Garry McDonald
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Garry McDonald (October 30, 1948) is an Australian stage and screen actor.
McDonald was born in Glen Innes, New South Wales, Australia and was educated at Cranbrook School and NIDA.
McDonald first came to wide public attention playing the supporting character "Kid Eager" in the second series of the groundbreaking Australian television comedy series The Aunty Jack Show in 1973. It was while working on Aunty Jack that McDonald first performed the character for which he would become best-known, the gauche and inept local regional TV personality, Norman Gunston. Gunston's first appearance was in a series of brief sketches (written by Wendy Skelcher) which saw him reporting uncomfortably on a "sex-scandal drought" in his home town, the NSW regional city of Wollongong; a drought he eventually breaks by appearing nude on camera.
After Aunty Jack, McDonald went on to work with the same team in the comedy miniseries Wollongong The Brave (1973) and Flash Nick from Jindivik (1974). The Gunston character was revived for one episode of Wollongong The Brave, a parodic show business biography entitled "Norman Gunston: The Golden Weeks". Around the time of his major breakthrough on Australian TV in 1975, McDonald also made his first major film appearance, playing a minor role in the landmark Peter Weir film Picnic at Hanging Rock.
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[edit] Norman Gunston Show
In 1975, McDonald revived the Gunston character for TV with the help of a writing team that included Morris Gleitzman (now a successful children's author) and veteran TV comedy writer Bill Harding, who had written for the pioneering Australian TV satire The Mavis Bramston Show.
The new series, The Norman Gunston Show was a parody of the Tonight Show format, and McDonald himself has stated that it was originally based on a mediocre late-night chat show hosted by expatriate American entertainer Tommy Leonetti. The series saw Gunston now the unlikely host of his own national TV variety show. After a slow start, the series rapidly gained a sizable audience by word of mouth and by 1976 it was a major hit, with McDonald winning the coveted Gold Logie Award that year, becoming the only winner in Logies history to win the award in the name of the character he played.
The series, which satirised many aspects of Australian culture and show business, was a mixture of live and pre-recorded interviews, awkward musical segments -- excruciatingly sung by Gunston himself in the broadest 'strine' accent -- and continuing comedy sketches such as "Norman's Dreamtime" (in which Norman read a stories to a group of children, such as "Why Underpants Ride Up") and the fondly-remembered soap-opera TV parody "Checkout Chicks", which featured actress Anne-Louise Lambert (who starred as Miranda in Picnic at Hanging Rock).
Using Gunston's gormless personality as a cover to avoid down the defences of his 'victims', McDonald pioneered the satirically provocative "ambush interview" technique, which was used to great effect in legendary interviews with Paul McCartney, Muhammad Ali, Keith Moon and actress Sally Struthers.
As Norman Gunston, McDonald also had a surprisingly successful recording career, releasing a string of satirical novelty pop records that anticipated the pop parodies of Weird Al Yankovic. Norman's Top 40 chart hits included his interpretation of the Tom Jones classic "Delilah", the punk rock send-up "I Might Be A Punk But I Love You, Baby" and "We're All Marching In The KISS Army", a parody of the KISS single "I Was Made For Loving You".
Edited versions of the Norman Gunston shows were screened in the UK in the late 1970s and it is arguable that McDonald's pioneering work was a direct influence on the later British comedy characters Dennis Pennis, Alan Partridge and Ali G. In the late 1990s, American actor Martin Short also created a distinctly Gunston-esque talk-show host, Jiminy Glick and one of the sketches in that show, "La-la-wood Tales", is a direct copy of the "Norman's Dreamtime" sketch, featuring Glick reading a satirical fable about Hollywood to a group of children.
[edit] Mother and Son
Although he suffered inevitably from typecasting as Gunston, McDonald was able to create another memorable character in the successful ABC television series Mother and Son written by Geoffrey Atherden. It was loosely based on the cult Carl Reiner comedy feature Where's Poppa?. The series was very successful in Australia, was repeated many times and has become one of the best-loved Australian TV comedies of its time. It starred veteran actress Ruth Cracknell as Maggie Beare, a senile dotty pensioner. McDonald played her long-suffering younger son Arthur Beare whose life is dominated by his obligation to care for her.
[edit] Other Information
McDonald has also appeared on stage at Sydney's Her Majesty's Theatre and at Nimrod Theatres in many dramatic and musical productions.
Garry was also the host of a sales video series for the now renamed Telecom Australia, promoting the ease-of-use and corporate usefulness of the Telememo communication network.
In later years, McDonald fought a public battle with depression which reached crisis point after an abortive attempt to revive the Gunston character for a commercial TV series in 1993. He is a member of the Board of beyondblue, an Australian national depression initiative.
In 1999, a portrait of Garry McDonald by artist Deny Christian won the Packing Room award at the Archibald Prize. In 2006, a portrait of McDonald called 'All the world's a stage' by Paul Jackson won the Peoples Choice award at the Archibald Prize.
In 2005 McDonald filmed a Tele Series called Step Father of The Bride for ABC Australian Television.
In 2006 Gary made an appearance on Channel 9's mystery show "Two Twisted".
