Quotes of the Day

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. The cat is in the house. One, two, three… " Each morning at her rented flat in Vancouver, Canada, between yawns and yoga stretches, Jacqueline McKenzie will listen to her language tapes. You'd think the 37-year-old graduate of Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Art would be a dab hand at American accents by now, but you try saying such lines as "statistically significant disease cluster" in impeccable shotgun Seattle-style. As agent Diana Skouris in the Francis Ford Coppola-produced TV sci-fi series The 4400, McKenzie does that and more. The highest-rating debut on U.S. cable last year, and a surprise hit from Australia to the U.K., the show introduced agent Skouris exercising on a treadmill - which was just as well since over 4,000 alien-abducted "returnees" were about to land on her doorstep; she and her offsider agent Baldwin (Joel Gretsch) would be put in charge of unraveling their back-stories. Now with the coming of a new series, McKenzie's eyes narrow on to the role like someone at target practice. She has always been one of the hardest-working actresses around, but she's traveling lighter these days. "I think it's tremendously freeing to be in this place right now," McKenzie says.

Ten years ago, she was in an altogether different place. In 1995, McKenzie won twin Australian Film Institute Awards for the movie Angel Baby and TV series Halifax f.p., playing a schizophrenic and a murder suspect with multiple personality disorder, respectively. If anyone had the monopoly over damaged souls and troubled teens it was McKenzie. The elfin actress first broke hearts as the little girl lost in a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads in Romper Stomper (1992), and proved the perfect Ophelia in Neil Armfield's acclaimed 1994 production of Hamlet. But when that play toured, her role was taken over by Cate Blanchett. And for the latter part of the '90s, McKenzie's star seemed eclipsed by a succession of less dangerous, more girl-next-door types.

Instead, armed with a green card, McKenzie took a stint on Broadway and a stab at Hollywood, but neither made much of a splash. Munched by a shark in Deep Blue Sea (1999), the New York Times groused: "Jacqueline McKenzie plays a character so vague she might be best described as the movie's extra (and most disposable) woman." Her career philosophy has always been to "throw it all up on the ceiling and something might stick," but for a while nothing much did. Here was the case of a remarkable actress waiting for the next character to click. "I'm so hugely ambitious for each role," she says. "Once I get that role, I'll live and die for it. But you've got to find the role. They don't always come to you."

"… four, five, six, seven… " Before setting her sights on agent Skouris, McKenzie returned to Australia in 2003 to film the low-budget feature Peaches. She was the first to be cast in Craig Monahan's just-released tale about a troubled teen working in a small-town peach cannery - but as the central figure's stepmother Jude. It was a seismic shift for McKenzie, whose character ages 20 years. "She had to cross a bridge," recalls Monahan. "She's smart, she knew the time was right and this was a good role to do it in. She ran towards it really." By turns warm and worn, McKenzie is a revelation as Jude, no more so than in the scene where she sings The Carnival is Over across a pub counter. If Peaches sees McKenzie's spiky talents settle and mature, Paul Cox's recent Human Touch, shot after Monahan's movie, sees it glow. As a young chorister estranged from her painter husband (Aaron Blabey), McKenzie makes Anna's sensual awakening both mysterious and real. But it's in her shift from arthouse to TV primetime that's most likely to cast McKenzie's talents in a new light. Shortly after filming Human Touch in late 2003, the actress flew herself to L.A. for her date with Diana Skouris. Interestingly in a show exploring "otherness" (and despite its unabashed cheesiness, The 4400 parallels the events of 9/11 and Guantanamo Bay with intelligence), McKenzie was asked to play against type. (In the pilot series, the clairvoyant 8-year-old returnee confesses to agent Skouris how she wishes she were like everyone else. "What's normal?" asks Skouris. "You are," replies the girl.) The character felt right, McKenzie says, "and it's funny because the role is not like me at all. It is a stretch. But I just felt like the stars were lined up for me to do this." "… eight, nine, ten. The cat is in the house… " Despite its waterways, Vancouver is a world away from the Sydney harborside suburb of Hunters Hill where McKenzie grew up. Its leafy, conservative environs might have contained the lawyer's daughter, had not drama pushed her over the bridge to nida straight out of Presbyterian Ladies' College. At acting school, the most useful tool learned was phonetics, she says, "which basically means if I'm on a bus anywhere in the world and I hear someone talking with a fantastic accent, I can write down on a piece of paper how that person is talking, and later be in that accent."

Being gifted helps, and on graduating in 1990, McKenzie was immediately cast opposite Russell Crowe in Geoffrey Wright's incendiary Romper Stomper. If it was a baptism by fire, it was "a really beautiful one," she recalls. "It was my first film but boy was I agog." She remembers rookie director Wright as "a great coaxer," and took acting notes from her costar, who she calls "an exquisite performer." For Crowe, "it's straight back to the drawing board," says McKenzie. "Who's the character? What does he believe in? Who's his family?"

For McKenzie, home is a somewhat trickier proposition. Besides the rented flat in Vancouver, there's her car, which she drove up from L.A. filled to the roof with her books and painting easel. Now divorced from an orthopedic surgeon she met when they were students at high school, she was more recently linked with actor-director Simon McBurney, co-founder of London's famed Theatre de Complicite. "I'm very reticent talking about those kind of things," she says. Instead, "where my parents and my sister are - that is where home is," she says. To this beloved harbor, she'd like to bring back a film project - perhaps Sisters, which she is developing with Sydney playwright Stephen Sewell. Or even an Australian episode of The 4400 (franchise-friendly, the returnees are from all round the world). "And I've already cast it," she says with a Jude-like cackle. "I've got all my mates in it. It's a cast of thousands, let me tell you."

It would seem the serious young actress has lightened up. For McKenzie, the turning point came while filming Human Touch in the South of France. Encouraged by director Cox to decorate the villa they were shooing in with his own art works, actor Blabey, himself a painter, coaxed McKenzie to the easel, too. Without any drawing skills, the actress began sponging the canvas with paint, from which figures began emerging - "like you see faces in cloud formations," she recalls. Eighteen months and 63 canvases later, McKenzie has painted up her own little universe, from street urchins to femme fatales, in a naïve manner not unlike the Australian artist Joy Hester. It's a passion that feeds and is in turn fed by her acting. "It's allowed me to loosen the reins," McKenzie says. "Because I'm not demanding everything from the roles I play now … It's just been a phenomenal discovery." And for audiences likewise.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• The Romper Stomper rebel nearly got munched by Hollywood. But Australia's Jacqueline McKenzie has reinvented herself as a fully ripened actress from arthouse to TV primetime