The Hewitson Profile: Ginette McDonald’s timeless comedy honoured

This is supposed to be an interview with the actor, producer and writer Ginette McDonald. It is, I realised swiftly, useless to even attempt interviewing Ginette McDonald. I happily admit defeat. Best just to sit back and enjoy her brand of entertaining stream of consciousness. You might not end up where you planned to go but her road trip is more thrilling. It involves careering head first along off-road detours, skidding through potholes and charging through gates.

It is also akin to attempting to interview a more genial version of the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Queen is given to shouting: “Off with his head! Off with her head!” There were a fair few decapitated heads lying on the floor by the end of my attempted interview.

A lot of things get her goat. Here is a by-no-means-exhaustive list: Hubris. Grandness. Toxic people. That journalist – the daughter of a close family friend – she invited into her house, where they had a good old gossip then some plonk. “Well, she wrote it as if she’d never met me in her life. And then I was this wild woman who drank continuously and smoked. I’m never letting a journalist in my house again.”

I was safely on the end of a phone so she was very nice to me. Phew. I wouldn’t care to be on the list of things and people who get her goat, although there is always the possibility I will have got her goat somewhere in this interview that was not an interview.

You know who Ginette McDonald is, or at least, was. She is still best known, and still adored, sometimes to her chagrin, for being the gum-chewing Lynn of Tawa, the character she conjured when she was just 16 and who became “a blessing and a curse”. Some people thought she really was named Lynn and did come from Tawa. Which you can see might be just a tad wearying.

Her brother Michael wrote the scripts. That nasal, flat-as-a-failed-pikelet New Zild accent was all hers.

She is a genius at accents. Another list: She does, for me, her willing audience of one, a pitch-perfect Helen Clark. The late playwright Bruce Mason, who encouraged her to become an actor: “You’re a bit fat but you might have a career if you get on with it.” She loved him.

One of the accents she most relishes delivering is that of her Chinese hairdresser. McDonald says her daughter, actor Kate McGill, told her: “Mum. No. Don’t do the accent.”

“I told the Chinese hairdresser that I had been told off, and she said, ‘Oh, no. I don’t mind. Do it for me now.’ So I did. She has a patter where she gets any old bag in the chair, does something to their hair and then says: ‘Ooh, very sexy. You get husband now.’” She did the accent for me.