The
Hollywood Reporter
By
Rhett Bartlett
November
29, 2021
David
Gulpilil, Pioneering Indigenous Australian Actor, Dies at 68
A Cannes award winner, he was known
for his work in such films as 'Walkabout,' 'Rabbit-Proof Fence,' 'The Tracker'
and 'Crocodile Dundee.'
David
Gulpilil, the beloved indigenous Australian actor who introduced the world to
his culture in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout and went on to
make his mark in the blockbuster Crocodile
Dundee
and in the Rolf de Heer dramas The
Tracker and Charlie’s Country, has died. He was 68.
Gulpilil
was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2017, and his death was announced
Monday in a statement by South Australian Premier Steven Marshall. “It is
with deep sadness that I share with the people of South Australia the passing
of an iconic, once-in-a-generation artist who shaped the history of Australian
film and Aboriginal representation on screen – David Gulpilil Ridjimiraril
Dalaithngu (AM),” he said.
His
emotional and humanistic portrayals in Mad
Dog Morgan,
Storm Boy and The Last Wave, all three released in 1976-1977, ran
parallel with the resurgence of the Australian film industry now known as the
“New Wave.”
Gulpilil
later received praise — and a best supporting actor nomination from the
Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards — for his turn as a
tracker pursuing three children who escape government-enforced servitude in
Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002).
Also
in 2002, he landed his first lead actor award in de Heer’s haunting The Tracker, playing the title character who is pushed by a
racist cop to locate the murderer of a white woman. Gulpilil would call it the
best performance of his career.
His
collaboration with de Heer continued when he narrated the landmark Ten Canoes (2006), filmed in the Aboriginal language, and
co-wrote and starred as an aging man wanting to retreat to his cultural roots
in Charlie’s Country (2013).
The
impetus for Charlie’s Country came during a low
point in Gulpilil’s life, when he was behind bars for aggravated assault.
During
a prison visit, de Heer said he was shocked at the condition of his former film
star, and the two began working through projects that could motivate Gulpilil
with a sense of purpose upon his release.
In
his Cannes
Film Festival review, David Rooney of The
Hollywood Reporter
called Charlie’s Country “a delicate but
powerful film that functions as both a stinging depiction of marginalization
and as a salute to the career of the remarkable actor who inhabits almost every
frame.”
Gulpilil
won the Un Certain Regard best actor prize at Cannes, as well as a second AACTA
award for his performance.
The
actor also had a memorable supporting role in The Proposition (2005), and he portrayed tribal elders in
Baz Luhrmann’s romantic epic Australia (2008), the
third-highest-grossing Australian film of all time, and Satellite Boy (2012). His last appearance on film was
the emotional 2021 documentary My
Name Is Gulpilil.
Gulpilil
also appeared in Crocodile Dundee (1986),
Australia’s top-grossing film, as Neville Bell, an indigenous Australian who
meets Paul Hogan’s Mick Dundee on his way to a corrobboree, or meeting.
His
character shows off a dry sense of humor, rarely afforded to indigenous roles.
When Bell tells journalist Sue Charlton (played by Hogan’s future wife, Linda
Kozlowski) that she can’t take his photograph, she apologizes: “I’m sorry — you
believe it will take your spirit away?” He replies, “No, you’ve got the lens
cap on.”
Born
in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory on July 1, 1953, Gulpilil was raised in the
bush and never went to school. He learned the English language solely by
listening.
“That’s
all I know, dancing, singing, spear-throwing and hunting,” he recalled in a
2015 interview. “My father gave me a spear and said make sure you come back,
the spear is life.”
British
director Roeg saw Gulpilil performing a traditional ceremonial dance as he
scouted locations for Walkabout (1971). He approached him and asked for his
name, but all the 16-year-old could reply was, ‘Yes.'”
For
years before Gulpilil’s screen debut, indigenous Australians weren’t counted in
the national census, and their rights were abridged by state and federal laws.
This discrimination was banned with a 1967 referendum vote.
Walkabout
told the story of two white schoolchildren lost in the Australian Outback who
are saved by Gulpilil’s character. His stirring performance culminates in a mesmerising
courtship dance and makes for one of the great film debuts of all time.
Veteran
actor Jack Thompson, who would later work alongside Gulpilil in Mad Dog Morgan and Australia, said it was the
first time he had seen the indigenous culture presented onscreen as
“dynamically attractive.”
“No
Australian director would have done that,” he said. “It would not have until
then been culturally possible for us to think of an aboriginal young man as
being sexually attractive.”
Previously,
representation of indigenous Australians on the big screen was virtually
nonexistent, with the occasional portrayal in offensive “black face” an example
of the country’s inability to reconcile its true history.
As
the industry began a resurgence in the 1970s, Gulpilil appeared in Mad Dog Morgan befriending the erratic real-life
bushranger played by Dennis Hopper, and in the children’s classic Storm Boy,
also released in 1976, he was Fingerbone Bill, who helps a boy raise an
orphaned pelican. (He made a cameo in the 2019 remake as the father of his
original screen character.)
Said
De Heer: “David’s early performances made writers and producers and directors
believe it was possible to have great aboriginal characters of interest to
broad audiences.”
In
1977, director Peter Weir, who had just completed the instant Australian
classic Picnic at Hanging Rock, began work on
another mystical film, The Last Wave. It starred Richard Chamberlain as a
lawyer drawn into a world of murder and premonitions and Gulpilil as a murder
suspect.
Gulpilil
had a profound effect on the director when they first met, Weir recalled during
a 1979 installment of the TV show This
Is Your Life.
“As
I was leaving and got in my old car, you leaned in through the window and said
to me, ‘I’ve told you very special things, Peter, just for you,'” he said.
“‘And just remember, as you drive away, my shadow will be beside you in the
car.’ And I remember driving off and looking at the passenger seat.”
When
Gulpilil, then 26, was asked later in the show what he hoped to accomplish with
his life, his voice cracked with emotion.
“I
want to do something not only for me, but I’m doing it for Australia and for my
people and for our culture … I’m doing it for black and white to know better
that we have culture and history still existent, and I’ll keep trying.”
Gulpilil
danced for Queen Elizabeth at the opening of the Sydney Opera House in 1973 and
was appointed a member of the Order of Australia in 1987.
He
also starred on stage in the autobiographical Gulpilil and received the Red
Ochre Award for outstanding contribution to the recognition of Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islanders arts. A charcoal portrait of him by Craig Ruddy won the
nation’s 2004 Archibald Prize.
In
July 2019, Gulpilil received the National Aborigines and Islanders Day
Observance Committee lifetime achievement award and in a prerecorded message
announced he was battling lung cancer.
“To
everyone, thank you for watching me … never forget me while I am here,” he
said. “I will never forget you. I will still remember you even though it won’t
go on forever. I will still remember.”
GULPILIL,
David (David
Gulparil Gulipilil)
Born:
7/1/1953,
Maningrida, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia
Died:
11/29/2021. Murray Bridge, South Australia, Australia
David
Gulpilil’s westerns – actor, musician:
Luke’s
Kingdom – 1976 (Aborigine boy)
Mad
Dg Morgan – 1976 (Billy) [musician]
Snowy
River: The McGregor Story (TV) – 1995 (Manulpuy)
The
Tracker – 2002 (tracker)
The
Proposition – 2005 (Jack)
Australia
– 2008 (King David)
