From the introduction:

The aim of the essays in this series is to document and interpret the specific contributions of actors who have worked in Australia for most of their lives, in order to understand their artistry and their world. The actors profiled in these pages came to maturity in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. They have shaped our ideas and our identity.

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Header images via ABC on Flickr: here, here, and here.

From the essay:

One of Helmut’s earliest memories is of being alone outside in a compound with snow falling. It was silent and cold, he was alone, and there was a terrible smell. He began to scream in terror. Later he learned that the camp in which he first experienced snow, had been a Nazi death camp in Celle.

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From the essay:

She played an apparition in Macbeth with her mother, heavily pregnant, playing Lady Macduff. Elspeth can still recite the lines she had to deliver: ‘Macbeth be bloody bold and resolute; laugh to scorn the power of man, for none of woman born shall harm Macbeth’. She was shocked when she realised that because her voice did not project, an adult man spoke those powerful lines over her.

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From the essay:

In 1982 she founded Performing Lines, an independent, non-profit organisation dedicated to developing and producing new Australian works in order for them to tour in Australia and internationally. Blacklock’s innovative work with Performing Lines has enriched Australian theatre, extending its reach and empowering local performers and companies. Blacklock has worked with numerous contemporary arts companies. In particular Blacklock’s work has enabled a wide range of Indigenous Australian plays and performers to present their theatrical events to audiences all over the world.

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From the essay:

For her, the immense pleasure of acting is intense and completely absorbing. She has always associated that pleasure, that excitement that she experienced bodily, like a dancer, ‘through to my fingertips’, with extreme dedication, focus, hard work and utter absorption in the project of playing a role. This intensity was always instinctive for her and her way of ensuring that she immersed herself and did her best.

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From the essay:

Invited to audition for the stage musical, Applause, Brown found herself in a crisis of self-sabotage. She appeared at the audition in old clothes, wind battered, having driven to the venue in a mini-moke with the roof down, to find every other Sydney actor ready and primed to audition for the iconic lead role.

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From the essay:

At Scots College in Wellington, when John was 14, he discovered a cartoon in a history textbook. It was the famous David Low cartoon of Hitler and Stalin meeting, published in 1939, and he marvelled at Low’s unique manner of portraying evil. Clarke was struck by its boldness and clarity, the terrible context and dead Poland, the perfectly mannered stances of the two liars, and by the fact that Low had used their own words to do it. Years later Clarke would perfect in sketch comedy what he had seen in Low’s cartoons: telling a shocking political truth through humour, using the precise words of those in power to skewer them.

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From the essay:

Barry Creyton is a purist who prefers live performance to television, and cautions against a tendency in directors to ‘do a concept production rather than a production which reflects the value of the play’. He has constantly challenged himself throughout his career. As soon as he achieved national celebrity status in the 1960s he decided to leave Australia in order to work where nobody knew him, and test himself in a new environment as a working actor.

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From the essay:

Max Cullen is familiar to audiences for his warm, crumpled face and for his ability to inhabit so many characters. Over the last fifty years Cullen has appeared in numerous productions on the main stages of Sydney and Melbourne, on television in a wide range of roles, and in many Australian feature films.

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From the essay:

As she sat in the audience, she used to think it would be ‘heaven’ to be amongst the cast on the stage and had no idea of the hard work, ‘killingly hard work’ involved in the theatre, particularly as she was to learn, in those fast-paced intimate revue theatre shows with the constant changes of costume and numerous song and dance routines.

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From the essay:

Hopgood’s early plays were amongst the most successful Australian plays of the 1960s. They were adapted for television and film, and prefigure the transformation of the theatre in Australia that we call the New Wave. Hopgood’s contribution to Australian theatre as a writer and as an actor is significant and ongoing, but it has never been fully acknowledged.

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From the essay:

By this time the London theatres had reopened and Carol continued to appear on stage in the West End. Theatres were fitted with air raid sirens and when they sounded members of the audience could leave their seats to take refuge in the nearest underground shelter. Carol recalls that very few people left the theatres at the sound of the siren.

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From the essay:

Scott tells stories about ordinary life and makes them extraordinary. She is obsessed with the idea of ordinariness and its opposite. For more than 30 years she has entertained audiences as a clown, in a comedy troupe, as a stand up comedian, as a radio presenter, game show personality on television and as an actor in several television series.

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From the essay:

Throughout his extraordinary career Tony Sheldon has performed in Shakespearean drama, cabaret, musical theatre and contemporary plays written by Australian, American and British playwrights, including premiere productions of plays by leading Australian playwrights, Peter Kenna and Louis Nowra.

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From the essay:

The young Henri discovered acting at Greenwich primary school in Sydney and taught himself tumbling on a grassy slope in the park at Lavender Bay. As a teenager he found a gymnastics teacher called George Sparkes who taught him to do back flips and had a profound impact on his life. It was this man, Sparksey, who eventually helped Henri to put together a club act.

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From the essay:

When he first read the script of Don’s Party he loved it. It was outrageously funny and full of colourful language, no shock to Tate’s ears. However several actors had been charged by the police for using obscene language in public, when they appeared in The Boys in the Band in May 1969. Nick feared a similar fate may befall the cast of Don’s Party. It wasn’t just the fear of a prison term, or an ugly court case, that put him off accepting the role. Tate laughed hysterically at the lines and found that he liked the character of Don, but he baulked at the crassness of the men and the way they ‘break down from cultured to their animal [selves]'

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From the essay:

Jacki Weaver’s life as an actor is a story of immense talent and resilience. At the beginning of her career when she was 15 she played Cinderella at the Phillip Street Theatre in Sydney in 1962. She also appeared on the television program Bandstand several times as a teenager. Weaver studied elocution as a child and trained at the Independent Theatre with Doreen Warburton and Doris Fitton. As a youngster Jacki was determined to pursue acting but her small stature, girlish beauty and blonde hair often meant that she did not get the ‘strong characters’ that she wanted.

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