Dee Smart

Dierdre Claire Smart (born 9 July 1966) is an Australian actress, model, singer, dancer and painter. After giving up on being a dancer, she rose to prominence portraying Lucinda Croft in the popular soap opera Home and Away from 1991 to 1992. After leaving the show she appeared in a handful of television guest spots, plays and films, including the 1997 comedy Welcome to Woop Woop, and was known for her appearances as Lady Luck on the variety programme The Footy Show before returning to regular television in the police procedural Water Rats, where she portrayed Detective Senior Constable Alex St. Clare from 1999 to 2001. Her more recent roles include having appeared in the 2011 TV movie Panic at Rock Island and the television shows Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries in 2013 and Winter in 2015. She is also known in Australia for being a permanent fixture in the country's tabloids and for her close friendship with billionaire businessman James Packer, with whom she and her husband Chris Hancock lived for a year, and who introduced her to Scientology, of which she became one of the country's most high-profile members. Her eldest daughter, Charlie Hancock, is also an actress and played Verity Darling on the drama series Spirited. Early life and education Smart was born in Adelaide, South Australia, the seventh of nine children. She grew up on a large cattle farm outside the city with her parents, four brothers and four sisters. At the age of sixteen, she joined the Victorian College of the Arts, hoping to become a classical dancer, but while she didn't experience much success, she found herself in demand as a model. She then turned to acting, studying with Hayes Gordon at Sydney's Ensemble Theatre. Career After studying drama for three years, Smart secured her first ever professional acting role at age 25 when she signed a two-year contract to play Lucinda Croft, the tomboyish niece of old-fashioned school principal Donald Fisher, in the popular soap opera Home and Away. Smart said that she was "a wreck" before filming her first scenes but soon learned to cope with the process and would attend acting classes each weekend. As Lucinda, Smart would have many storylines involving her love interest, policeman Nick Parrish (played by Bruce Roberts), as well as her estranged brother David (played by Guy Pearce), and quickly became one of the show's most popular characters.