Peta 'loves being wicked'
From The Sun, 30 January 1986. Author not stated.
RETURN TO EDEN is one of those television programs that refuses to go away. The critics were scathing of the original mini-series when it first screened in
1983, but viewers took to it in droves. It has since been screened in more than
30 countries and seen by an estimated 300 million people.
The 22-part series of the same name is scheduled to screen on Channel 10 in the next few weeks.
It has been sold to Britain and has already gone to air in 30 major US cities.
With a budget of more than $8 million, it promises to be as glamorous and outrageous in its storyline as the original.
After five tests, actress Peta Toppano convinced the makers she was right for the part of villianess Jilly Stewart, played in the original series by Wendy Hughes.
Rebecca Gilling is back as Stephanie Harper, the plain woman, who after almost being killed by her husband, returns as a beauty tha
nks to plastic surgery.
The new story is set seven years after the first. Jilly, who served seven years in prison for her evil doings the first time round, is out for revenge against Stephanie, who has become head of a multi-mullion dollar business empire.
Peta Toppano found her role as Jilly a welcome change from the parts she often plays of "the put-upon wimp."
"I have had mostly put-upon types, mostly victims, so this is my first real woman of maturity, substance and power," she said during a visit to Melbourne for the show's launch this week.
"I loved being wicked. It was such a good time. I'd read the scripts to see what I was doing this week ... sharpening my claws.
She is motivated by jealousy basically and loathes Stephanie to pieces. I don't want to give away too much, but she has a fairly good reason for hating Stephanie."
She said the new Jilly bore no resemblence to the character Wendy Hughe
s played. "We're alike in name only. I actually felt a certain amount of sympathy for Wendy's character. She loved that man (Stephanie's first husband Greg Marsden, played by James Reyne) so much and she had an alcohol problem," Peta said.
"My character has been sitting in prison stewing. She's come out fighting, very tough and very cunning. She's got that over Stephanie and she fights fairly dirty.
Jilly might sound like Alexis Carrington and J.R. rolled into one, but Peta said she hadn't modelled the role on any particular characters.
"I never really watched Dynasty very much and I don't watch Sons and Daughters so I wasn't drawing from anything. Jilly's my invention," Peta said.
"I didn't think 'How am I going to be the new video bitch? I'll take a bit of Joan Collins, a bit of Pat the Rat and a bit of this one and that one,' because I don't watch them".
Peta, the daughter of entertainers Enzo Toppano and Peggy Mortimer, won a
scholarship to study ballet in France in her teens, which she did for a year.
A fall which injured her foot helped put an end to that, although Peta said the incident wasn't as dramatic as it had sometimes been portrayed.
"It got blown out of all proportion. In retrospect I didn't really have the application and I don't think I would have seen it through anyway," she said.
"It was depressing at the time, but there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then."
Peta and her husband of almost seven years, Barry Quin, have done a fair amount of acting together and are looking at financing a play they may appear in together.
But for the short term Barry, who both appeared in "Prisoner", have no firm plans together.
"Our only project is have a baby," she said. "We don't want to work too much. We nearly died opened a magazine and there was a picture of us and Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy (and the headline) 'Hubby, acting
team are at it again". We just cringed."
Peta has enrolled at the University
of NSW this year to study French and Italian and hopes to travel overseas.
And if enough people like "Return to Eden", Jilly Stewart may surface again.
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