BRUNO

by Roger Booth

reviewed by Mike Crowl

Bruno Lawrence, who died in 1995 of lung cancer, was a star in a country that has very few of them, especially in the movie business. Never formally trained as an actor, he still carried off several brilliant roles, most particularly in Smash Palace and The Quiet Earth (a film he held together almost single-handedly). He acted partly by instinct and partly by using a personal magnetism that only a few film actors have, the sort of magnetism that was more common amongst the stars in the earlier days of movie-making. Given the chance, he could act, and this has been acknowledged not only by those who worked with him but also by overseas reviewers who saw him in some of his better roles. His real gift, however, was in music, and it was a sort of accident that he got into movies as well. Before the movies came along his name was almost a household word amongst musicians, (at least in the North Island), and he continued to play throughout his life. Though he taught himself the saxophone, and played it publicly, his special musical ability was as a drummer, and he was widely acknowledged as superb in this role, both at home and abroad, making a living out of it for much of his life. Again his talent lay in a sort of instinctive approach, a constantly experimenting style that left some lesser musicians and singers on the hop, but was generally appreciated for the way in which it lifted the music out of any rut and took it off in new directions. He might have been seen as the epitome of the Wild Man type of male - macho, into risk-taking, attractive to women and attracted by them, a drinker and a gambler - yet he balanced these aspects of his character by a vulnerability and gentleness and generosity of spirit that all who knew him spoke of with warmth. He had a great love of family, including both the extended family that was BLERTA, and the community that he and others formed at Waimarama. He was down-to-earth both in the musical scene and the film world, and never behaved publicly as the star he truly was. Roger Booth's biography of him is straight down the line, a no-nonsense piece that lets Bruno shine. The facts and stories are there, everything is in order, and there is little philosophising or analysing. Booth has kept himself well out of the picture, even though he was a friend of Lawrence's, first through the children, and later as the proposed writer of the biography. He never treats Bruno's sometimes outlandish behaviour with sensation, he doesn't play up the darker sides of his character and give them more value than they're worth, and overall he lets Bruno the man stride through the book as himself. The only curiosity is chapter 27, entitled Curriculum Vitae. This does offer some extra comments from friends and work colleagues, but for the most part takes us back through the 300 pages we've just read, like a precis of the whole. That chapter apart, this is a thoroughly readable biography, with plenty of photographs and good appendices, and it does one of New Zealand's top artists great credit, reminding and informing us of the breadth of his achievements.

Published in paperback 1999, Canterbury University Press.

© Mike Crowl 1999

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