Noni Hazlehurst opens up: “I felt like a disappointment to my mum”
Noni Hazlehurst never had the close relationship with her mother Leonie that she craved – and now, thanks to new SBS series Who Do You Think You Are?, she knows why.
The series uncovered the trauma Noni’s mother endured during World War II. At the time, she was living in Liverpool in the UK, looking after her baby son Cameron while her husband George was in the army.
"She was very good at masking how she really felt and she didn't tell us about what she endured during the war," Noni recalls.
"I just felt a lot of regret that she didn't feel like she could open those boxes of trauma and let us have an intimacy that I craved."
The actress says she wishes she knew about her mother’s wartime experiences before she passed away.
"I just would have loved to have been able to be more empathetic and sympathetic to what she'd endured," she says.
"She was very frightened of loud noises, and not knowing what that came from, I didn't understand that about her. I thought she overreacted."
Noni also believes her mother, who had a career on stage as a young woman, wanted her to go into musical comedy.
"I always felt like I was a bit of a disappointment to her," Noni adds.
"I think generally she had a real disappointment about what life had dealt her."
Who Do You Think You Are? begins this Tuesday, 17 April at 7.30pm on SBS.