Australian film actor Hunter dies

Bill Hunter, the archetypal working class Australian of a multitude of movies including the quirky trio Muriel’s Wedding, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Strictly Ballroom has died of cancer, his manager said today. He was aged 71.

The prolific star of Australian movie and television screens with a distinctively broad and gravelly accent and an authoritative no-nonsense style remained an actor in demand until the end.

He recently narrated a two-part television documentary about the floods and cyclone that became Australia’s most expensive natural disasters early this year.

He plays the legendary Australian racehorse trainer Bart Cummings and a cameo role in two Australian movies to be screened later this year.

He died surrounded by family and friends in a Melbourne hospice where he was admitted a week ago, his manager Mark Morrissey said. Colleagues who had recently worked with him were surprised he had been sick.

“Bill was much-loved, a gentleman, an inspiration to fellow actors, a journeyman and a rogue,” Mr Morrissey said. Director Baz Luhrmann described Mr Hunter in a statement last week as “the go-to iconic actor to synthesise quintessential Australian-ness”.

The BBC’s Sydney correspondent Nick Bryan wrote in 2008 that “Hunter is to Australian films what ravens are to the Tower of London. Without his portly presence, such films would be doomed to fall”.

Mr Hunter’s weather-worn face has become almost omnipresent on Australian screens since he first appeared as an extra in 1957 in The Shiralee, a British-made movie set in Australia.

His real break into the industry came as a stunt man when Hollywood made On the Beach in his hometown of Melbourne in 1959 – a movie about survivors of a nuclear war that starred Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire.

“He watched Gregory Peck do 27 takes and thought: ‘A mug could do that’,” Mr Hunter’s former wife Rhoda Roberts told Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph newspaper last week.

Mr Hunter was born in Melbourne on February 27, 1940, and raised in rural Victoria state in Australia’s south east.

Mr Hunter told Melbourne’s The Sunday Age newspaper in 1994 that he left school at the age of 13 to become a cowboy, known in Australia as a drover, guiding cattle herds across Victoria.