Striking a series of fierce poses, and wearing one fabulous outfit after another, Anne Hegerty couldn’t be more different than her famous ‘The Governess’ alter ego during New Idea’s exclusive photoshoot.
In Australia to film new episodes of The Chase Australia, Anne graciously slotted us into her busy schedule – and dropped quite the bombshell when she arrived in our studio….
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“My dirty little secret is that I wanted to be famous right from childhood,” Anne tells us, matter of factly while getting her hair and makeup done.
“I just wanted to be famous as ‘something’. My grandfather worked for a publisher. I thought, ‘I want to be able to do this.’ I couldn’t…I’m not a very good writer. So I decided I’d be a famous singer, then a famous actress.”
Instead, Anne, 65 became a journalist. But even then she admits she only did so “to become a really famous journalist. And that wasn’t going to happen.”
After a stint in therapy, Anne says she “got her head in the right place.”
Finally, her lifelong goal came to fruition when she was cast as a ‘chaser’ on British quiz show The Chase.
In 2015, she began appearing on Channel Seven’s Australian version.
“I used to wonder if my wanting to be fame adjacent is really just a substitute for wanting friends, but no, it was actually that I just wanted to be famous,” Anne continues.
“It’s nice that I can walk into a room, and I don’t have to tell people who I am. I can just sort of lurk at the back. If people ignore me, I think ‘Well, it’s your loss.’ I don’t really know how to explain it. I like being famous.”
Even though she’s a household name now, Anne still has her pre-fame base in Manchester, but spends most of her time in Watford, on the outskirts of London.
She takes part in quizzes “quite regularly” when home in the UK, and has even converted her brother Jonathan – or ‘Jon’ as Anne calls him.
“I’ve got him playing Quiz League of London,” she says with a smile.
“He seems to be enjoying it. We’ve become quite close. There was a long period of time where we weren’t, but he actually really likes me being on The Chase, and his kids are quite excited about it too.
“Jon’s quite bemused with all the people he suddenly knows! I don’t have a lot of other family members. Both my parents are dead.”
Describing herself as somewhat “haphazard” Anne doesn’t do much preparation for The Chase. She simply “reads a lot”, including newspapers and Twitter.
She does confess, however, that she’s had to “catch up” on modern music, as she tells us, “I stopped listening to [the] charts in the mid-80s.”
While Anne has become synonymous with the word governess for many Aussies, production initially chose ‘The Headmistress’ as her nickname. Anne wasn’t keen on it so when they started calling her ‘The Governess’, she requested a permanent change.
“The Governess has more freedom than a headmistress,” Anne says.
“A headmistress has got a board of governors breathing down her neck. A governess just makes her role whatever she wants it to be.”
Reflecting on her journey thus far, Anne believes it’s a “good thing” she tried to “do real stuff.”
Before she stumbled into fame, Anne spent the best part of her career “proofreading books.” She also worked as a ghostwriter.
“I always believed in hard work and my Scottish mother didn’t,” Anne tells us.
“My mother was always saying, ‘Do be careful dear. Don’t work too hard,’ and I actually thought, ‘Hard work is actually a really good thing!'”
“My father hated all sorts of work. I don’t know where I ended up getting this work ethic from. However, one of the things about being autistic is, I need to do things really slowly and with lots of breaks, which makes me feel as though I’m a lazy person and no good at hard work. But I really value hard work so much.”
As we start wrapping up for the day, Anne reveals she plans on having some downtime once she returns home.
Filming for the British version of The Chase begins in October, then Anne will transform into the Empress for Aladdin, a Christmastime pantomime in Chesterfield, UK. It’s a gig Anne throws herself into every year with gusto, requesting the chance to sing despite “not having a very strong voice.”
“They find it useful to have someone who’s on TV to get those bums on seats,” she adds.
When she is finally home alone, Anne shares that she is “perfectly happy lying on my back in bed for hours” letting her “thoughts wander.”
“It might seem like a dull life to some,” she declares.
“But it suits me.”
