The Beauty of Retrospect: Cynthia King Week, Part Three

Cynthia King was in such great demand as a model, some advertisers couldn't get enough of her. Look at this photo from a cigarette ad s...

Sunday, November 25, 2018

British actress Rachel Ward

If you watched a lot of TV or went to a lot of movies in the 1980s, chances are you remember Rachel Ward.


Originally a model who appeared on the covers of magazines such as Vogue and Cosmopolitan, she made the transition to acting at the beginning of the eighties, impressing critics with her performance as a prostitute in the 1981 Atlanta cop thriller Sharky's Machine, starring and directed by the late Burt Reynolds.  Two years later (1983) she played Meggie Cleary in the American miniseries version of Colleen McCullough's novel "The Thorn Birds," opposite Richard Chamberlain, a soap-opera-style story about three generations of a family in Australia and New Zealand.  It was one of the highest-rated miniseries ever in American television history.


She distinguished herself in several movies throughout the decade, including Taylor Hackford's 1984 thriller Against All Odds, the 1987 Australian romantic drama The Umbrella Woman (about a complication between a woman and the brother of her husband) and 1989's farcical How To Get Ahead in Advertising (doesn't the title alone make you want to see that one?). 


Rachel Ward has remained active in movies and television, albeit at a slower pace than in the 1980s.  Her most recent film as of this writing is 2016's The Death and Life of Otto Bloom, a pseudo-documentary about a man who experiences time backwards and can only remember the future.
And here's something you may not know about her: She has been married to Australian actor Bryan Brown since 1983.  They met while working together on "The Thorn Birds."

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