Born Dubbo, NSW, November 18, 1939. Died Sydney, November
6, 2000.
Max Phipps will always be known for the 1983 mini-series
The Dismissal, in which he splendidly portrayed Prime Minister
Gough Whitlam in his last days of power. Aided by a wig,
coloured contact lenses and extensive make-up, Phipps made
a very convincing Whitlam, apart from the sequences that,
perhaps unwisely, edited reenactments alongside archival
footage.
Phipps the actor suffered only in comparison with Whitlam
the public figure, and indeed the less complimentary reviewers
would criticise him for not being a larger than life. Others,
however, praised his strong yet understated performance.
With the real-life dismissal still fresh in the nation's
memory, Phipps revealed a more vulnerable, human side to
the already-legendary statesman. Thanks in no small way
to Phipps and his supporting cast, the ambitious production
was a huge success for the Kennedy Miller stable.
The quality was typical of Phipps. "I've never seen
him play two performances of anything the same," said
John Fabian, a close friend. "He was quite a brilliant
character actor."
Nonetheless, The Dismissal was unusual for two reasons.
Firstly, it was a rare lead role for Phipps, known as one
of the best character actors in the business. Secondly,
he played the good guy, after specialising in rogues. "I've
played sophisticated baddies, the common baddy, all of them,"
he said in 1990, "with a multitude of different deaths."
Crooks they might have been, but they were varied nonetheless.
Three years before The Dismissal, he had been nominated
for an AFI Award for his role in the film Stir, playing
an apparently sympathetic prison warder who eventually reveals
his true colours, beating the rioting inmate China (Bryan
Brown) within an inch of his life. He was also the minister
of a deadly country town in The Cars that Ate Paris (1974);
the infamous Toadie in Mad Max II (1982); a corrupt police-detective
in Dead Easy (1982); and an evil pirate, battling Tommy
Lee Jones, in the New Zealand swashbuckler Savage Islands
(1983). Most famously (and perhaps most unusually), he was
the diabolical Dr Frank'n'Furter in Harry M. Miller's long-running
production of the cult musical The Rocky Horror Show.
Phipps was more than happy to be typecast as a rogue. "Ever
since I was a kid, I've enjoyed the baddies more than the
goodies," he said. "And then I got to a certain
age and looked at my face and thought, 'Well, it's not a
hero's face, so let's go for the villains.'"
Growing up in the NSW country town of Parkes, Phipps' first
ambition was to be a "star". By age 21, he was
studying drama at Sydney's Ensemble Theatre, becoming one
of Australia first exponents of "method" acting.
"He was a very versatile, very strong actor,"
said Lorraine Bayly, another Ensemble alumnus. "Also
a very vulnerable person, which is a great quality for an
actor."
During the 1960s, Phipps toured with J.C. Williamson's
musical comedies, before returning to the Ensemble to play
a homosexual prisoner in John Herbert's controversial Fortune
and Men's Eyes. There was no shortage of theatre work after
that. He was in the original cast of David Williamson's
The Removalists (1970), tried his hand at directing with
Alex Buzo's Rooted (1970), and played in London productions
of Williamson's What If You Died Tomorrow? (1973) and Don's
Party (1974), returning to Australia in 1975 to play Frank'n'furter.
Despite his previous work in musicals, the earnest Phipps
might have seemed an odd choice to play the self-proclaimed
"sweet transvestite" (more recently portrayed
by unrestrained performers like Craig McLaughlin and Tim
Ferguson), and he himself initially turned it down when
Miller offered him the role. "I hated the thought of
it. Real undergraduate humour, and they were humiliating
vampires and Frankenstein, whom I love. But finally I gave
in..."
The show ran for three years, making him the toast of Melbourne.
"It was a buzz," he admitted, "it was fun,
and it became an institution. Although it's probably the
worst thing you can say about a radical rock musical, it's
wonderful to be part of."
Elsewhere, his bad-guy face was frequently on television:
Homicide, The Sullivans, A Country Practice and All Saints,
to name a few. He conceded that villains were far more intriguing,
pointing out that with his most famous good-guy role, in
The Dismissal, "nearly all my stuff ended up on the
cutting-room floor."
Nowadays, with "media bias" so often censured
by the Federal Government, it seems astonishing that The
Dismissal (made in 1982) could portray the then Prime Minister,
Malcolm Fraser (played by John Stanton), as a scheming villain.
"It became the Malcolm Fraser story," Phipps recalled,
"because the writer absolutely hated him, with reason
I suppose. And the baddies are always the most interesting."
By this stage, Phipps - a firm believer in new age thinking
- was consulting a fortune-teller before accepting major
roles. Her advice was perhaps unusual (adding figures like
Sir Frank Packer and Ian Barker Q.C. to his TV roles), but
kept him steadily employed. Eager to assist new talent,
Phipps also directed productions during the 1980s for the
Ensemble and the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA).
A science fiction buff, one of his last roles was in the
Sydney-produced sci-fi series Farscape, once again playing
a villain. While it was only a supporting role, and he was
already in poor health, he was given good notices by Farscape's
American fans. Phipps never truly realised his ambitions
of stardom (becoming, in his own words, "a sort of
kind of" star), but for over 40 years, few actors in
Australia were so consistently good.
He never married.
