In the wake of ‘that trolling incident’, The Weekly sits down with Rachel Ward for a heart-to-heart about age and beauty.
It was days before Christmas – mid-summer – and cicadas trilled in the background as actor, director and beef cattle farmer Rachel Ward posted a video to her Instagram feed thanking friends and neighbours for their support throughout the year.
No one – least of all Rachel – imagined this chatty, generous and otherwise innocuous post would attract a band of ill-mannered (and inarticulate) trolls.
‘OMG!! What the hell happened to her. Wow!! She has aged really bad.’ ‘I wish I never saw her like this!’ ‘She looks ravaged.’ And worse.
Her daughter, Matilda Brown, also an actor and food producer (at The Good Farm Shop), was incensed. She jumped to her mum’s defence and reposted the comments, calling out the idiocy of criticising a 68-year-old woman for, essentially, looking 68. “Warning!! Naturally aging woman. Proceed with caution,” she wrote and posted a series of exquisite photographs of Rachel with her grandkids, and at work on the farm.
The resulting pile-on of love is what Rachel has focused on, she says, sitting in her kitchen, enjoying a morning cuppa as she chats with The Weekly.
“Still an exquisite beauty, and a great movie star,” Alec Baldwin wrote. “Beautiful … in every way,” Viola Davis added.
Former editor of The Weekly, Deborah Thomas, epitomised the general sentiment from women of all ages when she wrote:
“Rachel is one of the most inspiring women I have had the privilege to work with … Rachel is intelligent, compassionate, competent and committed to creating a better world. She has a huge heart, she is authentic and a trailblazer for women, constantly demonstrating how you can successfully reinvent yourself at any stage of your life. Rachel’s shift to regenerative farming in her 60’s is truly awesome … I say thank you for helping women embrace the joy of life at every stage. Following two years battling ovarian and endometrial cancers, I am grateful to be alive and healthy. @rachelwardofficial, you are a legend. Thank you for encouraging us to just be ourselves. Go you! 🙏♥️”
“That’s why I’m talking about it, in the end,” she says with that glorious, cryptic smile. “Everybody says, ‘don’t build on this, let it go away’. But actually, it’s been an amazing experience.”
She hasn’t taken either the criticism or compliments too personally.
“I think people are really talking amongst themselves. They’re expressing something that’s very personal to them,” she explains. “I actually don’t think I’m part of this equation, particularly. Somehow, I was the linchpin for it, but I feel it goes way beyond standing up for me with the trolls, because that was so minimal. I think it’s people just expressing their own defence of ageing naturally. I think it is just people saying ‘leave us alone to grow old without having to pretend that we’re fricking 40’.
“Why are we giving ourselves these expectations to maintain youth, and what is perceived as attractive? It’s so great to not weigh into that anymore. Maybe if I was 40, I would mind the comments, but now I’ve so left any kind of attachment to youth and beauty behind … It doesn’t touch me because it’s not important anymore.”
Rachel suspects that Matilda – the middle of her three children (Rosie, Matilda and Joe) – was more shocked and upset by the trolling than she was.
“My dear daughter,” she says. “I think she came to my defence because she sees me as a sort of vibrant, very alive, contributing force. I think she looks at me and goes, I wouldn’t mind being like Mum when I’m her age, being as fit and as involved; I don’t think she’s frightened of that. And I think that for someone to weigh in and go, ‘that’s not okay’, it probably raised her hackles a bit. I think she was just loyal and didn’t like it.”
Rachel was born in the UK and began her career as a model and then an actor in London and New York. She met and fell in love with the quintessential Australian actor, Bryan Brown, on the set of The Thorn Birds in 1982. They married, settled and raised their family down under. They bought their plot of paradise in the Nambucca Valley in 1986.
As a young woman, Rachel was considered a great beauty. Her father, famously, once said to her: “What do you need an education for? You are pretty enough to marry someone very rich.”
“And he encapsulated the feelings of parents of that generation, well, in that world that I grew up in.” Which was the British upper class.
As a young actress, she quips, “I realised where my bread and butter was coming from, and it wasn’t because I looked like Rumpelstiltskin. I wish I’d exalted and appreciated it more at the time. As an actor, you were always trying to be recognised for more than what you looked like. I wish I could have just gone, ‘I look pretty good right now, let’s milk it for all it’s worth’. But you wanted more. You wanted to be recognised for your talent.”
The early morning sun filters through gum trees and the kitchen windows, and Rachel, face framed by her backlit grey pixie cut, looks both joyful and glorious. But how has she managed to rise above the prejudices, so prevalent still in the entertainment industry (and plainly also the online world), that bind beauty to age?
“Because I’m a wise old bag,” she says, and laughs uproariously.
That easy-going attitude hasn’t necessarily come easily. There’s been a journey to get there, she admits, “and also a journey in becoming more resilient and robust, which I needed to do.
“It’s been great being with grandchildren and how fluid that love is. You know, how fluidly that love flows. And I do feel that, as you get older, the scars from the wounds are definitely there, and you are a lot tougher. I was very vulnerable as a young girl, and I’m certainly not now.
“I’ve had my fair share of bollocking. Bad reviews were like the trolls are today. It was a public demolition of your performances, of your personality … That was painful. I had my fair share of bad reviews, and yes they hurt deeply. I’m not saying I should be exempt from them because you are in a business where you have to be up for that. But I think, because of the upbringing I had, I was very sensitive to that. I took it to heart. So this type of trolling now is nothing. Nothing. It doesn’t get to me.”
Today, Rachel lives on and manages a 350-hectare beef cattle property in northern NSW. She manages the farm ‘regeneratively’ to nurture the soil, do as little harm as possible to the environment, and produce chemical-free food. She posts progress reports from the farm regularly on her own @rachelwardofficial Instagram page, and on @farmthru_, where she and other growers deliver their produce – paddock to plate – to city consumers without the ‘middlemen’.
Her fans love the authenticity of her posts. “I’m on a tractor, I’m on my buggy, I have not been to the hairdressers,” she chuckles. “I’m not going to do my hair for Instagram. I don’t do my hair for anyone, really. I’m bored stiff going to the hairdressers and doing any of that stuff. I haven’t opened a makeup bag for many years.”
Rachel let her hair colour grow out last year, against Bryan’s advice. It was a conscious decision.
“I’d been wanting to do it for a while,” she explains. “It was Bryan who was very resistant. I was just, ‘Well, you’re grey, why does it matter?’ And he was like, ‘You don’t need to go grey yet.’
“I had no idea it was going to be this white, but I like it, and my daughter cut it, so it’s her haircut. My kids like it, the grandkids don’t have a problem. and even Bryan seems to have come around to it, so there we go.”
Even so, Rachel says she doesn’t want to be made into a crusader for growing older naturally.
“It’s not that important,” she insists. “I’m not making a statement here. I’m not making a judgment on people who get work. People can do whatever they want. I just can’t be bothered.
“The only thing I work on is keeping fit. Being on a farm keeps you fit because you’re running around all the time. I was out there with my nephew yesterday, running up a hill to get the cows that had got away, and I could absolutely keep up with him, and he’s in his 30s; I can climb a hill as well as any young fella can!
“I also eat very healthily; I probably drink too much wine, and I even have the odd cigarette, so I’m no paragon, but I don’t eat processed food. I’m a regenerative farmer. I grow meat that’s grass-fed, grass-finished, has minimal chemicals … I always buy organic vegetables.”
She says she’s also conscious of not “looking cross” because sometimes, “when you get older, you look cross, and I think you have to work against that”.
Realistically, though, it doesn’t require a lot of effort these days. Country life agrees with Rachel. She confesses that she feels lighter, more prone to joy.
“I’m still somebody who’s very much had to battle with depression. I’ve definitely got emotional volatility,” she says. Back in 2023, she told The Weekly, “I’ve got a darkness in me, and Bryan’s got an eternal lightness in him.”
But for now, life feels good. “Definitely, at the moment,” she says, “I really enjoy farm life. I really am much happier out of the entertainment business …
“I’m someone who likes to be busy. I start navel-gazing if I’m not busy, and farm life keeps me very busy. So I don’t have time to think about my hair or how I’m feeling. I’m just getting on with it.”
On the subject of which, there are cattle to muster down by the dam, and water pumps to take a spanner to. But as she rises to leave, Rachel has just one more thought on age and beauty.
“I think, if you’ve built an identity on youth, beauty, wanting to be attractive – if you’ve given that priority and that goes – that is frightening for people. But for the majority of people my age, the expectations of youth and beauty are gone. I don’t have to fulfil those expectations anymore. And that, to me, is very liberating.”
