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'She is a good mother': Hollie Andrew met with Roberta Williams before she started filming Fat Tony & Co

PUBLISHED: 02:56 EST, 6 March 2014 | UPDATED: 03:35 EST, 6 March 2014

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Hollie Andrew, the actress playing Roberta Williams in Fat Tony & Co, has spoken out in defence of the television show after Roberta complained on radio about the way she was being represented.

Hollie took the time to meet with the ex-wife of slain gangland figure Carl Williams before filming began.

‘It was important for me because I wanted a sense of her [in the show],’ the Australian actress said.

Roberta Williams (left), ex-wife of murdered underworld figure Carl Williams in 2010 met with Hollie Andrew (right) the actress who plays her in Fat Tony & Co

‘She wanted to make sure she was represented as the mother she thinks she is… It was an interesting aspect for us to focus on,’ Hollie added.

Roberta asked Hollie to portray her as a good parent, saying that she had never sworn in front of Dhakota, her daughter by Carl Williams.

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‘From all accounts she is a good mother and the way she talks about her children, she is a survivor,’ said Hollie.

Roberta Williams has five children - Tye, 25, Danielle, 20, Breanane, 18, and Dhakota, 11 from marriage to Carl.

In 2011, she gave birth to her fifth child, a son named Giuseppe Sebastian Carpenter with fiancé Robert Carpenter.

Hollie said that Ms Williams ‘has a great sense of humour and loves telling a yarn.’

‘I got a sense of compassion and that she has grown up a lot from the first time Underbelly screened and the story was told,’ the actress said.

Hollie used her meeting with Roberta to inform her performance, saying: ‘I definitely had to stand my ground on some things because the writing would come to me and it was a little bit contradictory [from meeting her] from where I was coming from.’

In character: Hollie Andrew as Roberta Williams and Gyton Grantley as her husband, drug kingpin, Carl

But despite Hollie Andrew’s efforts, Roberta Williams has not been happy with the way she has been portrayed.

She told the Grill Team on Triple M a few weeks ago that she felt misrepresented on the show.

‘My parenting skills are a lot better than they portray them to be on the series, I certainly don't sit around taking drugs in public or anywhere else. I don't speak to my children the way they portrayed me to do so,’ she said on radio

She also said that the portrayal of her deceased former husband Williams was ‘far from what he was like.’

Roberta was reportedly very unhappy by the way that Kat Stewart portrayed her in the original Underbelly series, which was released in 2008 and was roughly based on the gangland war in Melbourne between 1995 and 2004.

Kat Stewart never got the chance to meet with Roberta, but Ms Williams made time to meet with Hollie before filming started.

Fat Tony & Co's debut drew 1.37 million viewers in the first hour, 1.23 million in the second. It screens on the Nine Network on Sundays at 8.30pm.

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Mrs B, Bayside, Australia, 3 hours ago

Good mother? No, a good mother is someone who protects their children from this type of world... Not someone who happily and willingly allows them to grow up amongst it... People seem to forget that these people are drug dealers and murderers... It's not something to be celebrated nor glamourised...