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Meggie Cleary is the main character of The Thorn Birds, a 1977 best selling novel by Australian author Colleen McCullough. The 1983 mini-series starred Rachel Ward as Meggie.

The novel is set at a sheep station in the Australian outback between the years 1920 and 1962. The story focuses on Meggie's forbidden love for the priest Father Ralph de Bricassart, who fathers her son but remains in the priesthood. Throughout the film, Meggie Cleary remains obsessed with the one love of her life, Father Ralph de Bricassart.

Meggie embodies the title of the Thorn Birds miniseries. Father Ralph de Bricassart describes to Meggie that the Nightingale, in seeking the beauty of life as a thorn bird, sets upon a rose tree laden with thorns; as it is pierced through, it sings the most beautiful song as it dies.

A central story of The Thorn Birds is that Meggie perceives her life to be destined for heartache and pain as she loses those the most dear to her heart. During the story, two of her brothers, her father, and her son die, and she feels that the Catholic church has stolen her chances of being with her beloved Bricassart.

Meggie Cleary is one of the most poignant of characters in television film, conveying life's vast range of human emotions. As a young girl, Meggie was forced to grow up and see life as an adult, rather than to develop into that passage of life, in a normal sense.

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