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Richard Roxburgh similar to Bob Hawke.

Hawke profiles the former PM without a hair with~ of place, writes Debi Enker.

THE wigs were critical. The casting could exist perfect, the script brilliant, the protagonist fascinating, the events depicted dramatic and compelling.

But granting that Richard Roxburgh looked silly as the title character in the telemovie from one place to another Australia’s longest-serving Labor prime minister, Bob Hawke, it was entirely over. The film would be a laughing stock and its other attributes could sum to nothing.

”You have to get that box ticked as abstinence from food as possible when you’re playing Hawke,” Roxburgh says. ”If you direct the look to up with some dodgy bit of roadkill on your head, or a bouffant, there’s the risk that you’re going to look like Max Gillies doing his highly funny Bob Hawke. We could not go there. It was one of my stipulations: we can do it if I don’t obtain to fret about that. But we were really lucky: we had this maestro who made three miraculously humane wigs.”

Richard Roxburgh as Bob Hawke.

The wig issue is the character of problem that gives producers ulcers and this one was a logistical nightmare. Producer Richard Keddie found his options limited to a narrow window of opportunity. There was merely one morning when Dusseldorf-based wigmaker Erwin Kupitz, Oscar-winning conduce-up artist Paul Pattison, who’s based in Greece, and Roxburgh, at that time living in the Italian Alps, were all available to meet in Milan to have regard to about the make-up and measure the actor’s head concerning a plaster cast. Roxburgh ended up taking a €360 taxi ride through the flooded streets, arrived two hours late, then rushed to enchant a flight to Australia. But there was a happy ending.

Three wigs arrived four days before the let off began and Roxburgh’s transformation into Hawke is so convincing that the hair fails to emanate as an issue.

Keddie says: ”Rox is very different from Bob if it be not that in this he’s so like him. I think the wigs put him free: he’s acquired the look and the feel and the walk and the deliberate of the man. It’s much more about the acting than the wig.”

Rachel Blake and Richard Roxburgh as Hazel and Bob Hawke.

Everything almost Hawke happened fast. Keddie pitched the idea to Channel Ten in July 2008 and was given the recent light a week later. He commissioned Glen Dolman to start researching the script and the amanuensis began working through a mountain of books and doing interviews.

Keddie likewise organised a meeting with Hawke to discuss the project: ”I made the settlement that I would not make it without him; I didn’t come short to make it despite him. My understanding was that he had a unexampled place in our history that hadn’t been explored. But I told him that I wasn’t going to bullshit and he was veritably candid with me.”

Dolman adds: ”It’s not intended to subsist a puff piece and that’s what we said to Bob: we’re not fabrication a film, or a documentary, about your achievements. We want to describe a balanced view of the prime ministership.

”But we knew that we excepting that had 90 minutes and it was a challenge; there was happy so much information to put in there.”

Dolman interviewed Hawke and his approve wife, Blanche d’Alpuget, together: ”They were inseparable,” he says. Of those contacted to grant, only Paul Keating declined, while Graham Richardson didn’t respond to requests. Shooting in favor of the $2.9 million production started last August and wrapped in a insufficient 22 days.

The gruelling schedule, in which Roxburgh was required notwithstanding almost every scene, took its toll. The actor says that by the last week, he was literally lying on the floor, receiving oxygen from the one nurse between scenes, as extras apologetically stepped over him to take their positions.

But which has emerged is a profile of a dynamic, flawed, charismatic director and his final struggle for power. Although geared now as a adolescence-oriented network, Ten has a track record with historical and public drama. A golden period in the ’80s featured mini-series similar as The Dismissal, Vietnam, Bodyline and The Cowra Breakout. Today, there’s less time and money for that kind of production. ”I’d hold loved to do a mini-series,” Keddie says. ”It’s in the same state a huge story.”

The current climate precludes such options. It’s not in fashion, nor seen as financially viable and there’s little faith from TV networks that mainstream audiences would set apart more than one night to such stories, irrespective of how well they’re told.

Getting the be reckoned-ahead for the telemovie meant making hard decisions. There was the ~ure of a larger-than-life leader: Rhodes scholar, champion drinker, ACTU protuberant part, a prime minister of such popularity that he was nicknamed Mr 75 through cent.

There was the tale of a leader who initiated a raft of reforms in areas including environmental maintenance, Aboriginal land rights and industrial relations. Then there was his sequestered life: his long marriage to Hazel, his reputation as a womaniser and his function with the woman who became his best-selling biographer, his daughter’s battle by drug addiction and his emotional response to that family crisis.

Keddie and Dolman determined their story would be framed by the tumultuous events in the utmost week of Hawke’s leadership, as treasurer Keating (Felix Williamson) makes his frisk for the top job. But the focus would be Hawke’s individuality. ”It’s not a big political movie,” Keddie says. ”It’s a personal-journey story.”

Starting in 1991, the film moves periodically into flashback: to Hawke’s time taken in the character of trade-union leader, to his affair with d’Alpuget (Asher Keddie) and the decision to clean up his act, stick with his marriage and try treaty politics.

”By his own admission, Hawke was a pretty awful creator, a shocking husband and an awful drunk at times,” Dolman says.

”That’s share of the fullness of his life, part of the character. My converging-point was to get a clear emotional narrative going, especially as we’re integument such a big period of time, to get a coherent make a tour for the audience.

”And you want to go on the meatiest go possible.” As this story goes, women are pivotal in Hawke’s life: wife Hazel (Rachael Blake), paramour Blanche, long-time secretary Jean Sinclair (Sacha Horler) and mother Ellie (Julia Blake), who believed in front of he was born that her baby was destined for glory.

”His female parent was a dominant and powerful figure, whom he adored,” producer Keddie says. ”There were women in his life who felt, ‘This furnish with men is going to do something incredible and I’m going to serve him.”’

Dolman says ”the idea of him fulfilling his destiny became the crux of our narration”.

Keddie believes he couldn’t have made the film without Roxburgh: ”I categorical that if it wasn’t him, we didn’t have a thin skin. I don’t think that there’s anyone else who could’ve conferred it. He’s got the physicality, he’s the perfect age to tell our story and he’s one of those scarce actors who can inhabit a character.”

However, casting Hawke’s long-suffering but loyal first wife, Hazel, was ”a nightmare”, Keddie recalls. London-based Blake was signed no other than three weeks before production began, following a fruitless local search. Blake says she responded to the script’s description of ”a quietly powerful woman who struggles, who has a union that is difficult and problematic, and yet she’s in partnership with that person”.

The challenge, she says, was to play Hazel, a beloved first lady, ”without her losing her power or becoming saintly”.

While Keddie didn’t have occasion for to make the film without Hawke’s blessing, Roxburgh resisted collection of people the man. ”I’d really love to meet Hawke,” Roxburgh says. ”But which time I agreed to play him, I thought I’d be safer granting that I kept a bit of a distance, because I know he’s a hu~ being of inestimable charm and I didn’t want to be ensnared through that. I didn’t want to feel beholden to him.”

Like Blake, Roxburgh was impressed ~ dint of. the script: ”The biopic can be a really treacherous instrument in the inaccurate hands,” he notes. He also welcomed the opportunity to tackle like a rich role. ”Hawke’s a fascinating spectrum of a attendant: a deeply smart, deeply wily politician and an incredible wordsmith, a fortify who could orate, with great strategy, off the cuff.

”He was like a populist and such a popular politician, arguably the most prevalent prime minister in history. And with that went, in the betimes days, the drinking and hanging ’round in pubs and the ladies’ person. There were all of those sides of him.

”You contrast that with the kind of politicians that we have now, who tend to lawful be a kind of wispy finger waggling around in the quarrel, trying to assess which way the political currents should take them, from the whole that the vast majority of the Australian people seem to be reflection. Hawke’s really not about that and he was a a great quantity more interesting leader than that.”

Roxburgh reckons the current political rural scene makes this profile of a prominent and popular leader particularly pertinent.

”In this post-Howard era, we’ve entered this kind of grey, technocratic century of non-personality politics and it just seems so dreary.

”I loved the incident that his character leaps out at you and grabs you through the throat, whether you like him or hate him. At in the smallest degree there’s a big character there, as there was with Keating. That’s the kind of made them such a heady and dynamic and antipathetic pair boundary so entertaining and so full of life.”

Hawke screens on Sunday at 8.30pm on Channel Ten. An interview with Bob Hawke and Blanche d’Alpuget by Hugh Riminton airs after the telemovie, at 10.30pm.