Any actress with ambition would kill to play Lady Macbeth. In a world of simpering girlfriends and supportive wifey roles, Lady M is a part for someone who really wants to get their hands dirty.

Shakespeare’s dark queen, with her unhinged ambitions and emotions, has launched the careers of some of the great actresses of our time: Francesca Annis sleepwalking nude in Polanski’s 1971 film, Helen Mirren as a sex goddess onstage in 1974, Judi Dench terrifying Ian McKellen in 1976 in the role some critics still call her greatest.

Little wonder, then, that unknown actress Victoria Hill had to fight so hard to play her in Geoffrey Wright’s new Macbeth movie — even though she co-wrote and co-produced the adaptation.

Every actress in Australia wanted to play the glamorous wife to Sam Worthington’s Melbourne gangland boss, but Hill hung on, even though she knew a famous actress could clinch funding for the production. Hill won’t name names or even honour my guesses (Toni Collette? Rachel Griffiths? Miranda Otto?).

“There were so many people wanting this part,” she says. “And actively pressuring and pursuing Geoff (Wright) and (executive producer) Martin Fabinyi regardless of my involvement. On the odd occasion, I felt as though the noble thing might be to step aside and say, ‘OK, no problems, let’s use this person so we can get this film made’.

After 16 years slogging it out in theatre collectives and television commercials, 35-year-old Hill now has four film roles in the can, including the Mick Molloy comedy BoyTown and Daniel Radcliffe’s escape from Harry Potter, December Boys. But it is Macbeth, the film she helped write, produce and perform, that has pushed her to the next level.

Although Hill has not been, up until now, a famous actress, her name has always attracted a certain amount of public scrutiny, at least in Australia.

She is one of the four children of the former defence minister, Senator Robert Hill, who resigned in January to take up a plum posting as Australia’s ambassador to the United Nations.

Growing up in old-money Adelaide, studying performance arts at Flinders University and then founding a theatre collective working that city’s radical arts fringe, Hill was accustomed to the assumptions people made about her.

The rough-and-tumble of politics certainly prepared Hill for Macbeth, a hyper-real take on Melbourne’s gangland wars, combining grabs of Shakespearean dialogue with the inky aesthetic of a Bill Henson photograph and the flashy violence of Asian cinema.

Hill met Wright 10 years ago when he cast her as a Snow White archetype in his 1996 telemovie The Fallen Woman. They got back in touch when they were both working on screenplays optioned by Martin Fabinyi’s Mushroom Pictures.

The Romper Stomper director had returned to Australia after a long, bleak stretch in Los Angeles. Hill had spent the previous five years working on a screenplay for a chick flick called Famous by Friday.

Their collaboration started with a few drinks at a Sydney hotel at the start of last year. Wright told Hill he wanted to make Macbeth as a modern gangster movie. She thought it was a brilliant idea and he told Hill she could play Lady Macbeth.

But the Macbeths have no children. Like many actresses before her, Hill decided her queen has lost a child and uses ambition to assuage her grief.

Hill had to summon demons of her own to tap into her character’s madness and despair. “I didn’t watch other people’s Lady Macbeth,” she says. “I concentrated on finding the moment for myself. Geoff and I had been talking about a Courtney Love mess, that kind of a nut case.

Hill knows that Macbeth will polarise audiences — it’s a Geoffrey Wright film, after all. But she’s fiercely proud of it and exhilarated that it’s finally out there, on the big screen, less than two years after that conversation at the pub.

“The Macbeth experience was so amazing, to be involved in so many elements,” says Hill. “The trouble with acting is, you have to wait to be picked and I can’t stand that. I never could. That’s why I went into theatre and started my own troupe. And that’s why I want to concentrate on my own things.

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