Artist Evert Ploeg chose Deborah Mailman as his subject after seeing her at the Australian Film Institute Awards. "She was really exuberant, bubbly, very natural and downright charming," he said. The resulting portrait won the People’s Choice Award for the most popular portrait in the 1999 Archibald Prize competition.

Mailman became the first Aboriginal woman to win the Best Actress Award at the AFI Awards in 1998 when she overcame a field of nominees including Rachel Griffiths, Cate Blanchett and Lynette Curran for her work in the film Radiance.

Three years earlier she had co-devised and appeared in the one-woman stage show Seven Stages of Grieving, which examined indigenous experience. This production was subsequently staged at the London International Festival of Theatre. She played Helena in the indigenous production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the STC’s Festival of the Dreaming in 1997, and Cordelia and Rosalind in the Bell Shakespeare Company’s King Lear and As You Like It. She won a Critics’ Choice Award in 1999, and is a very popular Playschool presenter.

Deborah Mailman (b. c1972), actress, is the daughter of a Maori mother and an Aboriginal father, who met when he was touring New Zealand as a rodeo rider.