Lisa McCune undresses for success

By LOUISA CLEAVE

Lisa McCune stripped by a waterfall and shed her nice-cop-next-door image from Blue Heelers once and for all.

The Aussie sweetheart could not have chosen a better role to send the wholesome country cop Maggie Doyle into her acting past and prove her ability beyond a police soap.

McCune plays Mary Abacus in The Potato Factory, a 19th-century epic based on Bryce Courtenay's bestseller. Mary is a woman with a talent for business who is disabled by a brutal beating and is forced to turn to prostitution to survive.

McCune swapped her police uniform for tight corsets and petticoats to make The Potato Factory during a break from filming Blue Heelers earlier last year.

She later left the police show, after six years and with three major Australian television awards proving she was the country's most popular actress.

In character with a cockney accent and a curly wig, McCune could not be further from Maggie Doyle.

But it was the bathing scene, heavily promoted by the Seven television network (and by TV3 on this side of the ditch), which had everybody talking before the mini-series screened in Australia.

McCune considered the reaction to her nude scene "absolutely bloody hysterical."

The waterfall wash was filmed on the first day of production and she was more concerned that an unfamiliar crew had to see her naked than by having to strip in front of them.

"The nude scene is just a fleeting moment. I wouldn't have done it if I thought it was gratuitous. It really fits with the story," McCune told an Australian woman's magazine.

"When people see the show, they will understand why Mary does it, it's a real moment of freedom for her."
Although McCune is well-known to Kiwi and Aussie audiences, author Courtenay told e.g. he had real concerns about her playing the part.

"When they suggested a young actress called Lisa McCune I just looked at them and laughed. I said, 'You've got to be kidding.' I'd never seen her in any of her soapies but I knew she was a soapie actor and I said, 'Come on, this is a fairly serious book, we don't want some ingenue doing this'."

Courtenay gave in to pressure from the producers, one of whom had given McCune her role in Blue Heelers, and watched her audition.

"I sat in the room and she read a part for me and I went 'wow'."

Courtenay wanted to be involved in the television production after being burned by Hollywood's treatment of another of his best-sellers, Power of One.

He is bitter about that experience and wanted The Potato Factory made by Australians.

"I was so disappointed in the Power of One movie because the Americans had such a totally different slant on it. If you make a series or a film you want your own people who are far more likely to have a grip on the subject and understand the perspective from which you are coming."

His 656-page The Potato Factory was filtered for television by Alan Seymour, an Australian writer who had recently returned home after a successful career in England.

The bars, brothels and boarding houses of East End London were re-created in an old market warehouse in an inner-Sydney suburb.

The Tasmanian part of the script called for an old brewery and one almost identical to the Hobart building described in Courtenay's novel was found in nearby Goulburn.

Overall, Courtenay was impressed with the end result of the $6m production.

"If I have any problems with The Potato Factory it's that they made it too pretty," he said.

"Ikey Solomon was dirty and a man of his times. Really what they've done is make them all rather pretty and clean and hygienic, and I would have liked it to have been a little more like it was at the time. But there you are. Television likes things to be nice and pretty."