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 Box alongside Sandra Bullock and John Malkovich; and The Grudge opposite Andrea Riseborough and Demián Bichir.
John Tsiavis
‘My intent for this portrait was to capture the power and force Jacki conjures when acting. She is not representing a specific character or role; however, I wanted to convey the complexity and depth of her acting, as though captured in a moment performing Shakespeare or a Greek tragedy.’
John Tsiavis (b. 1977), is a commercial photographer, working across portraiture, entertainment and editorial projects. Tsiavis started his photographic career working as a film stills photographer on Australian feature films Head On, Chopper, Ned Kelly and Jindabyne, and went on to work in the entertainment industry creating images for film, musicals, theatre and television series including The Secret Life of Us and Summer Heights High. Formerly Melbourne-based, he now works in Los Angeles, primarily as a portrait and fashion photographer and director of television commercials. Tsiavis’ portrait and fashion photographs have been published in high-end journals including Harper’s Bazaar, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire, and some of his entertainment clients include HBO, Disney, Sony Music and Warner Music. Tsiavis was a finalist in the Olive Cotton Award in 2011, and he was shortlisted for the National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2013 and 2016. His portraits of Chris Lilley, Bud Tingwell and Christos Tsiolkas are in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection. Over twenty of Tsiavis’ portraits were displayed in the National Portrait Gallery’s 2014 exhibition PROMO: Portraits from prime time.
Commissioned with funds provided by Marilyn Darling AC 2018
