Leah Purcell

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Leah Purcell (born 14 August 1970) is an Australian actress from Murgon in the Kingaroy district of Queensland.

She is an accomplished film, television and theatre actor, singer, director and playwright. She is the youngest of six children of Aboriginal and white Australian descent. Her father was a boxing trainer. After a difficult adolescence, looking after her sick mother who died while Leah was in her late teens, she had turned to drink and had her own child, Leah finally left Murgon and moved to Brisbane and became involved with community theatre.

In 1996 she moved to Sydney to become presenter on a music video cable television station, RED Music Channel. This was followed by roles in the ABC television series Police Rescue and Fallen Angels. She co-wrote and acted in a play called Box the Pony, which played at Sydney's Belvoir Street Theatre, the Sydney Opera House, the 1999 Edinburgh Festival and in 2000 at the Barbican in London. She then wrote and directed the documentary Black Chicks Talking, which won a 2002 Inside Film award. She appeared in the acclaimed Australian film Lantana starring Anthony LaPaglia and Geoffrey Rush and in the theatre in The Vagina Monologues and in the 2004 films Somersault, The Proposition (starring Guy Pearce and Emily Watson and written by Nick Cave) and Jindabyne (starring Gabriel Byrne) as well as playing the role of Condoleezza Rice in David Hare's play, Stuff Happens in Sydney and Melbourne.

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