Michala Banas was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1978, and moved to Australia when she was 10. “I was very sick as a child”, she told Girfriend Magazine. “I nearly died of whooping cough. I was born with a malfunctioning kidney and didn’t grow for the first few years of my life”.

In January 2001, she wrote: “I have been an actor/actress basically all my life – I did my first television commercial when I was only eighteen months old! (not that I knew what was going on). After that, I never really stopped. I guess film work is in my genes, my father [i.e. John Banas] is also in the industry as a writer/director/producer, and I just kind of fell into it.”

Michala’s first great accomplishment as an actress came in 1995, when she played the role of Louisa Iredale in Mirror Mirror and was nominated for the Best Young Actress Award in the 1996 New Zealand Television Awards for her performance on the show. She says: “When we shot Mirror Mirror seven years ago, I was only sixteen years old … , but it was one of the best experiences of my life so far.”

When she was 18, Michala Banas moved to Melbourne and started doing lots of guest roles for various television shows, including Blue Heelers and Round the Twist. She then moved to Sydney and became a familiar face on Australian television screens thanks to her role as Marissa Taylor on Always Greener. The show was axed in 2003.

In addition to her acting career, Michala is also an accomplished singer. She played in several bands (Cosmo [named after the famous Seinfeld character], Pass the Peas), and she released a single called “Kissin’ the Wind” in 2003.

Michala joined the cast of McLeod’s Daughters in 2004, a role which has allowed her popularity to grow even more – in and outside Australia.