Helen Buday's screen career is a short one, and most people know it from a single part: the stern child-leader of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The stage kept her. The few films that did use her asked for a woman who has made up her mind.
Fi1m perspective
Savannah Nix stands in front of a tribe of children in the desert and tells them, in a chanted, half-broken English invented for the film, what they are going to do. Helen Buday plays her without a trace of apology. Most of the actors around her in the back half of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) are children, the writing has turned into a parable, and the film has just walked out of the one place we wanted to stay. She holds the scene anyway. We resented the film for leaving Bartertown, and we did not resent her, because she plays the leader of these children as someone who believes every word of the strange language she has been given, and belief is the only thing that passage has going for it. We called hers the best performance in that half of the film and we stand by it.
It was her screen debut, made two years out of NIDA, and it is the part the world remembers. What followed was mostly theatre. She played Nora in A Doll's House, Sally Bowles in Cabaret, Eliza in My Fair Lady and Lady Macbeth, for companies including Sydney Theatre Company and Belvoir, and took film roles when they came. They did not come often. For Love Alone (1986) gave her a lead as Teresa. Rolf de Heer cast her in Dingo (1991) as Jane Anderson and then, twelve years later, built Alexandra's Project (2003) around her: a wife, a husband, a videotape, and a revenge we will not describe.
The usual complaint is that the film credits are sparse after 1985, and that is true, and it is also a choice she appears to have made rather than one made for her. We have not reviewed Alexandra's Project and will not pretend to a view on it. What we can say is that a director went back to her twice for parts nobody else was offering, and that the people who have seen it describe the same thing we saw in the desert: a woman who has decided something and cannot be talked out of it. She studied voice at the Melbourne Conservatorium before she studied acting, and it shows in how a made-up dialect comes out of her sounding like a language someone grew up in.
Since the 2000s she has lived between Australia and France, where she directs an Australian film festival, and she turned up on screen again in Passing Through (2022). The Mad Max films have been rediscovered by a generation that never saw them in a cinema, and Beyond Thunderdome is the one they tend to skip. Sit through the second half anyway, for her, and then go looking for Alexandra's Project, which not many people did.
Biography
Helen Buday is an Australian actress and singer. She graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1983.
She made her screen debut as Savannah Nix in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). She played the title role in Alexandra's Project (2003), for which she received the Best Actress award at the 48th Valladolid International Film Festival.
Buday has worked extensively in theatre, appearing with major Australian companies in productions including A Midsummer Night's Dream, Three Sisters, The Importance of Being Earnest and A Doll's House. She has also performed lead roles in musicals such as My Fair Lady, Cabaret, High Society and The Threepenny Opera, and has appeared in various television series.
