But corporate law didn’t sit well with her, so she quit and went to work for the Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS). “I thought acting was fun and it also helped with my legal advocacy,” she says. When she returned to Sydney to work with top law firm Freehills (now Herbert Smith Freehills), Miller also signed up with the Actors Centre.

Her passion was working on issues affecting people at society’s margins. What Miller loved about law was the debate and the rigour, the necessity for clear and strong communication. We used to go to bed fully clothed.”Ĭaroline Craig in the State Theatre Company of South Australia’s new production of Prima Facie. Miller was just happy to have a bedroom: “Even though I had to share it and we only had mattresses on the floor and no heating. Boy George used to live with us periodically when his other home broke down. “Blue shagpile carpet everywhere and in utter disrepair. “It was a big old terrace in Camden Town that used to belong to the Bay City Rollers,” Miller says. There, she lived in a share house with, among others, Boy George’s backing dancers and a couple of film-makers. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best readsĪfter graduating, Miller skipped off to London for her first taste of the bright lights. “I was from a big working-class Catholic family, so it was a big deal to leave the fold.” “I left Melbourne at 22, moved to Sydney and never went back,” she says. Miller has written plays for decades, partly in parallel with her career in law, which she studied at the University of New South Wales after gaining her first degree in science at Monash in Melbourne. Prima Facie, the story of a female lawyer confronting the structural biases of a legal system she is both part of and subject to, is a rare bird, the complete meeting of two careers housed in the same body. I had no speech, nothing, just ‘Oh my Lord, this is happening’.”Įveryone should have seen it coming. “So there I was, putting on my I’m-so-happy face for Aaron Sorkin or Peter Morgan, who everyone expected to win … and then it was me. Did you see the video? Jodie won first and then I was told to remember the camera was still on me for the announcement, just so my face didn’t go ‘oh shit’ when I didn’t win. “I was so blown away by the Olivier, I didn’t even know how to process it,” Miller says.

Don't Turn Around by Caroline Mitchell