Melissa Natalie Tkautz (born 24 January 1974) is an Australian actress, singer, model, and presenter. She played the role of Nikki Spencer on the popular Australian TV soap opera E Street, from September 1990 to May 1993. During the early 1990s she had a solo music career, performing mononymously as Melissa, and had top 20 hits on the ARIA Singles Chart with "Read My Lips" (Number One, June 1991), "Sexy (Is the Word)" (No. 3, September) and "Skin to Skin" (No. 16, April 1992). "Read My Lips" also became a Number One hit in Sweden. Her debut album, Fresh, was released in June 1992 and peaked at No. 15 on the ARIA Albums Chart.
After her stint on E Street, Tkautz has appeared on Paradise Beach (1993–94), Pacific Drive (1996–98), All Saints (2001–02, 2004), Swift and Shift Couriers (2008, 2011) and Housos (2011). Her modelling career has included early child modelling, then as a teen in various pop entertainment magazines and from 1996 on fashion and men's magazines. On 4 December 2005, she issued her second solo album, Lost & Found, which provide a single, her cover version of "The Glamorous Life", which appeared in the top 40. In August 2011 she issued a compilation album, The Hits & More. In February 2009 Tkautz married a finance businessman, Kwesi Nicholas, her partner of five years; outside her performance career she uses her married name, Melissa Nicholas.
Tkautz released a single "The Key" on 26 May 2017.
Television career
Tkautz was born in Sydney in 1974. According to Tkautz "I had very strict parents ... I wasn't allowed to do anything". Her father, Stefan Tkautz, is from Austria and her mother's family are Maltese. As a young child she studied drama, dance and singing; she began modelling and appearing in commercials. By the age of 17, she had appeared in over 160 television and print commercials. Some of these included ads for Qantas and Cadbury. She started modelling and then began acting in TV soap operas, Richmond Hill and Home & Away in the late 1980s. In 1989 she entered the Miss Teen Australia contest.
In September 1990, at the age of 16 years, Tkautz was cast in the role of Nikki Spencer on the popular Australian soap opera, E Street. She described her role, "Nikki is everything I don't want to be ... She smokes and she's really the sort of girl most parents would be horrified to have their daughters associating with". Tkautz soon became one of the show's main stars due to the popularity of her character. During this time, she attended the Australian Academy of Dramatic Art in Sydney, graduating in 1991. During that year she appeared on numerous Australian editions of magazine covers including Vogue, Cosmopolitan, TV Week, Smash Hits and Dolly. In 1991 readers of TV Hits voted her as the Hottest Woman on Earth. Tkautz also had a supporting role in the mini-series, The Girl from Tomorrow (1992).
Due to her popularity, the producers of E Street decided to have Tkautz record a song, which would be used in the show as part of a dream sequence, where her character imagines she is a pop star. This resulted in a recording career for Tkautz, she later recalled "I loved singing and I had trained as a singer, but everything happened so quickly, it was just a crazy whirlwind. One minute I'm watching E Street in my lounge room, the next minute I’m starring in E Street and I've got a number one single in the charts". However, in November 1991, due to the pressures of juggling two full-time careers, and a conflict with the producer, Forrest Redlich, Tkautz left E Street to concentrate on her music career. At the TV Week-sponsored Logie Awards she was nominated for Most Popular New Talent in 1992. By November 1992 Tkautz had returned to E Street. However, the network decided to axe the series in May 1993.
In 1993 and 1994, Tkautz appeared on Paradise Beach, playing Vanessa Campbell, the manipulative ex-girlfriend of Sean Hayden (played by Ingo Rademacher). Tkautz described her character "[s]he's a bit of a psycho, a real bitch ... She is nothing like Nicki in E Street. This one's a real troublemaker". In 1995, she had a role in Echo Point. In 1996, Tkautz joined the series Pacific Drive, where she played a model, Bethany Daniels. This role had a major effect on Tkautz, who played the first long-term HIV positive character on Australian TV. She described how "I did a lot of research on the role and a lot of charity work with HIV [patients], especially young kids who had contracted the disease". The series later gained a cult following. When Pacific Drive was cancelled in 1998, Tkautz joined the cast of Medivac (1998) as Nurse Evie Morrison. Tkautz later appeared in the series, All Saints (2001–02, 2004).