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The Sunday Herald
Sun (October
22, 2000)
Colin
Friels is Judge David McKinnon in a gripping story about a marriage and family
under siege, writes Dianne Butler.
'I
take what I can get, I get offered so little work, there’s one every year.'
This year it's Heath Ledger. A few years ago it was Russell Crowe and Matt Day.
Twenty years ago it was Colin Friels who was considered most likely to become
the next Mel Gibson.
In 1981 Friels set Australian TV on fire as Rufus Dawes, protagonist of Marcus
Clarke's searing novel For the Term of His Natural Life. The media fell on him,
as it does. Actual articles were written that paid tribute to Friels' eyelashes,
which were said to be longer and more lustrous than other eyelashes, perhaps
even Mel Gibson's.
Friels followed up with Monkey Grip, a small film about heroin addiction that
also starred Noni Hazelhurst.
He
played a simpleton with a flair for electronics in Malcolm, the big Australian
film of 1986, then appeared in Ground Zero, an apocalyptic downer about nuclear
testing. Interesting choices for an actor on the cusp of something huge.
Not choices, Friels insists: "I take what I can get, I get offered so
little work. I don't mind. I've been in so many shocking things and I've been
shocking in so many things that I don't blame people.''
Well, here's a turn-up from the usual overheated praise actors generally heap
upon themselves. "Honestly, it's not self-modesty or whatever. I got all
unbelievably self-conscious and nervous whenever I saw myself, for about 10
years, when I was first in films. Honestly, I'm not excusing myself, but I was
never in anything that I could relate to as a part, I just did it because I
didn't want to be a dinosaur in the theatre. I thought, other people are doing
it, I suppose I'd better make a quid.''
Make a quid from acting in Australia? Lots of luck.
"I've never been able to define success myself,'' he says. It took TV to
bring him the audience his work deserved. Water Rats -- Gerbils, as he calls it
-- was also the most money he'd earned from acting. Friels made a great cop and
Senior Detective Frank Holloway helped Water Rats to ratings prominence.
"This sounds a bit funny, but if you're doing a TV show, you want people to
actually want to sit down with you once a week. They sort of want to know you.
You've got to let them in.''
But then -- and isn't this always the way? -- Friels got pancreatic cancer. One
of the worst. Odds are you'll die within the first year of diagnosis. That was
1997. After a massive operation and 18 bad months, Friels started to get
better. Three years down the track from pancreatic cancer is ``fantastic. You're
usually dead 11 months, 9 months after.''
So you see why Friels, at 48, can see there's more to life than getting yourself
on film. "These days I don't think about it very much. I haven't done a
film since, well, I can't remember. I'm right out of that loop.'' Even the show
he's promoting, Marriage Acts, is dimming in his memory a year after its
completion. Friels plays Family Court Judge David McKinnon, a glib womaniser who
one day gets a bomb in his mailbox. It turns out to be not the isolated, random
event McKinnon had first believed. A parallel story around McKinnon and his wife
(played by Sonia Todd, pictured with Friels, opposite page) unfolds alongside
the bomb investigation.
"You don't want to like somebody who's got a mistress, he's not
particularly great to his kids and all that sort of thing. He's not an imminent
candidate for Mr Good Guy when he walks in,'' Friels says. "It was just by
force of will he kept himself together.''
Friels is a remarkable actor, as natural as if he's having a chat across the
back fence instead of surrounded by cameras and equipment and people. It's hard
not to feel a pang of regret watching Marriage Acts; regret that there aren't
more like him, regret that he was so sick, regret that this is only a small film
on the ABC. "I usually get offered a job about once every seven years,''
Friels says. "Now I've done three things back-to-back, so I figure I won't
work for 21 years now.'' He's joking, but only partly. He knows he'll get more
work, if only because these days, he's second, third or fourth cab off the rank.
"If you can stay at a certain level, you get the cast-offs. Doesn't matter
to me, but sometimes it matters to the producers and directors. You might say, 'This
is bullshit', and they go, 'Shit, we didn't want him anyway'. Once I had to
improvise something and I said to the director, 'Look, you wanted me for the
part', and he said, 'No, I didn't. The producer wanted you. I wanted Doc Neeson'."
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