Rose Grainger knew that she might lose Percy to Karen, but at the same time she hoped that the relationship would free him from his obsession with self-flagellation. Karen did her best, but the odds were against her. "In the end," says Woof, "Percy's relationship with his mother - the only woman he ever really loved - beat them both."

Woof was also forced to confront the masochistic side of the affair, which she soon realised went a lot deeper than mere kinkiness: it was about confronting and going beyond pain. And this was something the actress felt she needed to confront herself.

"Richard and I decided to go and see a mistress, a professional S&M lady," she admits. "We had a session with her which was just extraordinary! It is one of the most bonkers things I have ever done in my life.

"We went to Coogee [a suburb of Sydney], to a normal little house, and in there was a dungeon - an S&M leather world. We spent two hours with the mistress, and I was strapped to a rack and whipped with about 10 different whips, including a riding crop. That really made me sore, but I wanted to know what it was like to feel that much pain.

"When you are being whipped, you go into quite a different head-space. It's almost like a drug: you space out and cease to think, which I guess is part of the relief. Afterwards, you feel this intense high, this incredible excitement about life. When the whipping was finished, I couldn't stop talking and running around. It was like - I don't know - a big drug rush: adrenaline pumping, like being in love! I was very excited, very alive. It was extraordinary!"

The masochism, though, was only one aspect of Grainger's determination to take everything to the limit - hence the film's title. "His life experiences and his art were so intense, personally, emotionally and sexually," says director Peter Duncan. "Percy took almost every aspect of his life to the edge, in a way very few human beings do. The more you read about him, the more you realise he is a fascinating and highly complex man. I was basically seduced by his life.

"Passion is like a sonata about Percy Grainger. It is romantic and it's dark and it's historical," he adds. "But, in the end, it's about how a man tries to traverse his emotional and creative lives and, in Percy's case, his personal and professional lives.

"These are things we all have to confront. But, in Percy's case, they were just multiplied in terms of their potency by many factors of ten because of what he did, who he was and what he wanted out of his life."

PHOTOS: Robert McFarlane, Mark Tillie