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Mary Charleston

Australian actress

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 18, 2026
Entity authorityQ6779204 ↗
Source-derived summary

Mary Charleston is an Australian choreographer, film and television actress. She guest starred on several television films and series during the 1970s and early 1980s, best remembered as playing Linda Golman in the cult soap opera Prisoner, but also having appeared in the 1980 television miniseries The Last Outlaw and the 1986 war film Death of a Soldier.

Career

Charleston got her start working as a dancer and made her television acting debut as a guest star on the police drama Cop Shop in 1977. She had a minor role in the 1978 film Mouth to Mouth, playing a massage parlor girl, and made another guest appearance on Skyways. In 1980, she appeared in the television miniseries The Last Outlaw. The next year, she was cast college political activist Linda Golman in the soap opera Prisoner. She and Kate Turner (Ricki Lee) were both introduced as friends and fellow activists of Andrea Hennessey, played by Bethany Lee, who kidnap the prison governor Erica Davidson (Patsy King). The kidnapping fails resulting in Ricki Lee being killed by the police and Linda Golman being sent to prison where she eventually commits suicide.

Following this appearance, Charleston decided to concentrate on her dance choreography career. She played the younger Heather McKean in the 1984 documentary film The Slim Dusty Movie.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mary Charleston” as australian actress. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1980, 1986, 1977, 1978—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Mary, Charleston and Australian can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as australian actress. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6779204. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1980, 1986, 1977 and 1978.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Mary Charleston”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Mary Charleston primary sources, Mary Charleston archive and Mary research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Mary Charleston”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Mary Charleston” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.