Bryan Brown: I owe it all to my mum
My mother was my role model
Actor Bryan Brown is a natural storyteller and as he breaks into crime fiction writing, the 74-year-old maverick reveals the influences of his Bankstown childhood, the amazing women in his life, fatherhood, a near-death experience and simple laughter.
When Bryan Brown mentioned he was busy penning a bunch of short stories and started drip feeding them to his family to read, no one was really surprised. While the award-winning Aussie actor and filmmaker had never before entertained notions of a literary career, creating characters was right up his alley. Indeed, daughter Matilda harbours halcyon childhood memories of Dad’s storytelling. “He would sit beside me going to bed and tell me stories of Susie and the Witch or Taddy the Tadpole, stories that he’d just made up,” she recalls, her own almost-two-year-old Zan chuckling vociferously in his playpen behind her.
“Susie and the Witch was all about a witch who would come and save this little girl whenever she was in trouble,”
Bryan explains when we catch up the following day. “Susie and Taddy’s tales were about trying to help my children with life. If you do what this character does, you could get into that trouble. I think stories – if you go right back – were used as warnings or things about life.”
Sweet Jimmy, Bryan’s debut crime noir collection of short stories, published this month, is also flush with warnings. The tales are menacing, gritty, unsettling and laced with dark humour; set in a world of constantly shifting sands where people are not who they pretend to be. As you would expect, they exude a filmic quality, but Bryan’s prose is surprising – punchy and powerful, his homegrown characters instantly recognisable. The inspiration, he tells me, comes from all around him.
“I realised that I’ve been involved with storytelling through theatre and film for 45 years and then about 30 years ago when I was in America I had an idea for a pitch for a movie. I wrote this story and handed it to my agent and he said to me, ‘Well, you can write’. No one had ever said anything like that before. I was a little shocked and also very pleased. That story is in this book. It’s called Nightmare, about a couple who go to America and get into a lot of trouble.”
Trouble is putting it mildly. Bryan’s duo is abducted and brutally tortured. In another tale a foolish widower is seduced and caught in a drugs sting. Plots started percolating and characters springing up, including a thief called Sam, loosely based on Bryan’s good mate, actor Sam Neill – at least that’s how Bryan tells it!
Mostly these stories come from Bryan’s upbringing in south-west Sydney and echo themes of revenge and trust. “Every time I started a story it really took me back to growing up, either to moments I’d been in or moments that I’d seen people in, where the choice you make can have enormous consequences for your life. They’re suburban crime stories. I like them all but I don’t like the choices these characters make because where they go to in many cases is a place that’s terribly destructive to either them or other people.
“I’ve got a story in there where a bloke puts a cue straight through the mouth of another bloke. I saw that happen in a pub when I was 20. That stayed with me. Now I’ve got the opportunity to put it in a story, but it’s real. I know what it felt like watching it and I know how terrifying that is.” In a particularly haunting tale - Be
Not Afraid - a distraught father tries to understand the circumstances that led to his daughter’s death. “My sister had a friend, I’d known this girl, and a few years ago she was found dead. It always struck me, if I was the father, I’d have to search for the truth.”
Fellow filmmaker Matilda was one of Bryan’s early readers, a trusted creative touchstone to see if he was onto something, and I wonder what she made of that particular yarn. “There’s been a few things that I’ve read of Dad’s that have had a fatherdaughter relationship in them,” she says. “They always move me because I know Dad would have had to draw on his relationship with my sister [Rosie] and I in order to bring truth to a story like that. He’s such an authentic man that he would always have to find something in his life to base it in his truth in order for something to come to life.”
Matilda loves the characters her father has conjured up. “There’s definitely a lot of Dad in his writing,” she says laughing. “The thing about those characters is that I didn’t find any of them unlikeable. Even though they’re dark, they’ve always got these elements in them that draw you in. They’ve got charm, even if they are on the wrong side of the law. They’ve also got a humour to them, which is very Dad and I like the worlds that he creates. There’s his upbringing in the western suburbs in there, people he’s known from parts of his life that I never knew him from. He has such a soft spot for that world that he grew up in that to be able to bring that into stories has been really fun for him.”
Mum, school & me
Bryan Brown was born in 1947 in Panania in south-west Sydney and raised in a female-centric house with his younger sister, Kristine, and single mum Molly. “My mother brought up my sister and myself on her own,” says Bryan, his face flushing with pride. “She didn’t have any family – no brothers or sisters – and her parents had died when she was 17.
She was an amazing woman.
“Because of her I had a pretty great childhood. I had a house to live in – a housing commission house – that was warm and there was always food because Mum went out to work to make sure we had everything we needed. I was well educated. My mum cleaned houses and played piano for ballet classes, and when I asked her many years later what was the hardest thing back then, she said, meeting the rent every week. But I would never have known that. I was brought up
“My mother brought up my sister and myself on her own. She was an amazing woman.”
by a very extraordinary woman and was able to live a normal, fun-filled, suburban life.”
Bryan barely knew his father, John Brown. “I met him about ten times during my life. He left when my mother was pregnant with my sister. But Mum was never hate-filled about him. He was just an irresponsible bloke. It was that period after the war and it just didn’t work out [between them]. I remember once he said to me, ‘your mother’s done a fantastic job’, and I thought that’s great that you see that, because you haven’t done anything, so I’m really glad you see that she has.”
When I ask if Bryan feels he lacked a male influence, he shakes his head and resolutely declares: “My mother was a great male role model.”
Bryan loved school – the camaraderie, the lessons, the larks and the three months of summer holidays when he would hang out with his mates and go surfing. “Then all of a sudden it was over and I had no idea what to do,” he recalls. “I got a scholarship to university but I didn’t have anything to study. I wasn’t interested. I was very good at maths but I didn’t want to be an engineer or a surveyor or anything that involved maths. Then someone told me about this thing called an actuary, but they didn’t have it at universities in Australia at the time and AMP took me on to work for them and study by correspondence at the same time.
“Well I was pretty sure from the day I started that there was no way I was going to actually be an actuary but I was getting some money in my hand, which I had never had before. I could go out and chat up girls, pay for their drinks. Life was opening up for me.
But I knew I was not going to spend the rest of my days in offices, and I used to watch the blokes who would come in smiling a lot and I found out they were the salesmen. I said they’re having fun, so I became a salesman.”
At AMP there was a raft of social activities, including a drama club, and this was the turning point for Bryan. “They asked for people to come round to do an end of year review and I said to a mate, ‘Let’s go down there, it’s something to do.’ I got given a piece of paper to read standing opposite someone. I’d never known anything like this. I loved it.”
Soon Bryan had joined a local amateur theatre group, spending all his time there while telling his employers he was out selling. “As a salesman no one knows where the hell you are, as long as you get the figures in, so I was down at this amateur all the time; come Friday I’d think, Christ, I’d better go and sell a couple of policies, keep everyone happy.” After three to four years treading the boards Bryan made the decision to quit his day job and see if he could cut it as an actor.
An actor’s life
“I sold my car, bought a ticket to England and started knocking on doors, telling people I was an actor.” Eventually Bryan got an audition with Britain’s National Theatre and landed a year’s contract in the repertory company at the famous Old Vic. “There was John Gielgud and Arthur Lowe and all those unbelievable blokes, as well as young actors like Michael Kitchen, Peter Firth, Jenny Agutter. It was so exciting.”
Bryan says he deliberately taught himself an English accent so he wouldn’t stand out at auditions. “I started that immediately. When I got off the plane, someone said the word ‘hour’. They pronounced it ‘are’. What ‘are’ is it?” On trains, buses and in bars he listened and learned. “Eventually no one knew that I was an Aussie. I really concentrated on that. By the time I auditioned for things I had an English accent. And that’s how I spoke.”
Bryan was having a ball, so why did he come back to Australia? “Because my mother sent me a photograph of herself and for the first time I saw her not as my mother but as an oldish lady,” he explains. “I was all set, my life was going to be over there. I’d just finished my year’s contract and I thought I’d do another year, or go to the Royal Court or the Royal Shakespeare Company. But when I saw the photo I knew I had to go back and visit Mum. It was supposed to be for six weeks, but in that time I thought I’d better get an Australian agent in case there was stuff around, and then the next minute I was asked to do The Rainmaker for the Queensland Theatre Company and suddenly there were lots of opportunities.”
Bryan was hot property, cast in the movie Love Letters from Teralba Road “and then movie after movie” he recalls. “Eventually I went back to England six years later and visited my friends who were still in the same dressing room at the National and I was rather glad that I’d come back.”
In Australia the industry was evolving fast with playwright David Williamson in the theatre and Peter Weir making the hit movie Picnic at
Hanging Rock. “I came back to an Australian voice that wasn’t there when I left. The culture had changed.” Playing characters like Lt Peter Handcock in Breaker Morant, Bryan was in his element. “I knew who he was, I knew his emotions, what sort of bloke he was. It felt great to be able to play those characters.”
It was on the set of the TV miniseries The Thorn Birds in 1983 that
Bryan famously met English actor Rachel Ward. His chat-up line involved reading Rachel’s palm and he is pretty proud of his prediction. “It was a good pick-up line. It shows you’re deep,” he jokes. “We were sitting there and I said, ‘give me a look at your hand and I’ll tell you how many children you’ll have’. Someone had told me about these lines on your palm and what they meant. Rachel had three lines and I said, ‘you’re going to have three children’… We’ve got three kids!”
They married a few months later and have been together almost 40 years. Bryan says the secret to their relationship is simple: “We like each other.” But also there’s a meeting of opposites. “I think there are things you see in people that you don’t see in yourself. Rachel is a far more game person than I am. She doesn’t think. If she wants to do something she just bursts into doing it, and loves adventure. I’ll go for things but I weigh up: hold on, that’s high risk, do you want to take it because the consequences could be that. She won’t even think about that.
“She leads me. She’s introduced me to a lot of things, opened my world in a lot of ways, which is great for me. Women have always introduced me to things. I’m always following behind them to know what’s good.”
Father first
When he became a father another new world opened up, though he jokes that the first lesson was “I couldn’t wake up hung over any more”. They are all grown now – Rosie, Matilda and Joe – and Bryan couldn’t be prouder of his brood. “I enjoyed being a father from the moment I was a father. I enjoyed that creature and I enjoyed that it needed me. I was its protector. I responded to that. I guess I’ve continued to respond to that all my life, much to the chagrin of my three kids who go, ‘oh for God’s sake, he’s ringing us again’.
“I have a different relationship with all three of them, but I’m very aware because I surf with Joe there’s a physical thing we do together. I do other things with the girls. I pushed Joe to surf when he was six or seven and he surfs all the time now. I like that relationship where we talk surfing and that leads us on to talk about other deeper things about our lives.”
Matilda says that, growing up, her dad was tough but fair. “I knew I couldn’t get away with stuff with Dad. He was playful, there for us by the side of the Saturday sports games. Then he was also the disciplinarian. He was the one who would ground us if we’d misbehaved. I got into quite a lot of trouble during my high school years.”
In contrast, she says, Rachel was the soft one. “I remember saying to Dad, in a fit of rage, ‘I hate you, Mum just wants to be our friend!’ And he replied: ‘I am your father first and your friend second and I will always be your father first and your friend second.’”
Matilda says over the years, though, her dad has “got a little sooky” and as she sees it, the change was sudden. “He had a near death experience about 14 years ago and after that it changed him. He got a lot softer.”
The incident happened in the US and is something Bryan will never forget. He was about to leave for the airport to fly home in a break while filming Along Came Polly with Jennifer Aniston, when he was rushed into intensive care. “My blood pressure was scorching the earth and I had septicaemia. If I had got on the plane that night I’ve had gone into septic shock and when they went to wake me up in Sydney I’d have been dead, so thank God I didn’t get on that plane.
“Everything you do goes in somewhere but I don’t think it was some awakening. I was aware that you can go, not when you’re expecting something and that’s the end of it, all the good things around you aren’t there – like your kids and wife. The laughter won’t be there any more.
“That led on to a period of anxiety that I developed. Anytime I’d travel I would get anxious thinking, what if I get sick again and there isn’t a hospital as good as the hospital there and I could die in 24 hours. I had to go and see a psychologist to try and find out what was wrong with me. Once I got to the bottom of it, it was great, and then I learned how to let go of it, come through it, and understand what it was. That made me a better person.”
In February, Matilda gave birth to her second child, daughter Anouk. She says Rachel and Bryan are “amazing grandparents”. “Mum’s so hands on while Dad is much more chilled out. He loves to come and visit them. You never know, you hope your children will fit in with your family and that your family love them. Now I can’t imagine our family without them and I’m sure they can’t, as grandparents.”
Bryan says he is still working out the grandparent role. “I had people say ‘oh you’re going to be great, you’re going to love being a grandfather’, and I’d say, ‘hold on a minute, can I just work that out for myself’.
“You have to understand, I never knew any grandparents, they were all dead when I was born, on both sides. And I didn’t have a father around. To me, family was three people: my sister, my mother and myself. Family was small. When I married it got a bit bigger and then we had children but I could understand that expansion. This is another expansion and I had to learn what that meant in what I understood family to be. Slowly but surely I’m learning.”
As a parting shot I ask Bryan what is the one life lesson he would like to share with his grandchildren. “That’s very hard,” he says, but decides on “Try and find the humour in it.” I think he’s nailed grandparenting! AWW
“Rachel leads me. She’s introduced me to a lot of things, opened my world. ”
Sweet Jimmy by Bryan Brown, Allen & Unwin, is on sale now.