Jacki Weaver

Jacki Weaver AO (b. 1947), actor, was a household name in Australia for some 40 years before rising to international prominence. Weaver appeared in stage productions in Sydney and sang on the Australian music show, Bandstand, before being cast in the children’s television series Wandjina! at the age of eighteen. Six years later, in the heady period of Australian ‘new wave’ cinema, she won an Australian Film Institute award for her performance in Stork. A string of films followed, along with a second AFI award for Caddie in 1976. Alongside her subsequent television appearances, she acted in theatre productions including The Cherry Orchard and A Streetcar Named Desire. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s she worked mostly on stage, starring in Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Death of a Salesman, Uncle Vanya and Last Cab to Darwin among others. Following her chilling performance in the Australian film Animal Kingdom(2010), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, she made her Hollywood debut with the comedy The Five-Year Engagement (2012). For her next role, in Silver Linings Playbook (2012), she was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar again. Since then she has appeared in a host of US and Australian productions, amongst them the films Magic in the Moonlight (2014), Last Cab to Darwin (2015) and The Disaster Artist(2017); and the television series Blunt Talk (2015-2016) and Secret City (2016-2018). She will soon be seen in the Steve McQueen thriller Widows opposite Viola Davis, Liam Neeson and Colin Farrell; Bird Boxalongside Sandra Bullock and John Malkovich; and The Grudge opposite Andrea Riseborough and Demián Bichir.

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Commissioned with funds provided by Marilyn Darling AC 2018
© John Tsiavis