Irrepressible TV trailblazer Hazel Phillips scarcely remembers that glittering night in 1967 when she won her two TV WEEK Logie Awards, including the prestigious Gold … because she could barely stay awake!
“Bert Newton was hosting, so it certainly wasn’t a dull ceremony. But I’d flown in from Los Angeles that day and was so jet-lagged I struggled to keep my eyes open,” Hazel recalls with a laugh.
Now a spry 95 and residing at a Gold Coast retirement home, Hazel is our oldest surviving female Gold Logie winner. Former journalist and broadcaster Michael Charlton, now 98, is the oldest. He won in 1963.
Hazel was just the second woman to receive the top honour, after the late Lorrae Desmond’s breakthrough win in 1962. At the 1967 ceremony, the Gold was gendered, with Graham Kennedy taking home the male award.
“It was the ninth Logies and it was broadcast from a cruise ship in Melbourne,” Hazel tells New Idea.
“I was outfitted in an enormous chinchilla fur coat – something I’d never wear these days – but that was 58 years ago.
“I was picked up in a limo, and Johnny Young was riding along. He tipped me off, saying he’d heard that I was getting the top gong. My head went into a spin.”
Although getting the Gold was “very exciting”, Hazel says she remembers thinking afterwards that she’d given a “really lousy acceptance speech”.
Making history
Hazel had been in the US on a three-day spree for her pioneering daytime TV chat show, Girl Talk. While there, she taped 54 interviews with the likes of Paul Newman, Charlton Heston and Bing Crosby.
Girl Talk aired on the fledgling 10 Network. It was the first Australian chat show hosted by a woman, with Hazel paid $350 a week.
Hazel’s big break came almost a decade earlier, when she won Channel Seven’s ‘Search For Miss TV’ contest.
Having emigrated to Australia in 1951 as a ‘Ten Pound Pom’, Hazel joined the daytime panel show Beauty & The Beast in 1964, where she worked alongside the late Maggie Tabberer and Dita Cobb.
Looking back, Hazel says it was a “bittersweet time”. Right as her career was taking off, her marriage to TV director Bill Phillips was collapsing. They shared two sons, Mark and Scott.
In the 1970s, Hazel guest-starred on Number 96, playing a woman who fell in lust with Elaine Lee’s Vera Collins. She tells us, “I’m told she’s one of the first lesbian characters on prime-time TV anywhere in the world.”
Moving to the Gold Coast in 1995, Hazel insists she’s enjoyed “a great life” ever since. She still keeps her finger on the pulse of TV, and will be eagerly watching this year’s TV WEEK Logie Awards to see who will next take home the coveted Gold.
“I’m addicted to Married at First Sight and Farmer Wants A Wife!” she adds.
