Gary Waddell dies aged 74: the brilliant Australian actor who turned small roles into great ones

The great Australian actor Gary Waddell – known for his gooseflesh-raising ability to portray rough-as-guts characters so real you swear you’ve met them before – has died aged 74. Waddell was a fixture of the Australian film and TV industry for decades, bursting on to the scene, bleary-eyed and angsty in Bert Deling’s cult classic drug drama Pure Shit, a production so notorious that its first public screening, in 1976, was raided by the vice squad.

This legitimately great film – the best ever made about heroin addiction and subculture in Australia – was famously described as “the most evil film I’ve ever seen” by Melbourne Herald critic Andrew McKay (an example of hysterical overreach if ever there was one, although, as they say, those were different times). It remains a thrilling piece of social realist cinema, full of drug-taking, petty crime and tomfoolery, with the story revolving around Waddell’s character Lou, who arrives five minutes in, grousing about how he “hasn’t had a hit for 10 hours”.

Since then, Waddell went on to appear in countless productions, usually in small albeit often high-impact roles, in TV shows such as A Country Practice, E Street, Stingers, Blue Heelers, Water Rats, Bad Cop Bad Cop, Home and Away, City Homicide, Upright and Rake. His films included The FJ Holden, Chopper, Dirty Deeds, Gettin’ Square, Black and White, Charlie’s Country, The Stranger and 2022’s The Survival of Kindness, which featured his final screen performance.

There were many more. Waddell was hired again and again because he was rock-solid reliable, bringing weight to even the smallest roles, though he was sadly rarely given the screen time he deserved. Waddell told me in a 2012 interview for Crikey that in the early days this was partly because he “sabotaged” his career, including with substance abuse. Then came self-doubt: “I actually thought for a long, long time – until around ’86, ’87 – that my career was one of the greatest con jobs I’d ever pulled off. I never thought I could act … I had no idea until an actor said to me – and he was a trained actor – that what I did on film was what most people go to school to learn.”

Another great actor – the inimitable David Gulpilil – had lots of small roles and just one true leading performance: in Rolf de Heer’s 2013 film Charlie’s Country. Just as De Heer righted that wrong with Charlie’s Country, he did something similar in his very fine, very wily 2012 black comedy The King Is Dead!, casting Waddell as the titular character – a drugged-up layabout with a weird gleam in his eyes.

Dan Wyllie and Bojana Novakovic play a sensible, fairly strait-laced married couple who buy a suburban house, only to discover that the residence over the fence is a haven for ne’er-do-wells – including Waddell’s King, an astonishingly well-played fiend. He’s charming, but also dangerous and weird; the kind of person you cross the street to avoid. I was so smitten by his performance that, as the film critic at Crikey at the time, I described Waddell as “out of this world good” and wrote an open letter to Aacta, imploring voters to give him the gong for best supporting actor.

I was far from the only critic to heap praise on this majestically odd and darkly comedic performance. Margaret Pomeranz called it “hilarious”, while The Australian’s Evan Williams wrote it was “wonderfully touching and humorous”. Variety’s Richard Kuipers wrote that “Waddell’s spot-on performance keeps the character human, and even evokes a strange sympathy”, while Fairfax’s Jake Wilson saw a “perfect role for Waddell, who well and truly earns his place in the ratbag hall of fame”.

After I wrote that open letter, Waddell contacted me and was extremely grateful. We hung out in person, and went for beers at Melbourne’s Young and Jackson hotel. We spoke on the phone several times and, in our last communication a few years ago, exchanged photos on Facebook of our jack russells. Waddell was humble, friendly, smart and down-to-earth – and as a screen presence, he was electrifying. He will be missed.