Meggie Cleary

Meggie Cleary is the main character of The Thorn Birds, a 1977 best selling novel by Australian author Colleen McCullough. The 1983 mini-series starred Rachel Ward as Meggie.

The novel is set at a sheep station in the Australian outback between the years 1920 and 1962. The story focuses on the Clearys and Meggie's forbidden love for the priest Father Ralph de Bricassart, who fathers her son but remains in the priesthood.

Meggie Cleary throughout the Thorn Birds film remains obsessed with the one love of her life, Father Ralph de Bricassart.

She is torn between the longings of her heart, and finding a sense of fulfillment in the reality of mature womanhood, and life.

Meggie embodies the title of the Thorn Birds miniseries.... the Nightingale in seeking the beauty of life as a thorn bird, sets upon a rose tree laden with thorns who is pierced through, and sings the most beautiful song as she dies.

Meggie's life appears to be destined for heartache and pain as she loses those the most dear to her heart.

First her older beloved brother Frank a ruddy country gentleman with tremendous gusto and a gift for energetic doggerel, next a baby brother, another brother she loved in childhood, Stewie, as well her father Paddy..... and finally her son, Dane.

It is at this point, at the death of Dane, that Meggie begins to experience life in all of its personal suffering, heartache and trial that Meggie finds a sense of peace, and inner fulfillment.

Although she and Father Ralph de Bricassart never marry, they remain forever in love. Father Ralph dies in Meggie's arms.

The death of de Bricassart represents a closure in one passage of Meggie's life, toward the beginning of a new life in relationship with her daughter, Justine, and a deeper understanding of her mother,Fiona, and herself, in middle age.

Meggie Cleary is one of the most poignant of characters in television film, conveying life's vast range of human emotions... Meggie as a young girl, was forced to grow up and see life as an adult, rather than to develop into that passage of life, in a normal sense.

Father Ralph, while a true anchor, in Meggie's life from childhood to adult, at the same time complicates her life with emotions and longings that an adult woman struggles to comprehend as is more often, than not the case.