“Does anyone have a plastic fish?”
Celeste Barber is poolside, in a pair of togs and a silk robe, exuding sunniness on this 14-degree day. After pocket-patting and giggling among the assembled crew for The Weekly’s shoot, it seems no-one has a plastic poisson to hand. Ever the improviser, she throws a rubber jandal into the swimming pool so she can hunt it down with the pool net. Quarry caught, she holds the net up like a fisherman with a fresh flounder –and hams for the camera.
Her mum, Kath, has dropped in for the shoot at the Blue Water Motel and Beach House in Kingscliff, just below the Queensland border. “She was just naturally, giftedly funny all the time,” she says. “And so is her sister and so is her father. So you get them together and it’s interesting.”
That happens a lot, because Celeste and her family live walking distance from Kath and dad Neville, and older sister Olivia, not far from where we’re shooting today.
“She was never a show-off as a child,” says Kath. “That’s the funniest thing.” Instead, she says it was an end-of-year dance concert in nearby Tweed Heads when Celeste was maybe four years old that planted the performing bug. Fresh from tapping her way through New York, New York with the other tiny tots, she ran to her mum at the side of the stage and said, “Mama – they love me!” Kath says, “That was it – we couldn’t get her off stage.”
Celeste’s career today flits unrelentingly from stage to screen to social media – and now even supply chains as the co-founder of BOOIE Beauty.