The call from Ian Smith that helped lead to Neighbours careers for Kylie, Jason, Guy, Margot…

Everybody knows casting director Jan Russ brilliantly cast Neighbours and ignited the careers of stars including Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, Guy Pearce, Margot Robbie, Jesse Spencer, Natalie Imbruglia, Craig McLachlan, Holly Valance and more.

But if not for a phone call from Ian Smith, who went on to fame as Ramsay’s Street Harold Bishop, it might have been a much different history for everybody involved.

It was Smith who lured Russ across to Grundys as a casting director in the early 1980s.

“I got a job at Crawfords under Bunney Brooke, who was casting director. I worked on All the Rivers Run, Cop Shop and those sort of shows,” Jan Russ tells TV Tonight.

“I received a phone call from Ian Smith who was writing with Prisoner, because Ian and I had actually worked together in Fiddler on the Roof at JC Williamsons.

“I loved working on Prisoner, because you were dealing with strong female actors. They all had a good theatre background, which to me is so important having come from theatre, even though at that time, television was a different medium to what they’d worked in. Very quickly they picked up how to work in television.”

Russ would later receive the phone call from Neighbours creator Reg Watson about his newest script idea, originally called Living Together, and asked her to begin assembling cast ideas.

At Crawfords showbiz lessons came hard. Russ insists she learned much about the casting process, which set her on her new career path.

“It used to really upset me to see actors walk out of the audition room ready to sort of, slash their wrists or just be absolutely desolate. So that’s something that I decided if I’m ever in that position, I would never allow an actor to leave my audition room feeling like they’ve done a terrible job. That to me was important.”