Ray Barrett, 1927-2009

(b. Brisbane 2nd May, 1927 – 8th September, 2009)

Ray Barrett on australianscreen

A Shifting Dreaming (1982)
Ray Barrett in A Shifting Dreaming (1982)
Image courtesy of Imago Holdings.

Ray Barrett once recalled speeding up the pace of a Sunday radio recording session so that he could get to the pub before it closed.  Slowing down the process were two female actors struggling over the accent of a dowager duchess.  After a succession of trial and error, Barrett quickly interrupted: “’Sod this, I’ll play it,” and did an impersonation of Edith Evans, and as he remembered it, “We were out before the two o’clock close”.

Among his talents, his charisma and his many achievements, plaudits and acknowledgements, Ray Barrett was a man who always managed to stay employed.  His service to the Australian radio, theatre, film and television spanned an astonishing 70 years, and he performed consistently into the last years of his life. 

Barrett’s career captured the transition from wireless to television, theatre to big screen and then, during a late 1980s downturn in Australian cinema, back to television again.  He was widely acclaimed across his fields, winning national and international awards for theatre, film and television.  Yet it was his humble beginnings in radio that determined his life as an actor.

Barrett began in radio at the ABC in 1939, at the tender age of 12.  By 1942 he was hosting his own breakfast show on local radio before moving to commercial stations.  In 1950 he became the first actor to be contracted to the ABC.  Barrett’s busy schedule as the star of radio serials provided critical diversity and development for his early career, equipping him with a repertoire of accents and voices. 

Such diversity granted him a wealth of success in England, where he worked for 18 years after moving to London at the end of 1958. He had a role in the English studio-shot interior scenes of The Sundowners (1960), and later in English studio features such as Mix Me a Person (1962) and Revenge (1971). Mostly (after performing at first in stage revues and radio) he worked in television, first appearing in the BBC’s 1959 teleplay of The Brother’s Karamazov (the recording of which Barrett spent many fruitless years trying to find).  He was a frequent guest and regular in many British TV dramas of the 1960s, such as Emergency Ward 10 (1957-1967) and Z Cars (1962-1978) and famously provided the voice for John Tracy in the marionette TV series and cult hit Thunderbirds. However it was his BAFTA award-winning role in BBC-TV series The Troubleshooters (which ran from 1965 to 1972)) that would secure his international profile. 

Barrett returned to Australia in 1976, having further developed his acting range, and became a regular figure in the post-1970 resurgence of Australian cinema.  William Halliwell recalls that he had “filled out physically and had developed a rugged on-screen personality, to which he added a cynical wit”.  Such physical characteristics and menacing charm earned him a reputation as one of the tough guys of Australian films, yet his choice of roles remained diverse and challenging, making an impact through their emotional subtlety.  He played a sinister colonial policeman in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and the Prime Minister in writer Cliff Green’s television play Burn the Butterflies (1979).   He was satirically cast as a representation of the ignorance and joviality of the everyday Australian in Don’s Party (1976) and Goodbye Paradise (1982), the latter of which brought his most acclaimed performance and earned him his second of three AFI awards for Best Actor. 

Barrett married twice, first to Miren Cork, with whom he had two children, later to Gaye O’Brien, with whom he settled in his home-state of Queensland, in 1986.   In 1995 he was awarded his third AFI award for Best Actor in Hotel Sorrento, and starred in Dad and Dave: On Our Selection alongside Leo McKern, Geoffrey Rush and Barry Otto. 

His acting career in film and television continued consistently until 2004, including his acclaimed role as the senile father in the Andrew Knight-scripted TV mini-series After the Deluge (2003). In 2005 he received the AFI’s Raymond Longford Life Achievement Award, to which he responded with great sentiment.  In 2006 the NFSA restored Goodbye Paradise as part of the Kodak/Atlab Project, and its status as one of the gems in 1980s Australian cinema – and Barrett’s role as one of Australian cinema’s iconic performances – was reconfirmed with a 2006 NFSA- tribute screening of the film, at Sydney’s Chauvel Cinema. Barrett’s final role was in Baz Luhrmann’s epic Australia (2008), a testament to his longevity as an Australian screen performer.  

Ray Barrett is best represented in the NFSA collection by his television performances in series such as After the Deluge, Waterfront and Something in the Air.  Also accessible, however are some early radio serials including the soundtrack to Peter Scriven's 1956 musical play for marionettes, The Tintookies.