It’s not just her 15-year-old daughter, Roxanne, that Jacqueline McKenzie has brought along to The Weekly‘s shoot on this chilly Sydney morning. The actress has also arrived with a treasured family keepsake.
Covered in sticky, floury fingerprints from decades of being used in her mum Robin’s kitchen, a well-worn copy of The Australian Women’s Weekly Quick-Mix Cakes and Delicious Easy Muffins is proudly brought out to display for the team.
“Look, it’s Mum’s writing,” Jacqueline, 57, says, tenderly tracing the notes left on favoured recipes. “Our family are very food-centric. I never had been, probably because I left home and was off being an actress in Melbourne on my own. Most of that time I was staying in a hotel, the most you could do was boil an egg in the kettle!”
Learning to cook, she says, came much later – and is a silver lining of her adored mother’s four-and-a-half-year battle with cancer.
Robin was diagnosed in early 2012. Jacqueline and Roxanne, then two, returned from the US to base themselves in Australia to be on hand as much as possible during her fight.
“Her treatment was just hellish,” Jacqueline reflects now. “But one amazing thing was that she taught me to cook, and Roxanne how to read. When Mum was undergoing her treatment, she’d make cakes and take them to the technicians at the hospital. She was such an incredibly generous woman.
“Watching her undergo the treatment, she was really in a lot of pain a lot of the time, but she was so mighty with it. We didn’t really talk about dying at all. It was just, everything that they threw at Mum, she was like, ‘Right, we’ll do that. We’ll move forward and get well.’ And then, all of a sudden she was no longer there.”
Those early days of grief, she says, were devastating. Russell Crowe, her leading man on their 1992 breakthrough film, Romper Stomper, reached out to Jacqueline. The two had formed a firm friendship, and Russell invited her and Roxanne to stay at his farmhouse.
“The kindness that he showed us, as well as his mum, Jocelyn, I will never forget,” she says with a wistful smile.
“I’ll never forget his mum coming into the kitchen and saying, ‘Come on Roxanne, let’s go up to the chickens and get some eggs.’ She held out her hand to Roxanne like my own mum would. I watched through the windows as she walked Roxanne up to the chicken coop, just watched my little daughter who had been through a traumatic few weeks and I thought, kindness is everything.”
Returning home, she began her own kindness in return – and this is where that treasured cookbook comes in. As Christmas approached, she turned to the Last-Minute Rich Fruit Cake that her mum had always made.
“I wanted to continue some traditions of hers,” she says. And so, just like Robin had all those years previously, Jacqueline put a kilo of dried fruit on the stove, adding the orange juice and brandy, treacle and butter, and simmering. She stirred in the bicarb soda, put it aside to cool before stirring in the eggs, flour, lemon rind and more treacle before placing the decadent result in a tin.
The first one she made went to Robin’s oncologist and technicians at the hospital where they’d spent so many days and nights by her bedside.
“Then I went, well, I’ll make one for Auntie Megan too,” she says. “Actually, I might as well make one for my agent. Pretty soon I’d made 20, wrapped them up in foil and then covered in cellophane. One I gave to Russell’s family. And I make one for Jocelyn every year specifically.”
And with that, she puts down the book, turning to Roxanne with a smile as they stride out in front of our cameras for what will be a fun-filled shoot to celebrate her latest role on Binge series Mix Tape – singing along together to their favourite songs from film Pitch Perfect and taking selfies along the way.
“Mum’s my best friend,” Roxanne tells us. “She’s very funny, she likes to laugh and joke a lot. But she’s a very open person. I just love chatting with her and hanging out. I tell Mum everything.”
“The first time Roxanne said, ‘You are my best friend,’ I went, ‘I’m not your friend, I’m your mother!” Jacqueline adds with a laugh. “But she has taught me you can be both.”
In the blood
Since Roxanne entered the world in 2009, Jacqueline has juggled her busy acting career with raising a daughter as a single parent. Homeschooling has taken place across the globe, adapting to the change of time zones and scenery.
“Wherever I would work, I just wanted Roxanne with me,” Jacqueline says. “If I was on set, I’d find someone to help with her schooling in the trailer.”
When Roxanne was in the second grade, they were living in Hell’s Kitchen in New York as Jacqueline performed in The Present on Broadway.
“There were blizzards outside and we were doing projects about the platypus,” she recalls. “So we started to adapt the homework to be a project that touched on her reality at that moment. At that point it was lots of Harry Potter and Minecraft. I found these fabulous maths tests that were all Minecraft. And we did projects on coyotes living in Manhattan instead of dingoes.”
The Present had begun its run in Sydney. Adapted by Andrew Upton from Anton Chekhov’s play Platnov, he’d insisted on taking the original Australian cast – wife Cate Blanchett, Jacqueline and Richard Roxburgh – to the US for the American leg.
“It was Cate’s debut on Broadway,” Jacqueline recalls. “She’s amazing, such a generous and beautiful person to work with. Her three kids were there. And Richard Roxburgh had his two, plus the stage manager had her little boy.
“My dressing room was right at the top of the theatre, and I came off stage once and ran into this room full of kids because they could make noise up there. I’m like, ‘I just have to go and shoot my ex-boyfriend. Can you give it a break so I can get ready for this final moment which is quite harrowing?’ I ended up buying noise-cancelling headphones so that I could concentrate on the scene.”
As Jacqueline auditioned for jobs, Roxanne would run lines with her to prepare. So it’s unsurprising to hear that, having grown up on sets and in theatres, Roxanne is keen to follow in her mother’s acting footsteps.
“I did an audition for something when I was six years old,” she says of her own first tentative steps into that world. “I didn’t book the job, but I’ve always been interested in it.”
“It was for a Ridley Scott-produced horror film, she was a bit young,” says Jacqueline. “But I noticed something about Roxanne then. I thought, oh my God, at six she just has a complete irreverence with the camera. It’s never been an unnatural thing for her to be in front of it. It’s not because she’s an iPhone or iPad kid, it’s just there’s no fear of it.
“When I was young and went to NIDA, we had very little experience with film classes. It was all theatre-based. So when I was finally on set, it was like, ‘What is that huge thing?’ It was a big old camera and a whole heap of people running around it. It could be daunting.”
For the love of music
As we speak today, Roxanne has filmed another audition tape for a feature film. Her mum, once more, was behind the camera to give notes.
“But it required no performance direction whatsoever,” Jacqueline says. “She’s actually superb and mesmeric.”
Perhaps, we suggest, she’s learnt a lot watching her mum at work. In her career she’s won AACTA, AFI and Logie awards as well as many more accolades. She’s starred opposite Russell (twice) and Cate, of course, but also Hugo Weaving, Sam Neill and a slew of other hugely talented names both here and internationally. But despite this impressive resume, Roxanne bashfully admits she’s not that familiar with her mum’s filmography.
“I’ve seen The Convert with Guy Pearce because I went to the premiere for that one. And Force of Nature: The Dry 2 as well. Those were really good because I’m a bit older now. And backstage, I was paying a bit more attention. As a kid, you’re like, ‘Can I go back to the trailer now?’”
Hopefully, she’ll be equally interested in her mum’s latest project, Mix Tape. Starring Teresa Palmer and Jim Sturgess, the four-part series is adapted from a novel of the same name by Jane Sanderson and tells the tale of two teens falling in love in 1989 in Sheffield, England, before fast forwarding to the present where they find each other again decades later.
Filmed between Sydney and Ireland, it’s a glorious – albeit at times heartbreaking – celebration of love. And it’s an evocative memory of those equally awkward and passionate teenage years. But also, for those of us who lived through the ’80s, it’s a wonderful reminiscence of the music of that time.
For Jacqueline, it took her back to sitting in her bedroom and making mixtapes of her own. “I had so many,” she laughs. “And I remember my first-ever Walkman. It was a massive brick and had the full-sized tape in it with these external headphones. I loved it so much. I had that Walkman on me all the time.”
Roxanne watches on bemused as we reminisce about the horror at finding the tape had become unspooled and the race to find a pen or pencil to wind it back together; the relief when it worked.
“You have no idea what we are talking about, do you?” laughs Jacqueline.
While her mum waxes lyrical over her love of Randy Crawford, Rick Astley and George Michael, Roxanne shares that she has recently discovered Spandau Ballet’s early hits – we put some on as the duo bop around the living room.
Roxanne isn’t only interested in acting, she shares. She’s also a keen photographer – currently doing a class as she completes Year 11. She loves to sing, and her ability to learn lyrics is something her mum wishes she could emulate.
“I still sing the wrong lyrics to songs I sang when I was 16,” Jacqueline laughs.
While Jacqueline is mad for home DIY (something Roxanne doesn’t share a passion for), the younger McKenzie has taught her mum to upcycle clothing. Roxanne will sew without a pattern, following her instincts, again something Jacqueline wishes she had the talent for. “I’m really strict on following patterns, the same as with recipes for cooking,” she says. “Everything Roxy does is so unique.”
The pride each feels for the other is evident, as is their enjoyment of each other’s company. Family has always been central to Jacqueline’s life. She recalls her pride at being able to fly her parents in to join her on sets in the US, of taking her nieces and nephews to remote shoots when they were young and before having a child of her own. But nothing compares to the thrill she gets when she and Roxanne travel together.
Since starting as an actress back in the early ’90s, Jacqueline recalls how each time she clambered into a film trailer she would dream of what it would be like to go on a trip in one. The first thing she would do each time was sit in the driver’s seat to see what it might feel like to drive it.
“But as a single person, I would never do it on my own,” she says. “And I would never do it on my own with a young child either, I would be too scared.”
But when she was filming My Life Is Murder in 2024 in New Zealand, “the motor home they had for me was so superb that I thought, ‘Roxanne’s coming over and bringing her best friend, maybe I can use the motorhome for the school holidays’.”
And so the trio set off around the North Island together after the last day of filming for a magical holiday.
“It was just fantastic,” Jacqueline says with a sigh. “So many of the dreams I’ve had have come about because of my job. I feel very lucky.”
The article originally appeared in the July 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. SUBSCRIBE so you never miss an issue.
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