Anne Louise Lambert as Miranda, peering over a rock and looking into the distance in a scene from Picnic at Hanging Rock.
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Return to Hanging Rock

Return to Hanging Rock

The return of Miranda and Mrs Appleyard
BY
 Stephen Groenewegen

We’ve added a Q&A with actress Anne Louise Lambert (Miranda) and more outtakes to our online Picnic at Hanging Rock curated collection.

Anne Louise Lambert, who played Miranda in Picnic at Hanging Rock visited the NFSA in August 2015 to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of the film and launch our online collection about Picnic at Hanging Rock. She attended a special screening of the film in Arc cinema and spoke with Cris Kennedy afterwards, also taking questions from the audience.You can watch clips from the Q&A with Anne Louise Lambert in the YouTube playlist below.

 

 

The playlist includes each question as an individual clip as well as a 20-minute clip of the entire Q&A. She answers questions about returning to Hanging Rock in recent years; how the film changed her life; what it was like as a young actress working with director Peter Weir; what she would change now about her performance; and her reactions to seeing the film again after many years.

Anne Louise Lambert as Miranda, wearing a white dress and looking up through a gap in the rock in a scene from Picnic at Hanging Rock.
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The rock... its' beauty and its' power just hit me. It has still got a presence, that extraordinary presence. It's really there.

Anne Louise Lambert (Miranda)

Mrs Appleyard at Hanging Rock

We’ve also added more outtakes to the online exhibition: scenes of Mrs Appleyard (played by Rachel Roberts) climbing Hanging Rock, retracing the steps of the missing schoolgirls and encountering a vision of orphan Sara Waybourne (Margaret Nelson).

Outtakes from Picnic at Hanging Rock. Please note: this clip is silent. NFSA title: 1395795

Director Peter Weir shot the scenes for the original ending of the film but ultimately decided not to use them, leaving Mrs Appleyard’s ultimate fate to the imagination of the viewer. These are excerpts from reels of 35mm silent colour outtakes, trims of scenes and additional unused material that the NFSA acquired from Martin Sharp, who was credited on the film as ‘Artistic Advisor to the Director’.

You can see more outtakes from the film in the Picnic at Hanging Rock curated collection, along with costumes, props, oral history interviews, music, posters, lobby cards, photographs, scripts and behind-the-scenes production documents.