Sacha Horler - My Life without Sex

The night Sacha Horler announced herself to the world, the heavens opened in Sydney. Rain fell in sheets, hail plummeted to earth like a meteor shower and all hell broke loose.

But the 1998 world premiere of Praise was not to be dampened. And the tempest of Horler's performance as Cynthia, a nymphomaniac with eczema and a taste for heroin, had a ferocity matching the elements outside. That year she won AFI Awards for Best Actress (Praise) and Best Supporting Actress for Soft Fruit.

A reputation for raw emotion and artistic fearlessness was sealed. "Youth and bravado, a healthy sense of denial, a large dose of 'What the hell?!' and suddenly I've got this nut-bag reputation," laughs Horler today. "Ever since Praise, I don't get cast as normal people. Instead, it's... 'Need something extreme? Sacha will go there'."

A decade on, Horler finds herself at the eye of a new storm, this time as the star of Sarah Watt's excellent new film My Year without Sex. Horler, now 39 and the mother of two children aged five and two, plays Natalie, a working nurse and mother, whose descent into the maelstrom begins when she collapses with an aneurysm and almost dies.

Although there's excellent support from Matt Day as Natalie's hapless stoic husband, Maud Davey (last seen in Summer Heights High) as rock star-turned-priest Margaret and Watts' husband William McInnes as a massive trannie in a tizz, this is Horler's film.

With a head half-shaved to the scalp, an ugly crescent scar serrated into her skull and her big eyes shot through with fear, it's a performance that cuts to the marrow.

Behind the scenes, Horler felt her character's pain deeply. "When we began shooting in Altona [Melbourne], I'd just had my daughter, Evangeline, and I was frumpy, fragile and my hormones were raging," says the diminutive daughter of a Sydney QC, out of her trakky daks and uggs and looking svelte and stylish today.

Director Watt, whose 2005 debut Look Both Ways claimed four AFIs, including wins for Best Film, Screenplay and Director, based My Year without Sex on her own battle with cancer in 2004. As has become her trademark, the animated title cards that separate each of the film's 12 monthly chapters reflect an inner life Horler lived on-set and off.

"One thing they don't teach you at NIDA is how to 'un-role' after a performance," says Horler, who will star in the STC's God of Carnage opposite Jeremy Sims later in 2009. "The brain doesn't distinguish between truth and fiction and the residue of a role remains. I think that's why some actors use sex and drugs and booze to rediscover themselves.

"Y'know, of all the films I've done, this was the toughest for me to 'turn off the tap'. One scene in particular, where Natalie is out of the hospital and staring long and hard into a mirror, had me crying for ages afterward. I couldn't switch her off. I really went there."

My Year without Sex screens from 28 May.

More films, film reviews, film festivals and special screenings in Sydney? Sign up for our weekly newsletter