Alexandra Park: the highs and lows of diabetes and Hollywood

At 23 years old, former Home and Away actor Alexandra Park left Australia for Los Angeles and was nearly immediately cast alongside Liz Hurley and others in The Royals. She was also dealing with a diagnosis of type-1 diabetes. Ahead of the release of Sugar High, a book on her experience, she talks with Mike McGrath-Bryan about striking a balance between stardom and self-care.

Alexandra Park, author of Sugar High, and her dog Billie.

Aussie telly, for many of us, is a mixture of cult appeal and the exotic — the standard tropes of sun-kissed beaches and unreasonably attractive protagonists, meeting a vernacular language and accent that resonates with many Irish people on a deeper, almost muscle-memory level.

No more enduring an example of this genre exists than soap opera Home and Away. Still welded onto afternoon and evening schedules here in Ireland some three decades after its premiere on import-hungry Network Two, the soap still trades in stories of teenage tumult and the events that befall the denizens of a nebulously-located beachside caravan park.