She's always been coy about motherhood and suggested children weren't in her future, but that all changed on Wednesday night when a glowing Asher Keddie proudly debuted her baby bump to a shocked media pack.
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The 40-year-old Offspring star is now expecting her own offspring, with her husband, contemporary artist Vincent Fantauzzo, in autumn next year.
"It's so exciting, we're so thrilled," she said on the red carpet at the GQ Man of the Year Awards in Sydney.
"I feel fantastic, tonight. It's been a little up and down but I'm just like everybody else I think. The happiness is outweighing everything else I think."
Fantauzzo, who won the People's Choice award at this year's Archibald prize for a record-breaking fourth time with the All that's good in me portrait of his three-year-old son Luca wearing a Superman costume, was equally overjoyed.
"It meant a lot to us and to Asher as well. We'll just have to keep making family members to paint now," the 37-year-old said.
The Gold Logie winner also admitted that she has been craving cheese and pistachio nuts.
She will be the second high-profile Australian woman to become a mother after the age of 40 next year.
Earlier this year, after several unsuccessful IVF trials, 49-year-old Big Brother host Sonia Kruger announced that she was pregnant with her first child.
"Hey everyone. Here's a fun fact ... I'm having a baby," she tweeted back in August.
Keddie, who was previously married to fellow actor and musician Jay Bowen from 2007 to 2011, has always been curious at people's interest in her private life and usually brushed off questions about starting a family.
"Why do people want to know? I don't care if people want to have kids or not. But I'm not sure how I feel about it, so to discuss it any further would feel too personal, I suppose," she told News Corp Australia in 2011.
"I just don't know if children are going to be part of it."
"Why are we only considered successful if we can juggle a family and a demanding career?" she asked The Australian Women's Weekly in 2011 when probed about motherhood.
"I admire people who can do it, don't get me wrong. But I feel successful not doing it as well. I don't think, 'Oh gosh, I won't be quite there and I won't be as successful as I want to be unless I'm juggling a couple of kids, a marriage and a career.
"It's not that I don't think I can do it. It's not that. It's that I don't know," she said.
The actress, following her divorce, threw herself into the role of the popular, slightly neurotic Nina Proudman which made her a house hold name.
Then in 2012 she met Fantauzzo before the private couple married in Fiji in April.
