Transcript: Colin Friels
28 October 2001

 Charles Wooley and Colin Friels

INTRODUCTION
CHARLES WOOLEY: He started as a brickies' labourer and grew up to be one of our most gifted actors.
Colin Friels is the original working-class lad made good. Many of us will know him as detective Frank Holloway of Water Rats, the gold-plated good guy, as straight as a die and always prepared to speak his mind — much like Colin. As an actor, he has played everything from Macbeth to the lovable mad inventor Malcolm, but his biggest role, his most courageous part, has been his off-screen battle with cancer. In Water Rats, Colin's arresting character was detective Frank Holloway, a starring role in a brilliant acting career. Acting is not just his livelihood; it's his passion, his life.

STORY

COLIN FRIELS: It makes me alive. It's a fantastic place to be when you're doing it well, because it's a complete loss of self-consciousness, which is like therapy for me. I think it's the only way good stories are told.

CHARLES WOOLEY: His latest good story is a charming comedy The Man Who Sued God. It's typical Friels; Australian made and tailor-made for this working actor. Friels plays a very dry foil to the very chaotic Billy Connolly.

COLIN FRIELS: He's a lovely guy. He's amazing. You know, he's quite remarkable.

CHARLES WOOLEY: He's the funniest man in the English language, isn't he?

COLIN FRIELS: I suppose he is. He's very funny. He makes me laugh.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Colin Friels gets a chance to revisit the Scottish accent he brought here as an 11-year-old migrant kid from Glasgow. It was an accent that quickly evaporated under the Australian sun.

COLIN FRIELS: There was a boy and a girl at school, and I'd say words, and I'd say "foooot" and they'd say, "no fuoot". I'd go "fuoot", and I'd go home and I'd speak Australian, and my father was very proud of this because, as far as he was concerned, we were here and that was it. We weren't going back.

CHARLES WOOLEY: If Colin Friels adopted Australia, it's also true that we've adopted him as one of our most prolific acting sons. From historical dramas like For the Term of His Natural Life, to confronting realism as the heroin addict in Monkey Grip. And the unforgettable idiot savant inventor, Malcolm.Should we notice good acting or should good acting conceal it?

COLIN FRIELS: No, not at all. You should not remotely notice it. A lot of actors come completely unstuck when their own vanity begins to take over, you know.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Vanity is certainly not Colin Friels' name. Not that you would expect that from the brickies' labourer who fell into acting. It was in 1973 when the working-class boy found himself accepted by NIDA.

COLIN FRIELS: You know, I remember mates that had never been to a play, but I had. They said, "What are you doing?" because I was working as a labourer at the time, and I said, "I'm going to NIDA, the National Institute of Dramatic Art". [They'd say,] "What? What are you doing that for?" I said, "Oh, I'm going to be an actor." [They'd reply,] "Oh, yeah." You know, it was just a joke. But I was deadly serious. I wanted to go.

CHARLES WOOLEY: It's obviously your first love in your craft, the stage?

COLIN FRIELS: It's where I've been the freest as an actor. It's given me the greatest freedom. You know, how am I — as a film actor — going to get parts that equal some of the parts that I've done on stage? I'd have to have won 12 Academy Awards to get the same roles. You're not going to say, "Listen, we've got Friels. Give us a $100 million budget." You know, it's not going to happen.

CHARLES WOOLEY: He may have chosen to work in local, low-budget films and even lower-budget theatre, but he's always won high praise. When he threw himself into television, it was natural that he would win its most prestigious acting award. And equally natural that Colin, the working-class lad, wouldn't let it go to his head.

COLIN FRIELS [at the Logies]: I'm very flattered for this and it's all rather silly, isn't it? So, thank you very much.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Logies, awards you're a bit diffident about that, aren't you? I mean, your acceptance speech was...

COLIN FRIELS: Oh, it's nice to get a Logie award. It was nice. All I said was, "It's a bit silly, isn't it?" People were horrified.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Yes, I know, they were.

COLIN FRIELS: It is all a bit … I mean it is all a bit silly...

CHARLES WOOLEY: If you say it's a bit silly...

COLIN FRIELS: But not that I...

CHARLES WOOLEY: ... If I say, "It's a bit silly," because I haven't ever won one, then it's just churlish, but it's much more hurtful if you actually get one and you say it's a bit silly. [It's] hurtful to the people that take it seriously.

COLIN FRIELS: I think you shouldn't be taking awards too seriously. Anyone that does is going off the track. If that's what you're after, give it away.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Colin Friels might be famously modest about his own achievements, but generous about others. In particular, the talent of his wife of 17 years, the much acclaimed actress Judy Davis.

COLIN FRIELS: Oh, she's brilliant, she has a brilliance, yes. She can make everything come alive. That's what good actors do, they make them come alive in their way, and they can do anything. But everybody's got their limits, you know. We all have. That's why you need more than one actor. If not, you could just have one — he could do everything or she could do everything.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Was High Tide the movie in which you fell in love?

COLIN FRIELS: No, no, we'd been together for quite a while before then.

CHARLES WOOLEY: There was a lot of pashing in that.

COLIN FRIELS: God, I can't even remember it.

CHARLES WOOLEY: So, you didn't fall in love with her in the corny way of falling for your leading lady?

COLIN FRIELS: Oh God, no, no, no, we didn't do it like that. No, no, it wasn't like that. It was quite normal. It was normal, it was normal … No, it wasn't like that.

CHARLES WOOLEY: In their latest movie, Judy Davis actually plays the love interest opposite Billy Connolly.What about the romantic stuff? I mean, there she is with Billy Connolly in the same movie.

COLIN FRIELS: Yeah, I wasn't there that day.

CHARLES WOOLEY: You weren't there that day?

COLIN FRIELS: No.

CHARLES WOOLEY: I wouldn't let my wife near Billy Connolly. She thinks he's the most sexy, marvellous man alive.

COLIN FRIELS: Yeah. Well, good. Oh, let her out.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Yeah.
The Man Who Sued God explores the randomness of misfortune; a theme in real life not unfamiliar to Colin Friels.
The real dramatic role in your life, of course, is that one terrible word: cancer...

COLIN FRIELS: Yeah.

CHARLES WOOLEY: It's an awful word.

COLIN FRIELS: It's quite...

CHARLES WOOLEY: It's a word we all fear.

COLIN FRIELS: Cancer, Jack the Dancer, the big C. You know, cancer is a word, you know.

CHARLES WOOLEY: When you first learned, though, it must have had a lot of resonance, when the doctor told you?

COLIN FRIELS: No, it takes a while to sink in. When the surgeon was describing what he was going to do to me, he lies you down on the table and he describes what he's going to do, it was so horrendous that I started laughing and he started laughing. By the time he finished telling me about it we had tears running out of our eyes. You can't do this to somebody's body and put them back together again.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Pancreatic cancer is one you don't usually survive.

COLIN FRIELS: Some do, if you get it in the right place.

CHARLES WOOLEY: What were you given as the odds?

COLIN FRIELS: Oh, a small percentage, small percentage.

CHARLES WOOLEY: It was late 1997 and Water Rats detective Frank Holloway was at the height of his popularity when Colin Friels was diagnosed with this aggressive cancer. Despite exhausting chemotherapy and major surgery looming, Colin continued to work 12 hours a day on the set of Water Rats.

COLIN FRIELS: I had to wait, like, eight weeks, some six to eight weeks before they could operate. They had to find out where it was and to get all these things done. I thought, "I'll keep working".

CHARLES WOOLEY: But you were doing such long days?

COLIN FRIELS: But my wife was away at the time, she was in New York with the baby, and I thought it best not to tell anyone.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Mmmm.

COLIN FRIELS: Because I thought, "Well, what can they do? It's not going to make any difference."

CHARLES WOOLEY: Usually, the prognosis for pancreatic cancer is not good, with most people surviving less than a year after detection. On those odds, he's lucky to be alive. How do you think you beat it? Good treatment, luck?

COLIN FRIELS: Oh, the surgeon, the surgeon.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Positive attitude?

COLIN FRIELS: Luck, luck, luck. Absolutely.

CHARLES WOOLEY: Was attitude anything to do with it?

COLIN FRIELS: No, no, I don't think so. Maybe I haven't changed enough. Attitude was … I had a wonderful surgeon. I said to him one day … I said, "Am I going to die?" He said, "Of course you're going to die. We're all going to die. I just can't tell you when." Then he said a wonderful thing. He said, "You can hang up your coffin this week." I was lucky it hadn't spread too much, but they decided to give me a treatment of chemotherapy for several months and not long after I was operated on. So, I got through and, I don't know, I might get it again, I don't know.

CHARLES WOOLEY: When will you get the all clear?

COLIN FRIELS: Your first year or two years. I'm through the first couple of years, I'm into my fourth year. You know, it will be four years soon, so I think, pretty much, now I jump back into the pool and take my chances with everybody else again.

CHARLES WOOLEY: When Colin Friels became too sick to work, he had himself written out of the script in a most poetic way. His character, Detective Frank, sailed off on a voyage of self discovery, a voyage not unlike the journey made by the recovering cancer patient himself.What has it taught you about life, though, and about what's valuable?

COLIN FRIELS: Oh, there are many people that could tell you more than me. See, I didn't think that I undervalued life before I got crook. I may have not looked after my health particularly well, or I may have been too … I used to let a lot of energy out all the time, you see, like, zoom. I suppose I was probably … you could call me slightly emotional, you know.

CHARLES WOOLEY: These days, Colin may be on a more even keel, but the passion has never left him and it never will.

COLIN FRIELS: I love working. I love the other part of life. You need both. You balance it. Work, family, you know, gardening, sailing. It's rich, then life gets rich, you can do it all.

CHARLES WOOLEY: You're a ruminator but you're a happy bloke, aren't you?

COLIN FRIELS: Oh, I'm happy. Yeah. I mean, I'm happy. I get sad, but then I get happy.