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Class Act: Googie Withers and John McCallum

Brian McFarlane November 30

Googie Withers and John McCallum are arguably one of Australian cinema’s most endearing partnerships. Both have had rich and varied careers, together and apart – Wither for her early work in Britain with Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell, and her pivotal role in Australian theatre during the fifties and beyond, and McCallum for his many incarnations as leading man, director, producer and theatre company CEO. Their relationship, both on and off-screen, has achieved much for performing arts in Australia and in the September issue of Meanjin, Brian McFarlane pays tribute to these actors for their live, vivacity and love. A brief extract of the essay is below. You can read it in full on our editions page. A version of this essay also ran in the Australian on September 12.

Individually impressive as their work was, and on film at least the evidence is still there, the partnership has been extraordinary. There have been other distinguished theatrical/cinematic duos: for a decade Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh dazzled us and bestrode the entertainment world, almost inventing the notion of ‘celebrity’; Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson were married for sixty years and often performed together, in Australia and elsewhere. However, it is arguable that no other combo has exhibited quite the same equality of achievement. Thorndike’s larger-than-life personality on and off stage tended to overshadow Casson’s more muted persona, and the Oliviers’ glamour foundered on personal difficulties and her nagging sense of not being up to the acting standards he set. In the McCallums’ case, Withers has an immense filmography and theatrical role-call, whereas he has the more diversified involvement. She is an actress par excellence; he is a director, producer and theatrical company CEO as well.

It used to be said (perhaps sometimes by disaffected local actors) that Australian commercial theatre wasted money on bringing from overseas acting names who were well past their prime—if they had ever had one. There was some truth in this, I suppose, when one thinks of the likes of Jessie Matthews or Evelyn Laye, who had shared fame (and a husband, though not at the same time) in 1930s England, but were no longer in a commanding position when they reached Australia in the early fifties. But this unkind perception was not to be levelled against the Oliviers in the late forties or the Cassons or Ralph Richardson in the mid fifties, and it was certainly not the case with the Withers-McCallum partnership when they arrived in 1955. In fact, the mid-fifties was a very bullish period for commercial theatre in Melbourne. The Cassons and the Richardsons (with wife Meriel Forbes; Withers remembers their fractious relationship) were doing two plays by Terence Rattigan, Separate Tables and The Sleeping Prince at the Princess, while round the corner in Exhibition Street the McCallum partnership made its Australian debut with Alan Melville’s comedy Simon and Laura and yet another Rattigan, The Deep Blue Sea.

These latter two plays drew very fruitfully on the McCallum–Withers co-starring team. In Simon and Laura they played a pair of married television celebrities whose off-screen sparring is at odds with the ideal they present on the box. It was a smart, witty satire at the expense of television procedures and images, perhaps a case of one medium feeding off (or slinging off at) another, and the supporting cast drew on Australian stalwarts such as Bud Tingwell, Lettie Craydon and Bettina Welsh. McCallum and Withers had made a couple of amusing lightweight comedies for the Rank Organisation in the late forties—Miranda and Traveller’s Joy (1949), both from West End successes—and they brought a snappy stylishness to the eponymous pair in Simon and Laura. The other play they did in that year (they toured the two round Australia and New Zealand in 1955–56), The Deep Blue Sea, offered a contrasting dramatic challenge. McCallum played the RAF-ish and raffish lover of Withers’s suicidal Hester. Jean Kent, who’d also played this role in England, as had Dames Peggy Ashcroft and Celia Johnson, had no hesitation in saying to me in interview (1989) that she thought Withers was the best in the role. Indeed, in contrast to the sophisticated comedy playing of Simon and Laura, she was here heartbreaking in her delineation of a passionate woman trying to hold on to Freddie, her unreliable lover. John McCallum told me that he didn’t feel he was right for Freddie, the role played by Kenneth More on London stage and on film, but somehow the greater inherent firmness of McCallum’s persona worked very effectively, and perhaps more subtly, in suggesting and highlighting Freddie’s defining shallowness.


 

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