From Summer Bay to the Best Seller Lists ...



It's no secret that a number of former actors from early evening soap Home and Away have gone on to to bigger and better things. Chris Hemsworth, Melissa George, Heath Ledger, Naomi Watts and Ryan Kwanten are just a few actors who found international fame after their characters departed Summer Bay. But did you know that a surprising number of former actors are also best selling authors? Here are four of the most famous ...
Isla Fisher

I'll kick this one off with Isla Fisher for no other reason than I've featured her books a couple of times on my blog already. At age 19, while starring on Home and Away as Shannon, Isla Fisher penned two teen romance novels with the help of her mother, Elspeth Reid (who is also a novelist in her own right.) More recently, (and after making it in Hollywood,) Isla Fisher published Marge in Charge, the first book in a new series for kids. (Read my review here.) Marge and the Pirate Baby, the second book in the series has just been released in the UK and according to Allen & Unwin's website will be available in Australia in February. 



Tristan Bancks

Since Tug disappeared from the screen, actor Tristan Bancks has penned several novels for children and young adults, including the brilliant, award winning   Two Wolves which I reviewed on this blog back in 2014. Some of his novels are semi-autobiographical such as the books in the My Life Series. According to his Australian publisher, Penguin Random Housee, the next book in the My Life series, My Life and Other Weaponised Muffins will be released on 27 February 2017. Bancks is now far more famous in Australia for his work as an author than his past as an actor.

Bancks also co-authored a book with one of his fellow Home and Away alumni, which leads me to...
Tempany Deckert

A few years after Selina Roberts left Summer Bay, Tempany Deckert penned Shooting Stars, a children's book series about some young, aspiring actors. Since then she has written several books for children, including a YA novel with her former Home and Away co-star Tristan Bancks, titled It's YR Life, which was published in 2009 and according to the publisher's website is still in print and is also available as an eBook. These days Deckert teaches creative writing classes at UCLA.




Judy Nunn

Arguably, Judy Nunn is equally famous as an author as she is forher work as an actor. In fact, Nunn was a published author before she starred in Home and Away, having published two children's books using a pseudonym during the 1980s. While still starring on the series, she published three glitzy, Jackie Collins style novels set in the world of television, theatre and film. In the years follow Ailsa Stewart's death on Home and Away, Judy Nunn has turned her hand to writing multiple novels about Australian people and places using simple and accessible prose, thus bringing to life Australian history, people and places to a broad readership. She is also a prolific scriptwriter and has written scripts for a number of Australian television series. Her most recent novel, The Spirit of the Ghan was released in 2015.

In 2015 Judy Nunn was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia for her services to performing arts and literature.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more