The last time I spoke to Colin Friels, he swore blind he was giving up the business of stage acting. It was, he said – and this was back in 2013 – “dog’s work”.
He was 61 at the time and rehearsing a play called Moving Parts at NIDA. A few months before, he’d won a Helpmann award for playing Willy Loman in Belvoir’s Death of a Salesman. I interviewed him just before that, too – and that, he told me, would definitely be his last time on stage.
I’m braced for the same answer to the same question a dozen years later, and Friels doesn’t disappoint. Belvoir’s The True History of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters, in which he plays the title role, will 100% be his last time on stage. Probably.
“My problem is I can’t say no,” he chuckles as we set out from Belvoir’s rehearsal room on a walk around Sydney’s Surry Hills, an intermittent stomping ground for Friels since his NIDA student days in the mid-1970s.
“Employment comes to 73-year-olds quite rarely,” he says. “So when someone offers me a job and I think, ‘Oh, yeah’ – you do it.”
“I mean, I know it’ll end. I’ve always thought of myself as just a local actor who got a few jobs from time to time. I wouldn’t call it a career. I’ve always thought the job I’m doing could be my last. Just like this walk I’m doing could well be my last.”
I’m thinking let’s make this a short walk. I don’t want to be the journalist who was interviewing one of Australia’s beloved veteran actors on his final stroll.
It’s late in the day and we’re walking along Belvoir Street, a buzzing inner-city street on a gently sloping hill. Friels is wiry, bristling with nervous energy, hyper-alert to everything around him. He’s excellent company but it’s a challenge to connect beyond his self-deprecating humour, Shakespeare recitations and long tales of his beloved stock horses.
“I need to put my hand on a horse’s wither just to calm me down,” he whispers as if someone might hear. “Because I’m finding this rehearsal period quite traumatic. King Lear … I’m not up to it yet. I’m trying too hard. I think I’m flying a bit close to the sun. But it’s a beautiful play, I love the play.”
We walk past a large housing commission estate and low-rise brick apartment buildings with balconies packed with pot plants, bicycles and laundry drying.
Surry Hills has changed a lot – and not much, Friels says. He lived in rented digs here when he was a student and later when he was acting in his first Sydney Opera House show, a 1979 production of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
“Should we go this way?” he says.
We veer past Ward Park toward Devonshire Street, a light rail thoroughfare. “When I was here doing Death of a Salesman, they hadn’t started laying the tracks,” he muses. We pause. “Just here I remember because I had an incredible attack of pancreatitis.”
That was in 2012. Friels was starring in director Simon Stone’s staging of Arthur Miller’s tragedy, one that hit the headlines first when Miller’s estate insisted Stone reverse his cuts to the text (he lopped off the epitaph); and second when Friels collapsed on stage during the play’s second act.
“It started to hit me as I was walking along here going back to the theatre,” Friels recalls. “But I pushed on, I got through about three-quarters of the show … and that was it. I collapsed. I went out like a light. All I remember is waking up, vomit all over me, bile and stuff.”
That and “a medic with beautiful auburn hair”, Friels smiles. “I said to him, ‘What do you want, mate?’ And he said, ‘Come on, I’ll to take you to hospital.’ I said, ‘Alright, let’s walk through the park. I’ll be right. I can walk’ … I didn’t know where I was, really. But that medic, he looked like one of those angels out of Wings of Desire. I remember thinking, wow, Belvoir is amazing … It’s got ambulances standing by 24 hours a day.”
Now, health-wise, Friels is doing fine. “Yeah, no complaints. You get a bit banged up and stuff – knees, shoulders, tendons, but they nail you back together again.”
He suggests we sit down on a low brick fence for a while. We enjoy the pink hibiscus, late flowering star jasmine and the yellow flame trees blowing in the breeze. A storm is brewing.
As well as working with old colleague Peter Carroll, Friels is performing in King Lear alongside his daughter Charlotte, making her Belvoir debut as Goneril, Lear’s eldest daughter and one of the play’s principal villains. “It’s a bit mind-bending that I have to curse my own daughter on stage, but she doesn’t mind a bit,” he says.
Rehearsals have given him pause to think about his own fatherhood. He has two children, Jack and Charlotte, with fellow actor Judy Davis.
There are no perfect dads, he says. “I try to treat my kids with respect, and I’ve tried to lead by example. I didn’t push them in any ambitious way. I didn’t set rules to live by … I probably never had the wherewithal to do that.”
His own parents were “peasants”, he says. “I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but they were peasants in that, they worked hard but earned nothing. I was a migrant in the middle 60s with these two Glaswegian parents, and we got on well. I respected the hell out of them, so I was never going to do them any harm, and I’d try and look after myself. So that’s how I go as a father too.”
And what is the secret to his strong marriage? “Friendship,” he says without hesitation. “And respect. You get through the good times and the bad times. You stick. We’ve been married over 40 years, Judy and I, and I’m real glad about that.”
I ask what he does to conserve his energy. “I don’t. That’s my problem, it’s go hard or go home. I don’t quite know how to relax. My mind is too busy.”
It’s clear he has no plans to retire. Why should he? “I’ve never done yoga and I’ve never studied under a swami or anything like that, but I do understand the concept of pulling back from things. You know, come on, we all have sorrows. We all have this. But we’re only here for a very brief time, so you may as well enjoy the living daylights out of it.”
Asked what he values most, he says “a reverence for life”.
Looking down the street to the theatre where we started, he says: “I have deference for the warm breeze coming up the hill, the peppermint gum leaves above me and the beautiful blue up in the sky … and the knowledge that some people around you are simply, precious. I have gratitude, more than most.”
