Penny Downie - Actor

Penny Downie is an Australian who grew up in Queensland. From an early age she knew she wanted to perform and would embarrass her family by insisting on dancing around the living room at home. Penny was only 17 when she won a scholarship to study at Australia’s premier drama school, the National Institute for Dramatic Art in Sydney. This school had witnessed the emerging talent of many of those destined, like Penny, to become Australia’s most famous actors including Cate Blanchett and Mel Gibson. She played the Chorus in Henry V. When her character first enters she is carrying an armful of books which she puts down on a long table before beginning to urgently flick through the pages of one of them as if in search of some obscure reference. Penny’s interpretation of the part of the Chorus suggested someone, perhaps an academic historian, or maybe an investigative journalist, whose special interest (or obsession) is the life and career of Henry V. In fact, her character is more than half in love with her subject, and this blinds her to the full knowledge that her hero is also a man with his fair share of flaws.

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