A gift to our friends, Ron and Jennifer

Rachel Ward’s journey from Hollywood to regenerative farming – Reposted from Forgotten Facts on Facebook

In the spring of 1983, a British actress named Rachel Ward appeared on American television for four nights, playing a character named Meggie Cleary in a miniseries called The Thorn Birds.

Around 140 million people watched.

For four episodes she played the forbidden love of a Catholic priest, a story spanning decades, set against the Australian outback, built on longing and sacrifice and landscapes so wide they barely seemed real. It became one of the most-watched TV events of its decade.

Hollywood had its next star. And Rachel Ward, at 25, had absolutely no idea what to do with that.

She had not planned any of it. Born in England in 1957, raised in an aristocratic family in the Cotswolds, she had moved through the world of high fashion modeling in London, Paris, and New York before drifting toward acting in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. She noticed early what that world was actually offering her.

“”You soon find it’s a very empty and unsatisfying place to inhabit,”” she said later. “”I was just make-up. I was fantasy.””

What happened instead was something quieter.

On the set of The Thorn Birds she met Bryan Brown, an Australian actor playing her on-screen husband. He was funny, grounded, and completely comfortable in his own skin. He proposed within months of meeting her. She asked him to wait. He told her he might not ask again. She said yes.

They married in 1983, the same year the show aired. They moved to Australia together, where she became a citizen in 1986. They bought a farm, 865 acres in New South Wales. Three children followed.

Rachel kept working and eventually moved behind the camera too, writing scripts and directing, winning an Australian Film Institute Award in 2001. But the farm kept growing in importance until it became the point of everything.

Then she went further. In recent years she threw herself into regenerative farming, rebuilding soil health and working with the land rather than against it. She spent her days fixing water pumps and moving cattle, her hands roughened in ways that had nothing to do with any role she had ever played.

In late 2024, at 67, she posted a video. No makeup. Short grey hair. Driving an ATV through a muddy field. Just doing what she does every day, not performing anything at all.

The comments were quick and unkind. “”What happened to her.”” “”I didn’t recognize you.”” “”She has aged really bad.””

Ward saw them and responded, not with anger, but with something that landed harder.

“”I’m so past caring about what people think about one’s appearance or age. All I want to hear is, ‘Actually, Rachel’s cows are looking pretty good.'””

Then she added: “”How ironic that my going grey garnered me more attention than if I’d taken my top off.””

And to those defending her in the comments: “”I just feel sorry for those poor souls who fear aging so much. They will learn that it’s ultimate freedom as a woman to let youth and beauty go.””

Forty-three years ago, 140 million people fell in love with Rachel Ward on a screen. Today she is more interested in whether her soil is healthy and her cows are doing well.

Hollywood gave her a face half the world recognized. The farm gave her work that actually mattered to her.

She never had much trouble knowing the difference, even when the rest of the world was still catching up.

Ron and Jennifer Ste Marie operate Notch Hill Community Growers, a regenerative farm in Notch Hill, British Columbia.

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