Prisoner of Melbourne: Bea Smith

Val Lehman is Bea Smith. The housewife and hairdresser Beatrice Alice Smith strangled her friend after she found the woman in bed with her husband. Lehman tired of the role and left after Episode 400, with Bea being transferred to Barnhurst after a final confrontation with the Freak. We later hear that Bea has died in a fire there.

The undisputed Top Dog of Wentworth Val Lehman greets a young audience of 250 prisoner fans at the Prisoner 30th Anniversary Celebration on February 22, 2009.

When the curtain goes up on Prisoner, Bea is both celebrating her impending release on parole and plotting the murder of her rotten, cheating husband. “I never killed anyone that didn’t deserve it,” Lehman says of the man who let Bea’s daughter Debbie succumb to drugs while Bea was behind the walls of Wentworth.

As the ultimate Top Dog, Bea was the champion of the underdog and protector of the weak. A bully in her own right, she loathed authority nonetheless. Lehman’s own daughter Cassandra (center) played Bea’s tragic daughter Debbie, seen only in Prisoner’s most frequently used flashback, during which Debbie begs a powerless Bea for help in the prison’s interview room.