After becoming disillusioned with this existence, Brooke sought conventional employment as a clown, acting teacher, café owner and train conductor.

Subsequent experiences of a broken marriage, two children and struggles with depression, illness and lack of money which gave her the depth for years later to win the Best Actress Logie for a 1974 episode of Number 96 as Flo Patterson, jilted at the altar.

Prompt Corner also held poetry readings and, aside from the gay and lesbian patrons, it attracted the theatrical and bohemian crowd.

[5] In April 1976, Brooke endured a heart seizure which brought her to the "brink of death", collapsing at her Rozelle home with crushing chest pains before spending 10 days in intensive care of Balmain Hospital, Sydney.

They shared the same birth year and a small house at the eastern end of Fox Valley Road in Wahroonga in northern Sydney.

The association with Crawford awoke Brooke's creative side, and she became interested in scripts, joining an amateur theatrical group.

Her first Magic Circle Club guest appearance, as a Southern belle with two suitors, led to a recurring role as Aunty Vale (an enchantress) in the children's television series.

The producers of the show were having trouble filling the role of Flo, a friend and comic foil of gossip Dorrie Evans (Pat McDonald), and Brooke fit the part.

Brooke was specially written into the Young Doctors episode as a clown, she so impressed Grundy Organization executive Reg Watson with her knowledge of clownsmanship.

Finding such enthusiastic responses from audiences in small theater venues around Melbourne, Brooke then wrote a third clown play.

[12] In November 1980, Brooke won the Penguin Award of "BEST SINGLE PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS" – Rock Pool, ABC[13] Next Brooke was known to a new generation of viewers with an ongoing role in the children's series Round the Twist (1989) as Nell Rickards, and, in 1990, acted at the same time as the ongoing role of Auntie Violet "Vi" Patchett in the soap opera E Street.

[2] Brooke, a heavy smoker and drinker, died in a Manly, New South Wales, hospital on 2 April 2000 at the age of 79, after a two-year battle with bowel and liver cancer.

[10][14] On 20 January 2009, her 1974 Silver Logie Award (presented to Brooke in 1975 by the late Hollywood great John Wayne) was purchased by an anonymous Queensland bidder in a 24-hour auction on eBay for A$2,225.

Frankie J. Holden, another Round The Twist star, said Brooke "Could play with the kids, be a serious actress opposite the adults and that night drink the crew under the table".