Monday, December 26, 2005

Merry Christmas - Article from William - Sydney Morning Herald

I'll bet Mr Arsey didn't know how to fix a gate

By William McInnes

December 23, 2005

IT was because the hammer fell on my head. That was why I unleashed the maelstrom of bonnets and lace and low brows and bad accents. The bloody hammer.

I was visiting my mother and I foolishly asked if there was anything she'd like done. I love that expression. Would you "like anything done"?

"Well," she said almost licking her lips. "You could take me to see the new Pride and Prejudice or you might like to fix the gate."

And she smiled. I shuddered. There was no way I was going to see Pride and Prejudice, whether it was new or not.

"Right then, the gate it is."

The problem was it wouldn't shut properly. My mother handily supplied some tools. A 30-year-old sander that gave you an electric shock when you turned it on, a hammer that I think once belonged to Thor the Thunder God, and some oily bits and pieces in a jam jar.

I sanded and swore and banged and had serious words with the sander and stood on the dog. Then the hammer fell on my head. I must have had concussion because I gave up on the gate after nearly shaving my arm to the bone with the sander and told Mum we were going to the movies.

Why you need a new Pride and Prejudice is open to debate, but I guess people keep on making Commodores, so why can't they keep on making Pride and Prejudices?

"Maybe they should make a car and call it Pride and Prejudice," I said.

"Are you trying to be funny?" my mother said. "Because if you are, I don't want to sit with you."
I promised I'd behave. And so we sat and watched the new Pride and Prejudice. And we sat and sat. It was OK as far as Pride and Prejudices go, I guess. Keira Knightley did some odd things with her jaw at times, but, you know, whatever gets you through. The old man behind us, who used to make the most beautiful pies in his bakery, said she "looked like a bloody piranha, the way she goes on with her gob". But my mum couldn't care less about Keira, or Lizzy as she was called in the new Pride and Prejudice. She was interested in Mr Darcy.

Mr Darcy. I rubbed my head. What did I think, she asked, about Mr Darcy?

What is it about Mr Darcy and women?

I said he was all right. "Although I think he had a wig."

"Mr Darcy wasn't bald," she said.

"Yes," I said, "but I think that fella's hair was a bit thin. But he was pretty good."

My mother was silent for a while. "Yes," she said, "I liked him, I liked that Mr Darcy."


"Didn't there used to be a trotter called Mr Darcy?" I asked.

"No," Mum corrected, "a greyhound that belonged to Eddie Lippiatt."

Right. I felt light-headed; the hammer had done its work.

"Let's get some beer and prawns and watch some other Mr Darcys and compare," Mum suggested

"I'd rather fix the gate," I said.

"Well, it's going to rain," Mum said. "So make yourself comfortable."

The beer and prawns almost made the next two days bearable. Almost. First we watched Laurence Olivier and his Brylcream at work. "He was short but very funny," was Mum's verdict.

Next was some old hazy video job from the BBC in the '70s with a thin-lipped fellow with permed hair. "Walks like he's done his knees," she said.

"He's all right," I said. "He's just a bloke who's trying to earn a living."

"And you'd know?"

I sat through Lizzy Bennetts and Mr Bingleys and balls and weddings and bonnets, more balls and more Bingleys.

The beer almost got me through Colin Firth's turn. Nearly, but not quite.

We got to the bit where Col jumped in the water. "Is that it?" I asked.

"Well what more do you want," said my mother as she scratched the dog's stomach. "He's bit podgy and well fed but he fills out those breeches nicely."

"Well, good on chubby Col," I said as I sipped a beer.

"Well, you can talk," Mum said as she squashed a flea between her fingers. True. I had played Mr Darcy on stage once and managed to behave myself in Melbourne. But when I got to Sydney, I gave up the ghost somewhat. A few hotdogs and dim sims here and there and Mr Darcy turned into Mr Arsey.

Mum helpfully reminded me of this fact. "When you wore those boots and that coat you were the size of a block of housing commission flats."

We laughed; we were, I think, both delirious.

"Right," I said and went back to the gate. I dubbed the sander Mr Bingley because he became my best friend. And the bloody thing never worked. Somehow I managed to fix the gate. In between rainstorms it turned out OK.

I proudly displayed my handiwork to Mum. She was impressed. "Well done," she said as she gave me a pat. "I like happy endings."

"Yes, I know," I said.

"Just like Pride and Prejudice," she laughed.

I groaned and went for another beer.

Monday, December 05, 2005

Sunday Telegraph - November 20, 2005

Stars relive a Christmas past
EDITION: 1
SECTION: Features
COLUMN: Social

Sunrise host Melissa Doyle hasn't fallen for the old fashioned charms of a dapper William McInnes. But the duo have teamed up together for a special Christmas shoot for The Australian Women's Weekly. In the magazine's December issue, McInnes who is currently filming a war-time movie Kokoda for the ABC, dressed in uniform once more to play the part of a returning soldier in a recreation of a famous 1940s wartime cover of the Weekly.And while dressed in a vintage 40s dress and hat to welcome her "husband" home, Melissa joked: "Anytime you want me to spend a few hours in the arms of a handsome man just let me know". The shot is part of a series the magazine has shot depicting Christmases past from colonial days to the 1970s.

Herald Sun - November 28, 2005

Trip win from helping a mate
BYLINE: Chloe Adams
EDITION: 1
SECTION: NEWS

A FRIENDSHIP with Australian actor William McInnes has indirectly landed two Melburnians the trip of a lifetime to the Golden Globe Awards.

Herald Sun readers Domenica and Frank Forti were announced as the winners of the Herald Sun Readers Choice Award at the L'Oreal Paris AFI Awards on Saturday night. The Footscray West couple registered their vote for the competition in the hope of helping their mate, William McInnes, to a win. But while McInnes lost to Cate Blanchett, the Fortis had better luck. Mrs Forti said they had not expected to win. "We weren't even thinking about a trip to LA. It was just enough to come tonight (to the AFIs),'' she said. Mr Forti, a real estate agent, met William McInnes 15 years ago when he sold a house for him. They remained good friends. The couple have won airfares, accommodation in Beverly Hills and two tickets to the Golden Globes in LA on January 16.

Adelaide Advertiser - November 19, 2005

MEET THE AUTHOR: WILLIAM McINNES
A bloke and his shed
BYLINE: SAMELA HARRISE
DITION: 1
SECTION: Magazine

Much to his surprise, actor William McInnes is well into writing his second book. SAMELA HARRIS talks to him about cricket and other hobbies, while he reveals the influence of his father.

MOST men do handy, blokey things in their sheds. Not William McInnes. He goes into his shed to write. "Aren't sheds there to produce things?'' he laughs. "Some men produce useful bits of household furniture and man-type things. I produce rambling books.

''To general acclaim, as it turns out. Suddenly, and to his mild surprise, the actor is being feted at writers' festivals. McInnes does not yet recognise himself in the skin of a writer, but he is busy on his second book, nonetheless. Writing, he says, is a form of release, a diversion after a day on the movie set.

McInnes's first book, A Man's Got to Have a Hobby - Long Summers with My Dad, The Advertiser Big Book Club's November selection, has been reaping good reviews and selling like hot cakes. He accepts its acclaim with modest amusement. He's that sort of a man - the kind of true-blue Aussie people like to describe as having "no tickets on himself''.

"I was never a great lover of scholarly work,'' he says. "I always quite liked writing. I like telling stories. But, did you know what hard work writing is? "It's hard. So hard."

'The star of TV series Blue Heelers, Sea Change, Shark Net and My Brother Jack found himself committed to the lonely art of writing after a guest feature article attracted the attention of publisher Hachette Livre. "We sat down and had a chat and decided to do this book,'' he says. "Now I'm writing another one, about cricket, an erotic thriller set against international cricket.''

He waits for a shock response - and gets one. "It's really about park cricket and the people who play it, drawn on my experiences a lot and some of it made up,'' he amends. "It's not really about erotic cricket - but that does sound exciting. It's only that when I tell people I'm writing a book about cricket, they just stare at me. It's a shame. The Americans have that great tradition of writing about sport, baseball especially. But when we write about cricket with any seriousness, it always seems to end up seeming rather affected.

''A Man's Got to Have a Hobby, a well-written account of the bliss and blundering of boyhood in suburban Queensland in the 1950s and '60s, is peppered with tales in which he is the brunt of his own jokes. After all, he was the boy who published his own death notice in the local paper as a prank. Pity his poor parents. But the book principally is a humorous paeon in praise of his extraordinary father, a man McInnes says was always larger than life, a man who had been through war and seen things a man never should see, but who emerged with a powerfully optimistic spirit. It was he who would reply to most every query on his lifestyle, especially his regularly doomed challenges as a Labor candidate in a safe conservative seat: "Well, a man's got to have a hobby.''

"I think people like the book because I don't take the micky out of anyone,'' McInnes says. "It's a book written by a bloke who likes laughing. It's not nasty. I'm the biggest twerp in there.''

McInnes was the youngest of five children and the last thing his father wanted for him was a career in acting. Hence, when McInnes enrolled at acting school, he told his father he was studying law. "I think Dad was worried that acting was not much of a career for making a living,'' he says. McInnes sympathises with his father's reservations. "I was fortunate to get a good run,'' he says.

A very good run, as it happens. McInnes has been in high demand both on stage and screen. He has just been working in the title role of an ABC telemovie called Stepfather of the Bride, and the film Looking Both Ways, made with his director wife Sarah Watt, has been swamped with AFI award nominations, including one for McInnes as best actor. But an actor's life also contains "resting'' time.

For McInnes, it has become writing time and, when at home in Melbourne with Sarah and his children, Clement, 12, and Stella, 7, fathering time. He does not see in himself much paternal resemblance to his father. "He was a man of his time and I am a man of mine,'' he says. "His time was very violent. Mine hasn't been. He saw some terrible things and he lived in a time which was more bound by ideas of race prejudice, religion and place. Today, it is a lot more amorphous and less ruled by obvious patterns, of service, family first and loyalty to country.

Things have changed a lot. McInnes says he is not much of a reader. "I like skimming, dipping into books, but I take a while to read a book,'' he says. That said, he starts mentioning recent reads - "Bryce Courtenay's book about his mum and his dad. I like Philosophy Made Simple. I like poetry actually. Tom Hughes poems and David Porter. So, well, no, I guess I don't mind reading.

He warms to the subject. "And I love cricket biographies. I love Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, American realists like John Steinbeck, Faulkner, not that he was a realist really. I like Hemingway. And I tell you what, I read Ian Townsend's book. Now that was fantastic. I really liked that book. Really graceful writing. Really interesting, too. A cracker.

And thus does one find a man with not one but several hobbies - perhaps more like his father than he thinks.

William McInnes will be in Adelaide and regional centres from Wednesday, November 23, to Monday, November 28.He will make appearances at Tanunda (phone 8562 1107), Port Lincoln (8688 3622), Cummins (8676 2476), Victor Harbor (8551 0730), The Grainger Studio, Adelaide (8348 2311), Sussex Hotel, Walkerville (8344 7714), Port Noarlunga Arts Centre (8384 0036 or 8384 0655), and Marion Cultural Centre (8375 6855).

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Article - Port Lincoln Times - December 1, 2005

Click Here for article. Includes photograph.