A liberating age =>Read more - Articles - Publisher

A year ago, actor Rebecca Gibney was reviewing her performance in an episode of the local crime drama Stingers, and was horrified to discover that her Botox injections had been altogether too successful. Her frown lines had been erased - along with much of her capacity to show emotion.

"I'm an actor - and there was no expression," she laughs. "I couldn't see myself look happy. I was 'the full Bree' (from Desperate Housewives) - as Rove calls it."

Gibney, now 41, had begun having the cosmetic procedure in her late 30s - a time when many actresses find all the good roles going to younger women. Yet, despite her anxieties about losing work, her phone kept ringing.

The New Zealand-born actor was 37 in early 2002, when Nine announced it was killing off halifax fp, in which she starred as Armani-clad forensic psychiatrist Jane Halifax. The 21-telemovies series had kept Gibney in star-billing from 1994 until 2001, when she married production designer and artist Richard Bell, with whom she now lives on a farm in Tasmania.

But the actor was soon cast as criminal lawyer Ingrid Burton in Stingers - a program that remained on local television screens until 2004, the year she gave birth to her son Zachary and also co-starred with Claudia Karvan in the crime drama Small Claims.

Gibney's decision to stop having the Botox injections signalled the start of one of the busiest and most interesting 12 months in her 21 years on Australian television.

"I am not getting leading roles any more, which is OK," she says. Instead, the actor is revelling in character roles that allow her to look less than immaculate and, in some cases, downright aged. In an episode of the US series Stephen King's Nightmares and Dreamscapes filmed here late last year, she had to age from 28 to 64.

"It is so liberating," she says. "I am no longer the ice princess, or the really nice 'girl next door' character - and I am playing someone quite different from me."

In Andrew Knight's recently completed comedy drama, Tripping Over, Gibney plays the 45-year-old mother of a 25-year-old, played by actor Daniel Macpherson.

"I have dark red, ringletted, curly hair that's pulled back in a severe ponytail, bright red lipstick and no (other) make-up. The lighting is less than flattering and I look every bit my (almost) 42 years. You see the lines around my eyes and my mouth."

Gibney is equally excited by her recent small role in the film, Clubland, due out next year, in which she worked alongside Oscar-nominated British actor Brenda Blethyn.

In it, she says, "I have a bit of a New Zealand accent - and a drinking problem. I have waist-length, straggly brown hair, no make-up, wear black bras with tangerine singlet tops and denim mini skirts - and look like tragic mutton dressed as lamb."

The latest in Gibney's succession of non-glamour character roles is that of Alison, mother of two teenagers, in the Melbourne stage production of Mum's the Word 2: Teenagers, which opens on August 31 at the Comedy Theatre.

On a cold winter afternoon, Gibney is in a small rehearsal room behind Prahran's Chapel off Chapel theatre as Melbourne choreographer Tony Bartuccio takes the five-woman MTW cast through the early parts of a complex dance routine.

"And right! Left! Right! Feet together. Hands on knees," calls Bartuccio. Gibney has positioned herself in the back corner of the room so that she can dance with an eye on co-stars Colette Mann, Marg Downey, Jane Hall and Louise Siversen. She has missed a couple of days of rehearsal because she was filming and has a bit of hoofing to catch up on.

The show is, as the title suggests, a follow-up to the internationally successful Mum's the Word, in which a group of new mothers joked about sleep deprivation, dirty nappies and floppy breasts. A decade on, the women are laughing - and crying - about their teenage children's raging hormones, their own feelings about ageing, and the amazing rows that can blow up when two generations' problems collide.

As Gibney's son Zachary is only two, the psychodramas of mothering teenagers are more than a decade ahead. But the script has taken the actor straight back to the horrors of her own adolescence.

"The scary thing is that everything in the script is what I was like as a teenager and it is really frightening to think I am going to have that revisited on me when my son becomes a teenager." Gibney did not look like a teenage rebel in the making: "Up until I was 14, my main aspiration was to be the first female prime minister of New Zealand, and I used to go and sit in parliament and watch the politicians.

"I was actually a very smart kid until I hit 14 - and then the hormones kicked in."

But, as the youngest of six children in a family traumatised by her father's alcoholism, Gibney did not have the benefit of parents with the time to notice the changes in her behaviour, let alone act on them.

"I was fairly much ignored and I thought, 'What's the point? No one pays any attention anyway'. I hit 14,15 and just rebelled. It was 'Stuff school, I'm not going to go, I'm going to drop out of school and I'm going to drink and stay out late and tell my mother to get stuffed'.

"I was vile. I have apologised to my mother constantly. For the last 20 years, all I have done is said: 'Oh God, I can't believe I was that bad'. But I think she has forgiven me."

Dropping out of a school at 15, Gibney took a job as a receptionist in a wholesale jeweller and then in a radio station. Aged 16, she stopped working to look after her father who had stopped drinking, but had lost a leg through an alcohol-associated illness.

After some small TV roles in New Zealand, Gibney moved to Australia at 19, breaking into Australian TV in 1985 with a role in Zoo Family and then cementing her place as a local "girl next door" type in the long-running series Flying Doctors.

Twenty-one years on, her CV includes an AFI award (for her role in the telemovie Come in Spinner), a silver Logie and roles in 40 television series and eight films.

But, at the moment, she is as excited as an ingenue by her new-found freedom to look "real" on screen - even in the nude scene that was part of her role in Tripping Over.

"I have rolls," she says, squeezing a fold of flesh under her shirt, "and I am normal."

Yet Gibney is not yet ready to say "never" on the vexed question of cosmetic surgery.

"At 48, I might go: 'Bugger it, I'm having it! And if I do, in three or four years' time, end up having surgery, I'll tell the world. I don't care - everyone can do what they want. Just don't bullshit!

"Anyway, it's not a big deal. At the end of the day, people read (about you in) newspapers. And then they go about their business."