Jack Charles
Before the screen work there was a theatre company. Uncle Jack Charles, as he was widely known, co-founded Nindethana Theatre with Bob Maza in Melbourne in 1971, the first Indigenous theatre company in Australia, and he spent the rest of his life as an actor and an advocate for Aboriginal people in roughly equal measure. Neither half of that is a footnote to the other.
His first significant film credit was Harry Edwards in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, one of the defining works of the Australian new wave, and then decades passed with the film industry mostly not knowing what to do with him. The later credits are small and he is memorable in all of them: Old Boy in Mystery Road, a waiter in True History of the Kelly Gang, the chief in Pan, and a voice part as a frill-necked lizard in the animated Back to the Outback. He also appeared in the television series Cleverman and Preppers, neither among the credits listed here.
What he brought was presence and a voice with a great deal of weather in it. Directors would hand him two scenes and get a whole life back, which is a real skill and one the Australian screen was slow to use properly.
Movies (5)
Where to start with Jack Charles
Mystery Road is the best use anyone made of him on film. He plays Old Boy, an elder on the edges of an outback murder investigation, and in a few minutes he supplies the sense of history that the whole mystery rests on. Ivan Sen's film is excellent on its own terms too.
Go back afterwards to The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, the 1978 landmark that gave him his first real screen part and remains one of the harshest films Australia has made about its own founding. True History of the Kelly Gang is the stylised modern counterpart, though his role in it is tiny.
Pan and Back to the Outback are the family-audience credits, the second of them a decent showcase for the voice if you want something lighter to finish on.