‘It all comes from his mother’: the surprising force behind Bryan Brown (2024)

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Bryan Brown and I are walking the Balmain foreshore of Sydney Harbour. There’s no wind, and it’s not raining, so let’s be grateful for small mercies. The pandemic restrictions have wrecked our plan to meet at his harbourside cottage, and I am crushed, because from shameless googling I suspect it has one of those Sydney gardens you envisage at the homes of the ultra-rich, though the ultra-rich are rarely classy enough to have one. (Brown, 74, has his by virtue not of being ultra-rich but by having bought his house approximately 10,000 years ago, when successful Australian actors could afford views that today require part-ownership of Amazon.)

Online, this garden looks quite small and overgrown, right on the water’s edge, with a patch of emerald green buffalo grass, and a hot pink bougainvillea, and a frangipani – and I think a wattle that his English-born wife Rachel Ward likes. The ultra-rich aspect of it is the way the harbour, peacock blue and sparkling, fills the entire space: not a little patch of view, but the whole, 180-degree shooting match, close enough to touch. I’d made a chocolate cake in honour of this view (and in honour of Bryan Brown, who is, to employ an overused phrase, a national icon). This cake is now sitting on the passenger seat of my car. Later, I will text Brown a picture of it looking forlorn. “I can’t believe I missed cake,” he will write back.

Nonetheless, he’s clearly happy to be out and about. “I walk here every morning,” he says with relish, “all round here to get my coffee and I just think, ‘How bloody beautiful is this?’ ” Today he’s wearing sensible walking shoes, a Gore-Tex jacket and a mask (disposable, not fabric). He’s picked up the takeaway coffees before we meet, and as we head down the hill towards the water, he tells me he’s been reading about Scott of the Antarctic.

Thoughtfully (and unlike most people reading about Scott), he doesn’t relay a single story about ice or crevasses or the eating of husky-dog livers. Instead, he tells me cheerfully that we all need to, frankly, harden the f… up about the pandemic. Who cares if we have to wear masks? Who cares about going for a walk instead of sitting in comfort at home? (Me, I want to say, but don’t.) We should all be bloody thankful we’re not freezing to death in a canvas tent, or – the pandemic equivalent – living in a country without vaccines or decent healthcare.

This is a true and bracing message, especially for me, moping about my cake. Taking a mouthful of coffee, Brown admits he didn’t really read as a kid. In fact at school, where he excelled, he never liked English.

“I got almost the maximum pass in the Leaving, honours in Maths one and Maths two. Even an A in English,” he says, “but I didn’t understand it. Nobody I’d ever met spoke like those characters: they were fantasy people. Shakespeare? Holy Christ!” He grins. “‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ – why doesn’t he just say, ‘Hey, why don’t you come down here and have a kiss!’

“It’s ridiculous,” he adds as we cross the road. “Because ever since, for 40 years, all I’ve done is spend time with the English language. Working with writers, telling stories on film and TV.” And now he’s done something even more intimately connected to language. Now, Bryan Brown has written a book.

Sweet Jimmy is a collection of short stories. Brown wrote them here and there, never really intending to do anything with them, and he seems slightly surprised, but pleased, that they’ve been published. He makes no claims for their genius, but they’re true to the raison d’être he’s been pursuing for those four decades: to tell, in an unpretentious way, Australian stories, about characters he understands – Australian blokes.

All the stories in Sweet Jimmy are about blokes. Some are old, some are young, most are white, all are working-class: wisecracking young tradies who don’t mind “changing a light bulb” for the lonely ladies of Sydney’s wealthy eastern suburbs; old blokes at the ocean baths with mottled skin, barrel chests and spindly legs. The women are barely drawn at all – they act as prime movers for bloke anger, bloke heartbreak, bloke revenge. But the men feel real, and engaging. In some ways, they all feel like versions of Brown himself. “There’s a lot of characters and incidents in the book that I remember from growing up,” he agrees.

Which incidents? Stealing stuff from people’s houses while they’re on holiday? Rerouting a car boot of cocaine? Serial killing? “I’m not saying,” he says, laughing. “Look, we all have those half-dozen days we’re not proud of. What’s the emotion that lasts longest? Guilt.”

As a kid, his thing, he goes on, was more along the lines of “knocking off the milk from someone’s front doorstep, that sort of thing. Look, if you’re a go-ey kid, you’re looking for a bit of excitement, aren’t you? But where’s the line? I wanted to try and write about that. A bit of nicking itself isn’t so bad – okay, you need a good smack in the arse; you need the cops to come round and scare the shit out of you. But what if that brake doesn’t get put on you? The move from loveable larrikin to criminal can be, just – that –” he pinches his fingers.

In Bryan Brown’s telling, every bloke has the potential to cross this line – every person has their limit. And it’s not just young delinquents who are tested: arguably the best story of the book is A Time to Do, in which a swimming coach in his 60s turns urban vigilante after he’s wrongly accused of drug trafficking. And guess who the urban vigilante reminds you of? “I remember watching a news report about people who had drugs planted on them at an airport,” says Brown. “And the judge told them, ‘You’re not drug mules, you’re stupid.’ And I thought, ‘If that was me, I’d have to find out who did that to me.’ ”

Over the course of his career, in roles from Breaker Morant, A Town Like Alice and The Thorn Birds, stretching through to Beautiful Kate, Sweet Country, even the recent, critically panned but quite-popular-with-Baby-Boomers Palm Beach, Bryan Brown has been investigating this same question: what do ordinary men do under extraordinary circumstances? And something in the way he’s done this – the nasal twang, the half-smile, the deadpan joke – has meant that along the way, he’s become the ultimate expression of a national archetype: the classic Aussie bloke.

Representing an archetype isn’t something Brown’s always comfortable with, but this seems not to matter: these are the roles he plays, this is the shadow he casts – the shadow of a tall man, sun-damaged, laconic, sometimes good, sometimes evil, but always tough, always undemonstrative, always in obscure competition with authority.

His characters are sometimes clichés – but they’re our clichés. And though we’ve had other exponents of a similar kind of manhood – Jack Thompson, Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe (notwithstanding the latter two weren’t born in Australia) – nobody else in our cinematic history has brought this trope of national masculinity so clearly to life, over and over again.

“The only thing I learnt from my dad was, ‘Don’t be like him.’ Mum taught me how to be a man.”

And yet, the irony of Bryan Brown’s own life, as he himself points out, is that when you look back, right back to his most basic lessons of character and behaviour, there’s no masculine force at work at all. He had no significant male role models as a child; he learnt nothing about being a man from his own father. “The only thing I learnt from him was, ‘Don’t be like him,’ ” he says. “My mum did it. Mum taught me how to be a man.”

‘It all comes from his mother’: the surprising force behind Bryan Brown (1)

Bryan Brown’s childhood sounds like something from a Fatty Finn comic. It was full of wild gangs of little kids, hurtling round the backblocks of 1950s suburbia, eating jam sandwiches and falling in the swamp and getting the cuts at school. At the centre of it all was his mother, Molly Brown, with a name like a comic-book heroine and the superpowers to match.

A single mum long before the Supporting Mother’s Benefit was introduced, she raised Bryan and his younger sister Kristine on her own, making the rent on their council house in Panania in Sydney’s south-west by a constant juggling act of cleaning houses, taking in washing and playing the piano for dance classes.

“Oh god, yeah, we were poor,” explains Brown. “We always had someone else’s hand-me-down jumper. But our feeling – the feeling our mother gave us – was, ‘How lovely of those people to give us that jumper.’ Mum was a happy person,” he continues: “One of these optimistic people. She was tough, though. Strong. I never heard her whinge, never saw her cry, never heard her say a bad thing about anybody.”

Not even Bryan’s salesman father, who was never around. “Through my lifetime I only probably ever saw him 10 times.” He thinks back. “There was nothing wrong with him … he had no sense of responsibility, I guess. You know? But the thing I can’t work out, to this day, is how he didn’t want to be around my sister and I more. I just don’t get it.”

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Or around your mum, I say, who sounds fantastic. “She was – she was incredible. She wasn’t even horrible about him. I remember he was supposed to come over one Saturday to take me fishing. I was about 12, and I was out the front at 7am, ready to go. Eight o’clock comes, nine, 10. And Mum said, ‘Look, something might have happened, darling.’ And I was like, ‘No, I’m waiting.’ I was standing at the gate. And at about 11, I was like, ‘Yeah, okay.’ So I went inside for a while, then I went and climbed a tree or something. I was disappointed – but then it was over. And she never made me feel bad about it, or about him.”

So it was Molly Brown who laid down the law for her son; who established the boundaries about morals, and behaviour, and relationships, and rode them – hard, when need be. “Oh God, Jesus,” says Brown. “She used to bring the strap out till I was 12 – until I suddenly realised I was bigger than her and I could actually just take it off her. She knew exactly how to discipline and how to love.”

Nobody taught Bryan Brown to be an actor. He could have gone to university: his marks at school earned him a scholarship, but instead he went to AMP as a trainee actuary. This gives rise to a stunning sliding-doors image: a world in which Brown’s first public performance might have been as a white-collar professional, interviewed by the banking royal commission. (One can just imagine him on the stand: wary humour, slight moral ambivalence, occasional inscrutable smile.) Instead, a flyer came round for the end-of-year revue at AMP, “and anyone who wanted to audition had to turn up. I had a mate who was a bit of a rascal, and I said, ‘We ought to go up for this, because there’s going to be girls there that we don’t know.’ ” He grins. “So we went along, we both got handed a piece of paper to read, he freaked out and left, and I stayed.

“I remember the feeling of it,” he goes on, “of acting what was on that bit of paper. I remember talking to [film director] Peter Weir about it once. It was like scoring a try [Brown played rugby league as a kid]: the buzz of it, the intensity of life in that moment.” He stops, trying to explain. “When they say ‘wrap’ on a set, and you’ve been in the zone of a character, it’s like that – like a moment out of time. You haven’t been you, but you’ve been truthful in a different way? I don’t know. Amazing feeling.”

Brown knew no actors, had no theatrical connections, never had an acting lesson in his life. But in he plunged. By 25, he was in London, auditioning for legendary English director Peter Hall at the UK’s National Theatre. And reading, horror of horrors, Shakespeare. What character did you read, I ask.

“Berowne.”

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Berowne, of course, is the great larrikin lothario of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Brown was never a classic leading man, but he was tall, sharp-featured, well-built, with vivid blue eyes. Did the role of ladies’ man feel familiar in his life, as well as on stage? “Well, I’d seen Timothy Dalton as Berowne in Sydney with the Actors’ Company,” admits Brown, grinning. “And he was a really good-looking bloke, and he was the lead, and he was rooting Vanessa Redgrave or someone!” He starts laughing. “So it was all the reasons to go: ‘I think I’d better do Berowne – you never know what might happen!’ ”

What actually happened was that after his audition, Brown got a call from the National Theatre, asking him if he’d like a year’s contract, “to which I said, ‘F…ing oath!’ ”

The first thing this anecdote tells us about Brown is that Peter Hall thought he could act. Ipso facto, we can lay down our tall-poppy scythe about that. It may be that he had more charisma than raw acting talent – but he had something that convinced arguably the world’s most celebrated theatrical director that he deserved to be there.

“He’s a fabulous actor,” agrees Bruce Beresford, who cast him in his great war film Breaker Morant: it became Brown’s breakthrough role. “He has a great naturalism about him. I remember he always seemed to be improvising the dialogue. In fact, he’s very meticulous about saying what’s on the page, but he makes it seem absolutely real. I wanted a very natural, straightforward, shoot-from-the-hip Australian character, and I met him, and thought, ‘He can give me that.’ ”

This is a crucial detail about Brown as an actor: he is most comfortable playing characters close to himself. It’s for this reason he stayed in Australia after returning here for Christmas in 1974: the likes of Weir and Beresford were starting to tell Australian stories on screen: stories that, at last, he recognised as his own. Brown never talks about the escape of theatre – the thrill of inhabiting vastly different worlds or personalities. He talks about playing roles that feel like him. “The thing you have to do, I reckon, the only thing that matters is that you’re real. So the core must be you. Around that core, there are colours. But it’s always you.”

This strategy – pulling something real out, rather than drawing something imaginary in – sometimes leads to the accusation that Brown always plays himself. And on some level he does: he filters every character through his own personality. He doesn’t even do accents. How many movies have you seen entirely full of Americans, and suddenly there in the middle is Brown, looking exactly the same as always, those nasal Aussie vowels serenely undisturbed?

“The core must be you. Around that core, there are colours. But it’s always you.”

“He has an absolute sense of himself,” says his wife Rachel Ward, when I contact her at their farm on the NSW North Coast. “He always did. He knows exactly where he stands, what his values are, what he believes in: total confidence. It all comes from his mother. [Thanks to her], Bryan just utterly believes in his wonderfulness. And no one has ever disabused him of that idea, except possibly his children and me!”

Certainly few people in show business ever have. Bryan Brown was one of our first genuine home-grown movie stars. Sam Neill, a close friend for four decades, observed his rise. “The right man, the right place, the right time,” he writes wryly, emailing from Turin (where he is, presumably, filming something wonderful, or drinking something wonderful, or communing with wonderfully photogenic Italian farm animals). “No. He’s relatable, quintessentially Australian, charismatic, not overly ugly, he works hard, and people just warm to him as a person and as an actor.”

It’s often tricky to interview the contacts of profile subjects: they’re busy, or conflicted, or envious, or just can’t be bothered. With Brown, I am inundated: people calling me, passing on their private numbers and emails, sending me photos. Randomly, I call the Addison Road Community Organisation, for which I’ve heard he volunteers, and within the hour the CEO, Rosanna Barbero, calls me back. “He comes two or three times a week,” she says. “He’s just wonderful. He comes, packs groceries, carries boxes, no special treatment. He never bangs his own drum – he does so much, and he never talks about it.” In fact, she says, he’s such a magnificent grocery packer, “he’s become our unofficial quality controller.”

“Brown!” says ex-Socceroo Craig Foster, who also volunteers at Addison Road, in the inner-western Sydney suburb of Marrickville. “I’m sorry I introduced him! I thought he was this half-unemployed, laid-back Aussie bloke; it turns out he’s the uber volunteer. I thought I was quite accomplished and he’s just blown me out of the water. He’s got grocery assembly lines, he’s got packing routines: he’s so good they’ve made him a sticker: ‘Bryan Brown Neat Packing Approved’. They love him! I’m never taking him anywhere ever again.”

‘It all comes from his mother’: the surprising force behind Bryan Brown (2)

By the early 1980s, Brown was so famous as an actor (his grocery-packing skills as yet undiscovered), that Hollywood came calling. He was cast – ironically, the only Australian actor on set – in the sprawling Aussie epic based on Colleen McCullough’s juggernaut novel The Thorn Birds. It was here that he met Ward. Hers, in fact, was the bigger role in The Thorn Birds. She had already made the cover of UK Vogue as a model, and been nominated for a Golden Globe as an actress; around the time she met Brown she was voted one of the 10 most beautiful women in the world. She has recalled meeting Brown as a moment of fundamental recognition; as if she’d found her other half. “[I remember] shaking his hand and feeling this extraordinary sense of relief,” she said. He also, she recalled, had “nice pecs”.

What was Brown’s first thought? “I can tell you my first thought,” he says, grinning: “‘Not a bad sort!’ ” Ward has said he was slow as a wet week about chatting her up; Brown looks pleased when I mention this. “That’s what people say. I remember someone saying to me in Hollywood, ‘Australian blokes are a bit slow, aren’t they? You know, you’ll be at the party, and the Australian blokes are there, talking, having a smile, whatever, not doing anything’ … And I said, ‘But do you ever see who they leave with? They’re the slyest!’ ”

In Ward’s case, “she thought I was bloody useless – couldn’t believe how I dressed – but there’s a challenge for her! I’ll get him there! I’ll shape him up! Women love a challenge. So wear the most stupid outfit, say the silliest things, and you’ve got ’em!”

This is ridiculous, as Brown knows very well. Ward is clever, talented and nobody’s fool, and you get the sense that perhaps once she decided on Brown, it was all over: the then 35-year-old irresistible ladies’ man (self-advertised), who was really just an ordinary bloke worried about commitment, was finished.

“We were married within nine months,” he admits. “I never thought about marriage until Rachel. I remember saying to my mother once – my sister and my mum and I were all in the car, and something came up about getting married, and I said, ‘Mum, I won’t be getting married,’ and she said, ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘Because I’ve come from a broken marriage, and that’s probably stopped me understanding it or wanting it.’ Which was a horrible thing to say! Probably made her feel like she’d let me down. But anyway, that’s what I thought.”

So how did it happen? “Once we started knocking around and that, it just made total sense,” he says, gesturing: how do you explain this stuff?

“Actually,” he perks up, “I think we had a really big argument! We were in Ireland, and I was like, ‘F… this,’ and I went across the road from our hotel to the pub. And I remember the elections were coming up, and a bloke started speaking to me in this broad Irish accent, and I couldn’t understand a single word he said. Not one word! Then Rachel came in and we walked back to the hotel together, and I said, ‘Look, if we’re going to argue like this, we may as well get married.’ And she said, ‘Oh.’ And I said, ‘So what do you reckon?’ And she said, ‘Can you wait? I’ll tell you at Christmas.’ And I said, ‘I might not ask you at Christmas.’ And she said, ‘Right.’ So we cracked a bottle of champagne.”

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The pair married at Ward’s childhood home, Cornwell Manor, a ridiculously beautiful Georgian mansion in Oxfordshire. Her grandfather was the third Earl of Dudley, and her great-grandfather was the governor-general of Australia between 1908 and 1911, which no doubt added emphasis to Brown’s wedding speech about getting some convict blood into the family.

Sam Neill met Ward for the first time on the wedding day. He’d been a bit worried about the event. “But the thing about really posh people and roaring Australians,” he emails, “is that what they have in common is they don’t give a flying f…. So once everyone had recovered from the best man’s speech, who was so drunk he was completely incoherent, the whole thing went gangbusters.”

‘It all comes from his mother’: the surprising force behind Bryan Brown (3)

As it turns out, so have the following 38 years. Ward and Brown’s marriage is one of the great success stories of Australian celebrity. “I consider myself extremely lucky, actually,” said Ward some years ago. “I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. But when those clouds [of lust and romance] cleared, I discovered that he was a wonderful, decent human being. An honourable man. It could really have been so different. He could just as easily have been a piece of shit. When you’re in that fog you just can’t see straight.”

What about Brown? Did he make a lucky guess when they married, or did he know what he was doing? “I think I knew her. If you’re seeing someone for six months, nine months, you get to see how they behave in situations. Are they kind? Are they nasty? Are they funny? All that stuff comes out. Because you’re living a life. You’re watching. You get a pretty good indication.”

Neither wanted to live in America, so they came back to Australia, where Ward, still in her 20s, unsure about acting and a mother within a year, had to start an entirely new life, knowing no one. Brown gives her credit for this time, and for making things – including marriage to him – work. “She’s very game,” he says. “She really is. It’s in her nature. The thing she’s most scared of, she’ll have a go at. She’s far braver than I am.”

The early post-wedding years were Brown’s most commercially successful: in consecutive years he made F/X, Gorillas in the Mist and Cocktail. His children (Rose, 36, Matilda, 34, and Tom, 28) were born during the same rough span of years. “For an actor, Bryan works a lot,” explains Ward, “but for a normal human being, he doesn’t work very much at all! So there was a hell of a lot of time he was at home, and he was terrific, a very hands-on father. Thank god.”

Did the absence of his own father affect his parenting? “Well, it sort of makes you wonder if you’re better off with a fantasy father than a real one sometimes,” she says. “He was able to be the father that he’d wanted his own father to be.” As he’s got older, she goes on, “he’s got more conventional. I’ve probably got more questioning and cynical and doubtful, and he’s got surer and more believing. He’s not particularly worried about the climate, or the real origins of COVID … he’s not suspicious of Big Pharma or government. He thinks they work hard and have our best interests at heart!” She laughs. “And he’s so annoying about lockdown! He just gets more and more stoic: you can’t trip him up!”

I tell her about his advice vis-à-vis Scott of the Antarctic, and she laughs again. “Oh yes. If Scott can rise to the occasion, Bryan Brown can rise to the occasion!”

‘It all comes from his mother’: the surprising force behind Bryan Brown (4)

In January, for instance, he took up the fight to help the Australian film industry stop the federal government lowering a crucial tax rebate – the 40 per cent offset for Australian feature films – that could have led to a loss in home-grown productions of up to 50 per cent. Alongside strenuous efforts from others in the industry, Brown called Nationals deputy leader David Littleproud (“he’s a mate from somewhere,” says Ward wonderingly), then took himself to Canberra with an industry delegation. Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg suddenly found themselves free for meetings (and matey photo ops), and in April, after a second trip, the change was scrapped.

Brown doesn’t mention this coup to me, which doesn’t surprise Ward. “Unless he’s sick – in which case he’s the world’s greatest hypochondriac – he never makes a fuss,” she says. “He just looks after his own patch, looks after his children, represents his country as best he can. And he does it with great aplomb and dignity.”

‘It all comes from his mother’: the surprising force behind Bryan Brown (5)

By the time this story appears, Bryan Brown will be in Queensland, filming an eight-part series called Darby and Joan with old friend Greta Scacchi. “I play a retired copper and she’s an English widow: we have a car crash in the outback.” He pauses, then begins to laugh: “We’re the only two cars for a hundred miles, but we crash and she damn near kills me. Bloody female drivers!”

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He’s also producing a film (as well as his 80-odd films as an actor, he’s produced several) and is talking to people about adapting one of his stories from Sweet Jimmy, A Time to Do, for the screen. He does Pilates every day. And of course, those boxes at Addison Road won’t pack themselves. “He’s actually been involved in a plethora of issues,” says Craig Foster, who’s well known for his human-rights activism. “Kids off Nauru, refugee aid – he’s a very soft-hearted man. He gives his time, he gives his money, and it’s almost always behind the scenes.”

In 2005, Brown was made a Member of the Order of Australia for his work in charities and the film industry – another detail he doesn’t tell me. These days, among other things, he’s the patron of the Lebanese Film Festival and ambassador of WestWords, a literacy and creativity organisation in Parramatta.

“I don’t like that idea about ‘giving back’. These are just natural places to be. You do things, you meet people, they become friends. It’s life. That’s it.”

This feels like closing the loop on those hand-me-down-jumpers he had as a child, I suggest. “No,” he says firmly. “I don’t like that idea about ‘giving back’. I find that these are just natural places to be. You do things, you meet people, they become friends. It’s life. That’s it.”

In Bryan Brown’s case, though, it’s been a surprisingly varied life. He’s been the kid in the hand-me-down jumper, and the man with the multimillion-dollar view; the boy who didn’t like reading, who’s become a professional wordsmith; the cynic from the broken home, with the long and happy marriage; and the child without a father, who made himself a good dad. Which goes to show, just because you’re a masculine archetype, it doesn’t mean you can’t be an interesting person.

At the end of our walk, we pause briefly on opposite ends of a long bench. Sitting with Brown, I realise, is a lot like sitting with my father, or my uncles. I grew up with eight uncles, seven of them Australian, and Brown manages to look, and sound, and somehow be like every one of them. And this, in turn, reminds me: the classic Aussie bloke can actually be a pretty nice guy.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

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‘It all comes from his mother’: the surprising force behind Bryan Brown (2024)
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