Sydney Theatre Company faces a scramble to find another actor to play a key role in one of its drawcard productions for 2012 after Logie award-winning actress Jessica Marais on Tuesday announced she was pregnant.
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Marais was to play Eliza Doolittle in STC's production of the George Bernard Shaw classic Pygmalion, scheduled to open on January 31.
A spokesman for the theatre told the Herald the STC was very pleased for Marais and said it was in discussions with her about what was best for her and for the production.
STC artistic directors Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton had been keen to showcase Marais's talent ever since what they have described as her "fragility and strength" caught their attention in 2008 in a Melbourne production of Patrick White's A Season at Sarsaparilla, before she became a household name in the TV series Packed to the Rafters.
Marais and her fiance James Stewart, both popular characters in the TV show, announced in a statement released on Tuesday that they were expecting their first child. Marais quit the show and her role as Rachel Rafter in February to try her luck in Hollywood.
Upton and Blanchett had decided to "shake the dust" off the Bernard Shaw work and focus less on the British class aspects and more on the power relations, especially that of an older man and a younger woman. Marais was to play the feral young flower seller who meets phonetics expert Professor Henry Higgins ( Kim Gyngell ) and is then transformed into a young woman so refined she could pass for a duchess.
"It's funny, it's sexually charged ... language is power and that is at the heart of this play," Blanchett told the Herald earlier this year. "There is a lot in the season about identity, who we are, who we think we are, and how we act."
