Chic and M.R. live on through new book

Margaret Rose Stringer and her late husband Charles were the perfect couple.

United by their passion and professional lives in the Australian film industry, ‘Chic’ and ‘M.R.’ Stringer were soul mates joined at the hip.

But when Chic died of lung cancer in 2006, Ms Stringer’s sense of being was eroded.

“It actually took me just a little less than six years until I felt I was a member of the human race,” M.R. says from her Pyrmont apartment.

“I was in a daze. I could do things – I actually enrolled in and achieved a post graduate certificate in editing – but everything I did I was doing on autopilot. I was doing things to fill my days.”

The grief led Ms Stringer to seek the aid of bereavement councillor Dianne McKissock, who prompted M.R. to pen an intimate account of their relationship amid their life in the Australian film industry.

“[Chic dying] was pretty terrible,” M.R. says. “I went into denial immediately. I couldn’t conceivably explain to anybody what it meant to me to know that Chic wasn’t going to be there forever and looking after me and running my life – it was unspeakable.”

Chic was one of Australia’s most eminent stillsmen of the 1970s and ‘80s, while M.R. spent her career in the industry as a freelancer and at SBS, Film Australia and AFTVS.

“Writing the book was incredibly difficult,” M.R. says. “I have to say that in the first draft I didn’t write about his dying. I wrote some phrase like ‘I can’t write about his dying, it’s too painful and it’s no one else’s business’.

“It was one of the most terrible things I’ve ever done, but it was totally therapeutic. It really was – there was crying and crying. But then I thought ‘this is ridiculous M.R. – it’s gone, it’s finished, it’s over’ and writing about his dying was totally meaningful.”

Ms Stringer’s memoire, And Then Like My Dreams, celebrates the career of Chic, and in doing so depicts their shared journey. Chic was a stillsmen in numerous famous Australian films, including Mad Max, Abba: The Movie and Stone.

Ms Stringer has just launched the book, and it has been acclaimed by David Stratton as “an intimate and deeply moving insight into a close and loving relationship against a backdrop of the Australian film industry”.