Name: Bill Hunter

Statement:

No statement has been received from this suspect.

Supporting Evidence:

The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Australian Showbiz (Margot Atterton, Alan Veitch, 1984)

HUNTER, Bill
Actor
Born: Ballarat. Vic., 1940

A swimming star in his early teens, Bill Hunter once held the world 100 yards freestyle swimming record and he held it for possibly a world record short period of only 10 minutes. He set a new world time when he won a heat of the Victorian Swimming Titles, but John Devitt swam 1/10 sec. faster in the very next heat.

While a 16-year-old member of the Australian Olympic Squad in 1956, Hunter was fleetingly introduced to American screen star, Ava Gardner, who was in Melbourne for the filming of Stanley Kramer's On the Beach (co-starring Gregory Peck, Anthony Perkins and Fred Astaire). In the course of a brief conversation, Ava casually suggested to the young swimmer that he could pick up some easy pocket money by working as an extra in On the Beach. He was hired the next day after judiciously dropping Ava's name to the first assistant director, and while hanging around the improvised sound studio in the old Melbourne Showgrounds (where many of the film's interiors were shot) he saw veteran actor Fred Astaire fumble through 32 takes of a quite simple scene before he managed to get his lines right. 'I can do that on my ear!' Hunter thought to himself and from that moment on he cheerfully decided 'it's the actor's life for me!'. No doubt, in his youthful optimism, young Bill was entirely unaware that his newly chosen profession would occasionally send him so broke that he'd be forced to work behind a bar while he waited for his agent to frantically hunt up a part.

However the swim star-turned thespian got off to a promising launch. At the end of an intensive acting study course in Melbourne he won a much-coveted two-year overseas scholarship to the famous Northampton Repertory Company, which gave him the opportunity to learn his craft from some of Britain's finest actors and directors.

A tall, powerfully-built, though hardly handsome man, Hunter unfortunately became typecast as a 'heavy' in his earlv TV and film roles on his return to Australia. Desperate for a more challenging role, he successfully appealed to producer Phil Noyce for the chance to play the lead in the upcoming offbeat movie, Newsfront. This was clearly the turning point in Bill Hunter's career. His acclaimed portrayal of the likeable, battling, idealistic news-camerman won him the 1976 AFl Best Actor Award. He went on to win the 1980 AFI Best Supporting Actor Award for his touchingly sensitive performance as the opera-loving Major in Gallipoli. Married actress Pat Bishop 1976, since divorced, Now lives in Melbourne with actress Narelle Johnson, TV includes: Homicide, Cop Shop, The Dismissal, 1915, Eureka Stockade, The Keepers. Films include Mad Dog Morgan, Newsfront, Gallipoli, Far East.

Extract from Making Priscilla (Al Clark, 1994)

[A book about the making of the film 'The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert' - BK]

[Terence] Stamp is naturally anxious about his hair, make-up and wardrobe if he is to succeed in a role so hazardous that failure, he feels sure, will lead to ridicule. He is also concerned about his co-star. Not about the two other leading actors with whom he will spend the majority of his screen time, but about who will play Bob, the Outback garage mechanic who develops an attachment to Bernadette, with whom he ends up, as the script so poetically calls it, 'playing hide the sausage'.

Aware that the other actors have to be Australian, Stamp suggests Bill Hunter, with whom he appeared in Stephen Frears' The Hit nine years earlier. They have barely seen each other since then, but Stamp remembers him with fondness and feels that an existing rapport between himself and the person playing Bob will bring a vital conviction to their scenes together. I call Bill Hunter's agent and inform her that Terence Stamp has specifically requested him as his 'love interest' in the film. When she speaks to him, Hunter laughs in disbelief and says he will accept the part without even reading the script.

By the end of the following day, Stamp has agreed to travel to a country he dislikes, Australia, to play a role that unnerves him, a woman, in a a genre he has never attempted, the comedy-musical.