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Before I got into TV, I wasn't fashionable at all.

Over the years I attempted to make my style a bit more relaxed 'cause the initial style you couldn't watch for more than ten minutes without wanting to kill me.

My mother and my sisters - five girls - were crazy about glamour and Hollywood movies. I styled myself on Veronica Lake and Marlene Dietrich.

In Australia, there is a very famous show called 'Home and Away.' I was cast on that at 15. The day I started filming, my life changed.

The Hollywood lifestyle was just overwhelming. A party here, an interview there, magazine and modeling shoots daily, your face everywhere and girls throwing themselves at you. As great as it felt at the time, I still felt something missing, and that I needed to change.

I loved the medium of TV from the first moment that I got into a studio.

I think I'm becoming more relaxed in front of a camera. I suppose I'll always feel slightly more at home on stage. It's more of an actor's medium. You are your own editor, nobody else is choosing what is being seen of you.

When I was at my height on TV, I was always busy - rehearsing, practising my impressions, learning new material. When that faded, I had to find another way to be creative. Houses were something to do instead. They saved me.

When I started, you didn't focus so much on production, certainly not - gosh - down to the finest little detail of how you shifted your eyes or how you turned to somebody. A lot of the shots were far away from a still camera. There weren't as many close-ups and intimacy.

A few years after 'Melrose Place,' when the luster of 'Melrose Place' wore off and what was left was just the stink, and I was just doing bad TV movies, that was a personal low point. I felt I needed to stop doing those, and I did.