Breaking Bread: Claire Pasvolsky, director and acting teacher, found herself in the theatre

“I’m about to turn 40,” Pasvolsky says, with a twinge of surprise in her voice. 

I ask her how she feels about that landmark day looming. 

“OK,” she replies. “I did feel a little strange about it, because it just doesn’t sound right. Thirty, I was sort of ready for. But 40? I don’t know. It’s just getting my head around it.”

Breaking Bread: The complete series

Perhaps it is harder for an actor to get their head around ageing, I suggest. After all, it is a profession in which the passing of time is often minutely measured, if not by the actor, then by those watching. And Pasvolsky had begun acting when she was a child. 

“I’m not an actor anymore,” she says firmly. “I stopped acting 12 years ago. So I’m a director. I do directing, writing and run my acting studio.

“But because I was an actor and trained in that capacity, it has helped me go to the other side. It sounds strange, but it’s almost like crossing a line.”

CLAIRE Pasvolsky found herself in the theatre. Growing up in Canberra, she was a shy child. So her father, Anthony, enrolled her in drama classes. Yet it was backstage, seeing how a production worked beyond the lights’ reach, that hooked her.

“That was where I went, ‘Bang!’, there was something really fascinating about that to me, in terms of being let in on a secret world,” she says.

The drama classes helped bring out young Claire Fitzgerald. 

“I think I was always very shy, but it did give me a place to be creative,” she recalls. “I was never the first one to put my hand up to jump up and do things, I was always thoughtful, sitting back. I wanted to be outgoing, but I wasn’t a particularly outgoing child. But I loved the performance, and I loved being in that environment.”  

Her environment changed when she was 11. The Fitzgerald family moved to Newcastle. Claire’s mother, Helen, was from here. Not long after they arrived, the earthquake shook and shocked the city.

Claire remembers returning from a holiday and driving through Newcastle, passing destroyed buildings.

What happened to the city in 1989 reflected how an 11-year-old felt being moved out of Canberra, with “the family upheaval, and what that meant to leave friendships behind, and a school I was happy in”.

She quickly enrolled in the Young People’s Theatre at Hamilton then joined 2 Til 5 Youth Theatre Co-op.

“That was where I really felt like I found home, so that was kind of the settling in for me,” Pasvolsky says, adding that as she watched her teachers at 2 Til 5, she thought, “This is the ultimate job … They get to teach kids, they get to help kids, they get to make theatre.”

The self-described “quirky” student wrote poetry, listened to Leonard Cohen and played Lady Macbeth in a production at her school, Newcastle Grammar: “That was my breakout role!”.

She went close to securing other roles. The teenager had an agent and travelled to Sydney for auditions. One was for a role on the TV soap opera, Home and Away. Claire was cast as a French exchange student, only for the role to change to a Spanish character. A Spanish actor was cast.

“That’s what happens in the business; you get a job and they take it away from you,” she says. But that didn’t crush her desire to act. 

“I specifically wanted to go to the UK to do that. My heroes were people like Emma Thompson and Daniel Day-Lewis.”

Claire was also interested in the work of writer and director Jane Campion: “The Piano came out when I was in Year 10, and I thought, ‘This is brilliant, I want to be like her’.”

In other words, she wanted to “write, direct, visualise. So that’s been the ongoing theme”.

After high school, she did an acting course at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre before completing a degree in English and Drama at the University of Newcastle. All the while, Claire acted – and collected awards – in local productions and planned her big move.

“I ended up applying for just one acting school. Zoning in on that one.”

That one school was The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS), whose graduates have included David Tennant, Robert Carlyle and James McAvoy. 

Claire filmed an audition and sent off her VHS tape. While holidaying with her sister and mother in Italy, Claire opened an email telling her she had been accepted.

For two years, she studied at the RCS, honing her skills – and her accent. 

“I ended up dropping my accent,” Claire says in an unmistakably Australian voice. 

“So how did you talk?”

“Posh!” 

She graduated in 2004 and stayed on in Britain, working non-acting jobs to survive, including one in a shop selling vitamins: “I was basically wearing a white coat; I was pretending I was on ER”. 

Claire auditioned for roles and kept getting close: “And I was like, ‘If I don’t get that, I’m going to go home. If I don’t get that …’.” 

When she missed out on a role in a touring production of Three Sisters, Claire decided to head home. But she was also thinking of other, bigger changes.

“While I was on my acting course, I knew I didn’t want to act anymore,” she admits. “It was, ‘You know, I’m good with this. It’s OK’. 

“My acting training hasn’t been in vain, because I use it constantly. I still use it constantly.”

“What, right now?,” I wonder.

“No, not now,” she laughs. “I’m just being real now.”

When she returned to Australia, Claire lived in Sydney and realised she was starting over. Acting work was hard to find. Rather than wait for the phone to ring, she set up her own theatre company, The Judas Tree. 

“It was a good experience and it was being proactive, rather than throwing my hands up and waiting for someone to say, ‘You’re OK’,” she explains. “That was one of the reasons I couldn’t do [acting] anymore, because you’re so dependent on other people’s approval, and fitting into this, that, and the other.”

“Coming back was a sense of, ‘I’ve got to make something happen, otherwise nothing will happen’.”

Something happened. Claire was acting “one last time, to make sure I’d made the right decision” when filmmaker Steve Pasvolsky saw the play. She was told he was in the audience; Pasvolsky had been nominated for an Academy Award for his short film, Inja. Claire knew the name; she’d taken the phone booking – “I did everything with the company!”. 

They met a few months later, when she was a screenwriter at a production company, Filmgraphics Entertainment.

“And the rest is history, three children later,” says the mother of boys aged nine, seven and six. Her marriage, she says, is that of two “passionate, creative, energetic and driven” people who understand, critique and support each other.  

“I think he challenges me with my stuff,” Pasvolsky says of her husband. “If he reads something I’ve written, he’ll really want to discuss it. It won’t be like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great’.”

Pasvolsky regularly returned to Newcastle, for theatre projects and to visit family. But at the end of 2012, life in Sydney with a growing family and a seemingly shrinking house prompted the Pasvolskys to head north. They’ve embraced the city’s outdoor life, and two of the boys attend Young People’s Theatre. 

As part of her philosophy to not wait to be handed a role, Claire converted what she had learnt during her career into a new teaching project. In 2014, she founded the Pasvolsky Actors Studio: “I put it out there to see what happened, and I had 18 people come to the first class, which was amazing.” 

The students, she says, come from all walks of life, and for different reasons; some want to be professional actors, others seek to be more confident in public. 

“It’s a really lovely position to be in to see people come out of their shell for whatever reason,” she says. “It’s fun. It’s really fun.”

Pasvolsky has continued contributing to the cultural life of the city, as a director and writer. She recently directed her adaptation of a German play, Woyzeck. All three nights sold out, which galvanised Pasvolsky’s view that Hunter people love seeing plays – and that they deserve a professional regional theatre company, just as they used to have.   

“I think it’s definitely something that should be investigated,” she asserts. “It should be feasible. Surely!”

“There are some really fantastic actors who live here, and also who have gone away and trained, earned their stripes, and come back and go, ‘Well, what do I do now?’.”

What Claire Pasvolsky is doing now is thinking about her 40th birthday. It will be a simple but warm production. Some work during the day, then a takeaway dinner with her family at night. 

As for life and her career after that, the script is yet to be written.

“Nothing’s set in stone,” Claire Pasvolsky says. “And I’m open to whatever happens.”