Obituary: Googie Withers

Actress Googie Withers has died in Sydney at the age of 94.

Born in India to a British father and Dutch mother, she was christened Georgette Lizette but as a child didn’t like the name so she adopted the nickname Googie which became her name for life.

She went on to become a star of stage and screen in Britain and it was working on The Loves of Joanna Godden that she met her future husband, Australian actor John McCallum.

They were married in 1948 and moved to Australia in 1959 when McCallum was offered the job of joint managing director of the JC Williamson theatre company.

But while Withers is best known for her work in British films and television, she has a unique place in Australia’s television history.

She was the first presenter for what are now known as the TV Week Logie Awards.  But the awards, then known just as the TV Week Awards and presented only to Melbourne-based stars and programs, were not presented in the lavish ceremonies that are known today.

Television in Australia was little over two years old and it was early in 1959 when Withers was on the set of GTV9’s In Melbourne Tonight to hand out the awards for “Stars Of The Year” – the precursor to the Gold Logie – to Graham Kennedy and Panda Lisner and to award In Melbourne Tonight for Best Live Show.

“It was very interesting coming over to Australia from England, where we had had television for many years,” she later told TV Week.  “We were awfully interested in Graham Kennedy because he was so young then.”

Her career continued in film, stage and television between the United Kingdom, the US and Australia, including the early 1970s Australian TV series Boney and the mid-1970s British prison drama Within These Walls, until her last credited screen role in the 1996 film Shine.

She was the first non-Australian to be awarded an Officer of the Order of Australia Award in 1980.

Both Withers and McCallum, prior to celebrating 60 years of marriage, were interviewed on ABC’s Talking Heads in 2007. 

Googie Withers is survived by three children and six grandchildren.  John McCallum died in 2010.

Source: ABC, ABC, IMDB, 21 Years Of Logies (TV Week, 1979).

Hazel Phillips has got Talent

It was a brief stroll down memory lane on tonight’s edition of Seven’s Australia’s Got Talent when actress, performer and former TV host Hazel Phillips entered the stage.

Phillips dates back to the earliest days of television, appearing in a TV talent quest before TV officially launched in Australia.  She concedes she didn’t win the contest but the ones that did have not been heard of since!

She went on to appear in early variety programs including the Revue variety series and the original Beauty And The Beast, both from Sydney’s ATN7.

But it was as the host of the 0-10 Network’s daytime variety show Girl Talk that Phillips scored the TV Week Gold Logie for Most Popular Female Personality on Australian Television in 1967.  In the same year she also won the Logie for Most Popular Female Personality in New South Wales.

Phillips also appeared in The Mavis Bramston Show and The Barry Crocker Show and dramas including Boney, Number 96, Ryan, Chopper Squad, Until Tomorrow, GP, Brides Of Christ and A Country Practice.

In 1989, Phillips appeared alongside fellow female Gold Logie winners Lorrae Desmond, Pat McDonald, Denise Drysdale, Jeanne Little and Rowena Wallace in the opening number of the TV Week Logie Awards:

Prior to the Australia's Got Talent appearance, Today Tonight screened a preview of Phillips' audition:

Her entrance onto the Australia’s Got Talent stage was met with warm affection and after her performance received a standing ovation.  And for Phillips, it was as if her career had gone full circle – “I thought well as I started with a contest maybe I can go out with one!,” she quipped.

And good news is she passed her audition and now progresses to the next stage in the competition.

Australia’s Got Talent. Tuesday and Wednesday, 7.30pm.  Seven/Prime7

Source: IMDB, Australia’s Got Talent 
YouTube: scottphillips55, oztvheritage

Eric Fullilove

Film and television producer and director Eric Fullilove, one of the names behind legendary series Skippy The Bush Kangaroo and a pioneer producer for SBS, has died at the age of 85.

An established film producer with many years’ experience, English-born Fullilove first came to Australia with the Royal Navy in 1952 to film the detonation of the first British atomic bomb, in the Montebello Islands off the West Australian coast. 

By the mid-1960s, Fullilove emigrated to Australia as a “Ten Pound Pom” and became involved in Australia’s fledgling film and television industry – working on programs including Boney, Barrier Reef, Catch Kandy and Song For Melbourne.

He was a director for TV series Skippy The Bush Kangaroo – and met his future wife, Paddy Barker, on the set.

Fullilove (pictured, above, in 1980) was a producer and director of various programs for multicultural Channel 0/28 (now SBS) in its early days – including telemovie The Three Sea Wolves (pictured), which aired on the channel’s opening night in 1980, current affairs programs SCOOP and Forum and dramas City West and The Liberation of Skopje.

Eric Fullilove is survived by Paddy, his children Julie, Michael and Christian and their partners, and seven grandchildren.

Source: TV Week, 18 October 1980; Sydney Morning Herald

John McCallum

Actor and producer John McCallum, co-creator of the iconic TV series Skippy The Bush Kangaroo, has died in a Sydney nursing home at age 91.

Born in Brisbane in 1918, McCallum was trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before a career that included stage, film and television in both the United Kingdom and Australia.  In the mid-1940s, McCallum met actress Googie Withers and the pair were later married and would work together on numerous occasions during their married life.

In 1958, after a decade in the UK, McCallum returned to Australia to run theatre company JC Williamsons.

By the mid-1960s, McCallum had produced the popular Australian film, They’re A Weird Mob, based on the book about an Italian immigrant settling into life in Australia. 

The success of the film led to McCallum and producer Lee Robinson to devise an Australian-based TV series that would have wide international appeal.  Their co-creation would become Australia’s first global television hit, Skippy The Bush Kangaroo.  (Although McCallum later credited Robinson for being the brains behind the concept, devising the show’s premise around a boy and his pet kangaroo and for naming the pet Skippy)  The children’s series put an Australian twist on a well-travelled genre of overseas shows to feature multi-talented animal characters, such as Flipper, Lassie and The Littlest Hobo, and was sold to over 120 countries including syndication throughout the United States.

Forty years after production on Skippy ended, the series is still shown on a semi-regular, late-night basis on the Nine Network.

Apart from Skippy, McCallum also produced TV series Barrier Reef, Boney, Shannon’s Mob and Bailey’s Bird.

John McCallum is survived by wife Googie and children Joanna, Nicholas and Amanda.

Source: news.com.au, TV Eye, Talking Heads, ABC News, IMDB