It was the pash that stopped the nation. At the 2006 Australian Film Institute awards, Heath Ledger was being interviewed by a TV journalist when a screech made everyone jump. Magda Szubanski, who was wandering the red carpet in character as her graceless Kath and Kim character Sharon Strzelecki, screamed at the sight of Ledger – who, without blinking, kissed her passionately. Szubanski promptly pretended to faint.
Now, 20 years later, Szubanski has revealed that Ledger was such a fan of this entirely improvised moment that he called her the next day to ask if he could play Sharon’s stalker on Kath and Kim, shortly before his death.
Footage of the kiss has been viewed millions of times online in the two decades since. Some unknowing commenters, perhaps unfamiliar with Kath and Kim, chastise Ledger for kissing a woman they believe was just a regular fan without her consent.
“We had decided that Sharon, who was in her role as assistant stage manager that night, would ambush Heath and go for the pash. Heath knew nothing of our plan,” Szubanski writes in her new memoir, I Can’t Tell You But I Will, out Tuesday. “But as soon as Sharon saw Heath, overtaken by my own avatar, she went off-script and screamed. Heath jumped out of his skin, composed himself, strode over, grabbed my face in his hands and planted one right on me. Then Sharon fainted. These are the ‘actionless’ moments actors live for.
“But what came next was even better: Heath rang me the following morning to tell me our red-carpet improv was the most fun he’d had in ages. And he wanted to float an idea: could he be a guest on Kath and Kim … as Sharon’s stalker! Mic drop. Heath and I had a few phone calls about it, and we were scheduled to meet in London when the tragic news came through that he’d died.”
Ledger died in New York in 2008, aged 28, from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.
“The loss of a superb human like Heath reverberates so deeply and widely it is impossible to express. But it is one of the great ‘what ifs’ of my life,” Szubanski writes. “What if he hadn’t died, and we could have kept playing? The delight and hilarity that would have brought to us, and the world … it hurts to think about it.”
I Can’t Tell You But I Will is Szubanski’s second memoir. It follows her hugely successful 2016 memoir, Reckoning, which charted her relationship with her father, Zbigniew Szubanski, a Polish assassin who killed Gestapo officers and Polish collaborators in Warsaw during the second world war.
The second memoir focuses on the last days of her mother, Margaret Szubanski, who died in 2017 at the age of 92. The book includes Szubanski’s discovery that her mother was raped when she was eight years old by a group of boys, and her realisation during therapy as an adult that she had been groomed by children when she was a child, experiences she believes “ruined” her.
“It has taken me years to understand what happened in that wardrobe, in that bedroom. To map the hidden, crawling tendrils of shame that have overgrown my life like poison ivy. It wasn’t violent. One of them wasn’t a male. They weren’t even adults. I never knew kids could do so much damage,” she writes.
The memoir also covers Szubanski’s work on the 2017 marriage equality vote, which helped pave the way for same-sex marriage being introduced in Australia. Szubanski campaigned for marriage equality, having come out as a lesbian on live television in 2012.
Szubanski describes the divisive public commentary as “an ordeal by fire that few will ever experience. Except of course our Indigenous brothers and sisters, some of whom have had to live through the indignity of this kind of vote twice.”
“All that time I spent in Poland had taught me this incontrovertible truth: you do not fuck with the elemental forces of mass psychology … because the target can change. It always does. Another innocent minority will be brought forward and made to answer for the pains of the age.”
The memoir only briefly touches on Szubanski’s cancer diagnosis last year. In interviews, she has revealed that while she is now in remission, her stage-four mantle cell lymphoma is “incurable” and likely to return.
“The great news is I’m in deep remission from my cancer,” Szubanski told 60 Minutes on Sunday. “It means that you’re not cured, but it’s at bay. It’s what’s called an incurable relapse in cancer; it’s almost sure that it will come back – it’s a question of when and then how bad. The median survival rate is eight-and-a-half years … I could go less, or I could go more.”
