Larrikin actor Craig McLachlan charged with sex offences
Friends of an actor who went public with allegations of abuse by Gold Logie winner Craig McLachlan say she feels vindicated after The Rocky Horror Show star was charged with sex offences and assault.
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Friends of an actor who went public with allegations of abuse by Gold Logie winner Craig McLachlan say she feels vindicated after The Rocky Horror Show star was charged with sex offences and assault.
Victoria Police announced on Friday that McLachlan had been charged with eight counts of indecent assault, one of attempted indecent assault, and one of common law assault.
A year ago, Christie Whelan Browne and fellow actors Erika Heynatz and Angela Scundi alleged they had been victims of harassment and sexual misconduct by McLachlan during a 2014 production of The Rocky Horror Show.
MCLACHLAN HIT WITH SEX ASSAULT CHARGES
“It’s a sense of justification for her today,” a close friend of Whelan Browne said on Friday. “It has been very challenging for her, and traumatic is not too strong a word to describe what she’s been through.
“It’s been devastating, but she’s facing it as bravely as she can, because she has no choice, really. And she is supported by a large number of people.”
He shot to fame as the quintessential loveable larrikin.
Craig McLachlan was an apprentice plumber when, in 1987, aged just 21, he was cast as Henry Mitchell on the popular TV soap Neighbours.
His on-screen sister, Charlene, was played by Kylie Minogue.
McLachlan once described Henry as a “fairly zany guy who loves a practical joke, and so do I. He has the same sense of humour as me.” Indeed, the Ramsay character, which earned McLachlan a Gold Logie in 1990, loomed large as the actor sought new challenges, including as a pop star, a role on a rival soap, musical theatre, and TV drama.
“Every time some young spunk appears with no shirt on Home And Away or Neighbours, I think: ‘Oh, my God, I’m probably to blame, I’m probably the cause,’” McLachlan told the Herald Sun a few years ago.
“Henry casts a big shadow. Charlene (Kylie Minogue’s Neighbours character) does too,” he said. “It was a golden era of the show.”
His next move was to go platinum: McLachlan and his band Check 1-2 recorded Mona, a cover of Bo Diddley’s 1952 hit. It was the biggest-selling single of 1990, and went to No.2 in Britain. “You couldn’t kill that song with an elephant gun,” he said.
Meanwhile, the intensely private McLachlan managed to keep his personal life out of the spotlight.
He secretly married high-school sweetheart Karen Williams before landing the Neighbours gig.
His second marriage, to Neighbours star Rachel Friend, lasted 18 months.
McLachlan has a son, now in his late teens, with British actor Charlotte Avery.
His partner is orchestra conductor Vanessa Scammell.
After soaps and pop, McLachlan found success on the theatre stage, as Danny Zuko in Grease on London’s West End, and later, in a recurring role as Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Show.
To McLachlan, the calling of the stage and of drama was more appealing than the lure of Los Angeles, where former Neighbours castmates, including Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe, said he should be.
“I didn’t want to take a year out to wait tables and do the rounds. I need to be working,” McLachlan said in one newspaper interview.
“What you see is what you get. I’m not very good at playing the game. Friends of mine have even said to me, ‘If you could just pull your head in and do a couple of hours of bullshit with these people’ … but I just can’t do it.”
McLachlan transformed himself into Michael Chamberlain for an Azaria Chamberlain mini-series, and played Stuart Diver in a Thredbo disaster TV drama.
TV’s Doctor Blake Mysteries, with McLachlan as leading man Dr Lucien Blake, debuted in 2013.
“Actors often talk about the role of a lifetime, the gig they’ve been waiting for,” McLachlan said. “This is the one I was hoping and waiting for.”
Again, his role as a crime-solving GP required a physical transformation.
“Lucien Blake drinks, and he has an interesting lifestyle. I try not to adopt all of Lucien’s habits, but I get up to 98 to 100 kilos while we’re shooting,” McLachlan said.
His subsequent weight-loss regimen included healthy eating, high-repetition training, and abstaining from complex carbohydrates after noon.
“The weight came off really quickly,” he said. “When I was 25, I could put on weight for a role, and take it off without thinking about it.
“Now it’s an effort.”
He stepped down from his roles in The Doctor Blake Mysteries and The Rocky Horror Show 2018 production after three actors accused him of inappropriate behaviour. Vowing to fight, he said the claims had “annihilated” him, and that despite his “Benny Hill” sense of humour he did not come close to other cast and crew “in the filth department”.
