husband in Separation City, Tom Scott's ensemble tale of "marriage, bad sex and requited love", and hooker sister to the anti-hero in Gregory King's A Song of Good.
Cormack's career now increasingly tended towards Australia. She performed with the Melbourne Theatre Company, acted in acclaimed drama East West 101, and was nominated for a Silver Logie after co-starring in 10 episodes of Underbelly: Razor. Turning the clock back to Sydney circa 1927, the series saw her playing "hearty, fearless, formidable" real-life crime-lord Kate Leigh.
Cormack enjoyed the challenge of capturing of the complexities of a person variously described by those who dealt with her as wonderful, family-orientated, horrible and vicious. She rehearsed for her audition with fellow Kiwi Chelsie Preston-Crayford, who won the role of Leigh's nemesis, Tilly Devine.
Cormack cemented her Australian status further with ongoing, high profile roles in Rake and Wentworth. Playing Scarlet Meagher on Rake, barrister and former flame to the main character, she spent the first season caught up in divorce proceedings. In the process the character went from "cool, calm and collected to a vulnerable emotional wreck in a completely convincing way" (as Sarah Lang argued in the NZ Herald).
Wentworth, an acclaimed 'reimagining' of long-running Aussie soap Prisoner, saw Cormack playing hard-nosed criminal Bea Smith, newly arrived at a women's prison. The role saw her nominated for multiple awards; she took away Logie and ASTRA gongs for the second season.
Cormack was nominated for another Outstanding Actress Logie in 2019, thanks to Australian political drama Secret City. Joining the show's second season, she played Karen Koutoufides, an idealistic but Independent MP. "She's fun, she's an agitator," Cormack told The Fierce Au. "She genuinely believes that politics can be good, that she can affect change without having to become corrupt... she's kind of naive."
That same year, Cormack returned home to feature in two local crime shows; the multi-season My Life is Murder and Fresh Eggs. The latter earnt her a nomination at the NZ Television Awards, for her role as criminal matriarch Lulu; who Cormack described to The Spinoff as "She’s heightened, she’s grotesque, she’s funny."
The years following were equally as busy, with Cormack having recurring roles in shows The Secrets She Keeps and Year Of, followed by a "brief but brilliant" appearance in Kiwi series Madam.
Outside of acting, Cormack has handled costume design duties on Katie Wolfe short Redemption, and hosted reggae show Fire It Up! for music channel Alt TV. Her theatre roles include an ATC production of two-hander The Blue Room (again opposite Kevin Smith) and a "wonderfully spontaneous" turn (said the NZ Herald) in solo play The Case of Katherine Mansfield.
Profile updated 26 July 2024
Sources include
Danielle Cormack: IMDB
'Danielle Cormack: Growing up on screen..' (Video interview) NZ On Screen website. Director Andrew Whiteside. Loaded 22 March 2010. Accessed 26 July 2024
Sam Brooks, Fresh Eggs’ Danielle Cormack on playing a monster with ‘mince and cheese hair’ (Interview) (Interview) - The Spinoff. Loaded 5 May 2019. Accessed 11 July 2024.
Peter Calder, 'A STAR is born' (Review of Via Satellite) - Weekend Herald, 10 October 1998, page D4
Matt Grainger, 'Right script, right time for success' (Interview with Anthony McCarten) - The Dominion, 19 October 1998, page 15
Sarah Lang, 'Australian show rakes in ratings' (Review of Rake) - The NZ Herald, 30 March 2014
Bret Ryan Rudnick, 'An Interview with Danielle Cormack'. Whoosh website. Loaded September 1997. Accessed 20 November 2008
David Stratton, 'Via Satellite' (Review) - Variety, 17 August 1998
Erica Thompson, 'Glamorous spin to gritty times' (Interview) - The Dominion Post (TV Week pullout) 27 September 2011, page 5
Tara Ward, 'Madam is a workplace comedy like we've never seen before' (Review of Madam) The Spinoff website. Loaded 5 July 2024. Accessed 26 July 2024
Holly Willis, 'Winfemme Film Festival' - LA Weekly, 11 August 2000
Unknown writer, Review of Channelling Baby - Metro magazine, October 1999
'Underbelly: Razor - Kate Leigh'(Interview) Time Out Melbourne website. Accessed 17 August 2011
'Danielle Cormack describes Karen Koutoufides' (Video Interview). The Fierce Au YouTube channel. Loaded 3 March 2019. Accessed 26 July 2024
Topless Women Talk about their Lives press kit
Siam Sunset press kit