“It was the first time the industry thought I was a viable actor',” she says. She won best lead actress in a television drama at the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards. The breakout came in 2010 with Sisters of War, in which she played one of two Australian women who survived as prisoners of war in Papua New Guinea during the Second World War.

“So I guess the children saw my first paid performing gigs.”Īfter graduating in 2008 and following work on stage, including being cast in King Lear in the State Theatre Company of South Australia, she started winning roles on television. “I moved cities and asked what skills I had, and I thought I could do fairy parties,” she says. Snook supported herself by working in a hotel at night and on the weekend was a fairy at children's parties. She was first reserve and got in after another student dropped out two weeks before term started. She won a drama scholarship to the prestigious Scotch College.Īt 18, the drama teacher who had cast Snook in A Doll's House pushed her to apply for Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Art, a year earlier than usual. She acted in primary school and was given the – admittedly jokey – Meryl Streep Drama Award for acting upon leaving. It was seeing her sister in a school production of Peter Pan at the age of five that really introduced Snook to the magic of theatre.

Old Snook instaling