Tilly Devine: Violent femme

Tilly Devine, May 27, 1925. Photos/ Supplied

Of the few photos of Tilly Devine online, the most telling are three police photos from May 27, 1925. Standing 1.6m in a heavy satin bonnet, the notorious Sydney madam is dressed in a dowdy jacket and skirt, with fancy shoes on her feet. A plain scarf imprisons her neck and her countenance is joyless, almost expressionless.

What strikes you most is how unlike Kiwi actress Chelsie Preston Crayford she looks. With a face that could wither any red-blooded male's libido, Devine doesn't live up to her promising surname or her risque reputation. Physically, she's about as non-descript as anyone from the early 20th century could be, though a few other pictures display a set of Shirley Temple curls and a more gregarious personality.

But the Australian TV phenomenon Underbelly has never been interested in depicting historical figures with accuracy anyway. Across several different stories, the show has played fast and loose with facts and figures, which is part of its charm. It certainly underscores its success. In the fifth instalment to hit our screens, following the recent New Zealand addition, Land Of the Long Green Cloud about New Zealand's Mr Asia connections, Underbelly: Razor on TV3 turns its attention to a couple of female rabble-rousers from Sydney's nefarious past. Unsurprisingly, the makers don't let the truth get in the way of a good yarn.

Preston Crayford plays Devine, while fellow Kiwi Danielle Cormack portrays her vice queen rival Kate Leigh, both historical figures that set Sydney's underworld and the headlines ablaze between 1927 and 1936. Leigh's claim to infamy was as a grog and cocaine peddler. Devine was her arch nemesis, who also sold sly-grog but largely made her name and fortune as a brothel owner. The pair battled for supremacy in what became known as the "razor gang" wars - and not because they fancied a close shave.

Preston Crayford adored playing such a colourful character, despite an understandable wariness due to Underbelly's tendency to position women as eye-candy or in token roles. After all, what's not to like about a role as one of "the worst women in Sydney", as the pair were known.

"That's one of the reasons why the premise for Razor and the character of Tilly appealed to me so much," says Preston Crayford. "Tilly and Kate aren't the molls, they're the gangsters. They're running the show. In that sense, they were extraordinary for their time. It's so refreshing to find a script where the women aren't the secondary characters. It doesn't happen enough.

"That said, it's still Underbelly," she admits. "There's still gonna be boobs and sex and the characters will be unrealistically glammed up. It's the Underbelly style. But the writers chose not to make a sex symbol of Tilly and instead made her a bit more gammy, so I dodged all that."

With her piercing round eyes and pearly white skin, complete with perfectly positioned beauty spot, Preston Crayford turns a wart of a woman into more of a sex symbol than she realises. Dressed to the nines in glamorous threads of the day, she brings Devine alive in a way historians may frown upon but audiences are lapping up. The show was a ratings hit in Australia and it has been performing well on TV3.

"I love Tilly's contradictions," says Preston Crayford. "She's obsessed with Pomeranians and the royal family and being high class but has a mouth like a gutter and won't hesitate to swing a right hook or tip a pot full of piss on someone. She threw a knife at a butcher and lit a dodgy cop on fire and then went to the coronation and sat in the front row sipping champagne. It's contradictions that make us human. Everyone has them and I think the writers realised that with Tilly."

To get into the vibe of the show and nail that broad cockney accent, Preston Crayford watched British gangster flick Sexy Beast and "a documentary about some cockney twin gangsters". She also drew inspiration from an unlikely source - Amy Winehouse - for her audition, though she laments that journalists have tended to exaggerate the late pop singer's impact on her performance.

"In preparing my audition for Tilly, I wanted a human reference, somebody who moved and talked with a specific attitude," she says. "I'm a huge fan of Amy Winehouse and I've seen just about every interview with her there is on YouTube. I felt she was the right mix of tough and vulnerable and I love the way she spoke. So I used those things I saw in Amy as a model for the audition. As I continued to rehearse and research, the character naturally evolved. For me, it was just somewhere to begin."

Although Preston Crayford transforms Devine into a charismatic, even likable character, Matilda Mary Twiss, as she was born in London in 1900, was a career criminal with a violent nature. Convicted 204 times for offences including prostitution, assault and attempted murder, she amassed considerable wealth over a 30-year period. Frequent spats with alcoholic husband Jim pale in comparison with the number of murders he's thought to have committed. After nearing bankruptcy in the mid-50s, she sold off her last brothel in the late 60s, finally succumbing to cancer in 1970.

As villains go, she was as complex as they come, leading then police commissioner Norman Allan to eulogise, "She was a villain, but who am I to judge her?"

"To me, a villain is an entity driven by power and money that is willing to cause harm to others to get what they want," says Preston Crayford. "It's a common, even encouraged way of existing in the capitalist system we live in. Corporations function this way, as do many world leaders, so I didn't have to look far for inspiration." As for playing tough characters that take her out of her comfort zone, Preston Crayford has a pseudo-Devine way of putting things, suggesting the character got under her skin at least a little.

"I just want to keep being challenged. My new year's resolution this year was to shit my pants more often and so far I've gone through quite a few pairs of undies."

Underbelly: Razor continues on TV3, Wednesdays at 8.30pm.