[3] After attending Kewdale Senior High School in Perth, she spent a year in Anchorage, Alaska, on an American Field Scholarship.
She moved to Kalbarri later in her career to pursue a break away from being an actress and to also spend more time raising her children before returning to film.
[23][24][1][14] Actor and musician Mark Coles Smith reported on Take 5 (a show hosted by Zan Rowe on ABC Television) that Lawford was his grandmother.
[a] He reported that, sometime when dancing with Bangarra in Sydney, she had a three-month relationship with David Bowie, who wanted her to return to Berlin with him, but she refused.
[25][26] Lawford died of complications following a severe asthma attack while in Edinburgh, Scotland, during the 2019 Sydney Theatre Company tour of The Secret River,[27][3][28] aged 52.