Lex Marinos obituary: Kingswood Country star settled into Australian consciousness
Lex Marinos’s parents took him to a touring tent vaudeville show when he was eight – that was the business he wanted to be in.
It was a scene from an early episode of Kingswood Country where the word wog possibly was used for the first time on Australian TV. Lex Marinos’s on-screen father-in-law in the show was Ted Bullpit (the late Ross Higgins) whose role was as a grumpy, curmudgeon quite like Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part.
They sit down in Bullpit’s lounge and he aggressively asks of the Mediterranean-looking Bruno, “Why don’t you go back to your own country?”.
Bruno answers, on behalf of some millions of us: “Listen, for the last time, I am an Australian. I was born here!”
“Where?” Bullpit asks disbelievingly.
Bruno: “Wagga!”
“That’d be right,” Bullpit responds nodding.
Not long before, during a writing session, it emerged that Marinos had indeed been born in Wagga Wagga. He had never before thought of the word play.
Marinos recalled that the writer thought this gold. “We can milk this. We can get 10 episodes out of this.”
Fulfilling another of those cliches, back home in Wagga his Greek family has a cafe. They would place public notices from locals in their shop window. Sometimes they were for local shows and the family would be given tickets. Each year George Sorley’s Travelling Vaudeville Show would pass through. Sorley had died, but wife Grace kept it on the road until it was killed off by TV.
His parents took him one night and the excitement, music, colour and drama of it all swept away the eight-year-old.
“Wow, this is the business I want to be in,” he told an interviewer a decade ago.
After school, Marinos attended the University of NSW to complete an honours degree in drama. Few boys enrolled in drama back then and Marinos thought this improved his odds with the women students. When he found out that many of the boys weren’t interested in girls anyway, he felt he’d made a sound choice.
He acted in student productions and worked as an extra in small films. After university, he thought he’d give acting a go but wasn’t confident it was for him.
He joined the ABC and was working there at a crucial point when it flourished under Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam and 2JJ, later to become 2JJJ, was launched along with colour television in 1975, attracting a wide youth audience not least of which because it was unencumbered by broadcasting rules and aired in its first minutes songs commercial radio was banned from playing – including Skyhooks’ You Just Love Me Coz I’m Good in Bed.
More recently he worked with Richard Glover on the acclaimed Thank God It’s Friday before a live studio audience.
He also worked across the commercial networks.
In 1995, he directed the film version of Colleen McCullough’s An Indecent Obsession. Three years later, he turned a Peter Yeldham British TV play into the film Boundaries of The Heart, and the same year directed Hard Knuckle, a film set in a violently post-apocalyptic Australia, starring Steve Bisley.
He was a director of the landmark Bodyline miniseries that retold the events of the brutal 1932-33 Ashes tour, and he starred in the 1990s ABC television series Embassy.
He was also in the hit television series The Slap, based on the profound repercussions when a misbehaving child is slapped by his father’s friend at a backyard barbecue.
Marinos plays Manolis, the father of Hector who slapped the boy, and is confused by the attitudes of the younger generation.
He was awarded an Order of Australia for his work in the performing arts.
He wrote his biography a decade back – Blood and Circuses: An Irresponsible Memoir – tracing his unorthodox life as an accident actor.
Had life in acting not turned out, he planned to return to university to become a doctor and sometimes pondered the patients he had let off the hook.
In recent years it was reported that he had been treated for leukaemia and that he had sent a note to friends: “The ancients used to say ‘If you want to make the gods laugh, tell them your plans”.
He will forever be linked to Bruno, who may have been a visitor to Kingwood Country but settled there and into the Australian consciousness.
Alexander Francis Marinos, born Wagga Wagga, February 1, 1949. Died Sydney, September 1, aged 75
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