Magda Szubanski

Szubanski in character at the Kath & Kimderella film premiere, August 2012

In 1985, while performing in a University of Melbourne Law Revue of Too Cool for Sandals, with Michael Veitch and Tom Gleisner, Szubanski was talent-spotted by producers from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), who convinced her to join up with some other university friends in creating a television sketch comedy show, The D-Generation.[17]

Szubanski was part of the team that created the television sketch comedy Fast Forward for the Seven Network, in which she played various characters, including Pixie-Anne Wheatley, Chenille from the Institute de Beauté, Wee Mary MacGregor, Joan Kirner, Michelle Grogan and other characters. The character of Lynne Postlethwaite was first performed on the ABC's The D-Generation. It was originally written by John Allsop and Andrew Knight, but from Fast Forward on Szubanski co-wrote the sketches, and created and co-wrote her characters.

In 1995, she and friends Gina Riley and Jane Turner wrote, performed and produced the first all-female Australian sketch comedy television program; Big Girl's Blouse. When Riley and Turner developed the sketch-characters they had created into the sitcom Kath & Kim, Szubanski joined them to play Sharon Strzelecki, a character she had previously created herself.

Her character Sharon "pashed" (Australian slang for vigorous kissing) and "married" Australian cricketing legend Shane Warne. She also "pashed" the late Australian actor Heath Ledger on the red carpet at the AFI awards in 2006 while in the role of Sharon, acting as an assistant stage manager.

In 1999, Szubanski created, wrote, co-produced and starred as Margaret O'Halloran in the Dogwoman series of TV films, a detective style show based on the idea an expert "dog-whisperer" who, by treating problem dogs, inadvertently stumbles upon and solves human crimes.

Sharon Strzelecki is one of Szubanski's most developed characters

In 2009, she appeared on Who Do You Think You Are? where she explored her father's Polish Resistance activities as well as the story of her shell-shocked Irish grandfather and her sculptor ancestor Luigi Isepponi who assisted in making the Death mask for William Burke, half of the duo Burke and Hare, notorious grave robbers and serial killers.

From 3 September 2018, Szubanski recurred as Jemima Davies-Smythe on Neighbours. Her character officiated the first same-sex wedding on Australian television.[18]

On 8 April 2019, she appeared as "Guest Announcer" on Chris & Julia's Sunday Night Takeaway's season finale where she participated in a number of roles.

Szubanski starred in the 1995 film Babe as Esme Hoggett. She reprised her role in the 1998 sequel, Babe: Pig in the City. She then teamed up again with director/producer George Miller to voice the role of Miss Viola in the animated films Happy Feet and Happy Feet Two.

In 2007, she had a minor role as Mrs Lonsdale, the housemaid in The Golden Compass to Lyra Belacqua.

In 2015, Szubanski released her award-winning memoir Reckoning. In 2016 the book won several awards and beat some of Australias top literary authors to win the TBA.[19] Reckoning also won the $40,000 Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction[20] and "Book of the Year" and "Biography of the Year" at the Australian Book Industry Awards.^[3]

While the book is nominally an autobiography, it is in large part about her father Zbigniew Szubanski, who was an assassin working for the Polish Resistance during World War 2. Reckoning deals with the themes of intergenerational trauma, the possible genetic inheritance of traumatic memory and Szubanski's struggles with her own sexuality in the shadow of this legacy.

Reviewer Peter Craven in The Australian said it would "dazzle every kind of reader" and described it as "a riveting, overwhelmingly poignant autobiography by a woman of genius. It is a book about how someone might live with the idea of killing the thing they love. It is a story of love and death and redemption and a daughter's love for her father. It is an extraordinary hymn to the tragic heroism at the heart of ordinary life and the soaring moral scrutiny of womankind. Every library should have it, every school should teach it."[21]

Richard Ferguson in The Sydney Morning Herald wrote, "This is documentary writing of the highest order and Szubanski has given life to an incredible war story…Reckoning, this tale of war and suburbia, sexuality and comedy, is likely to be the most popular Australian book of the year. Anyone who doesn't adore Magda Szubanski the clown will be awed by Szubanski the A-grade non-fiction writer. Let's hope the books keep on coming."[22]

Academy Award winner and friend Geoffrey Rush launched her book and wrote in The Guardian: "I was absorbed in preparing for King Lear when I read the book. The classical stature of that particular father-daughter relationship didn't go unnoticed. Magda grew up in the shadow of a difficult reckoning — the summation, the questioning, the Elizabethan sense of settling the bill with one's parents. As she phrases it: her father needed to forget— she needed to remember. The only way forward was back. Her book riffs a major life in a reflective minor key. I've got lost in Joyce's Dublin, Woolf's Bloomsbury, the Bronte Sisters' Yorkshire moors. Now I'm enthralled with Magda Szubanski's Croydon, Australia's own collective sub-conscious suburb, the architecture of which she deftly anoints as Bauhaus's "bastard child"…Reckoning is really a non-fiction novel – and its invitation into Magda's story is infectious."[23]

The Premier's Award judges described Reckoning as 'warm, clear, wise, funny and deeply intelligent. The amplitude of Szubanski's writing is particularly impressive. Her voice has a light surety, while constantly giving narrative and moral weight to the larger themes of grief, family, migration and finding one's place in the world'."[24]

In 2007, Szubanski ventured into musical comedy, taking on the role of William Barfee in the Melbourne Theatre Company production of the hit Broadway musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Variety described her performance as "sensationally good".[25] Australian Stage said, "Magda Szubanski as the Eric Cartman-esque William Barfee steals the show."[26]

In 2008, she again participated in some gender-blind casting, taking on the role of pint-sized gangster Big Jule in a major stage production of Guys and Dolls.

In 2010, she appeared in the first Indigenous musical film Bran Nue Dae as Roadhouse Betty alongside Geoffrey Rush, Ernie Dingo, Missy Higgins and Deborah Mailman. The film was directed by Rachel Perkins, daughter of the Aboriginal activist Charlie Perkins.

In 2012, she again teamed with Rush to appear in the Stephen Sondheim musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

• Too Cool for Sandals (1985) - various
• The Rise and Fall of Little Voice (1993) - Sadie
• Grease: The Arena Spectacular (National Australia Tour) (2005) - Miss Lynch
• The Madwoman of Chaillot – (2007) – Countess Aurelia
• Guys and Dolls (2008) – Big Jule
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (2012) - Domina