Actor John Wood has been a regular visitor to the Sunshine Coast hinterland for more than 15 years. He’s back again having just completed a season as Alfred Doolittle in the Lerner and Loewe musical, My Fair Lady at Brisbane’s Lyric Theatre. John and the show have now moved on to Sydney.
John won Australian television’s most popular personality award – the gold Logie - in 2006 recognising his 12 year role as sergeant Tom Croydon in the police drama, Blue Heelers, and for the popularity of Rafferty’s Rules. John won his first Logie (best supporting actor) in 1976 for a role in Power Without Glory.
John has also appeared in numerous plays and musicals in a career spanning more than thirty years. From Death of a Salesman, Major Barbara and Oedipus in 1970 to his ten year association with The Club, singing and dancing in the musical Chess, Patrick White’s Signal Driver and his first solo, and nude, performance in The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin.
John has written and directed for the theatre and television, and as his biography states, he has no intention of stopping.
In recent times though John Wood has been advertising for high profile Sunshine Coast retirement homes. In this exclusive interview with Hinterland Times editor, Michael Berry, John reveals his own personal thoughts about retirement.
Have you actually contemplated retirement?
To be honest I haven’t thought about it too much.
Surely you ‘re at an age when you should think about it?
No I shouldn’t. Why should I? When I am at these retirement villages there are people there who are younger than I am, and I think it’s quite bizarre that here I am still working, and they’re retired, and that I’m advertising these places.
I guess it’s the active nature of the work that I do. People ask me my age, but I tell them I don’t want to talk about it because in fact I was too old to play sergeant Tom Croydon in Blue Heelers. I mean at 55, Tom would have been forced to retire, and I’m older than 55.
But don’t you think you were chosen to advertise retirement homes because you look the retiring kind?
No. I don’t think I was chosen because I am the image of retirement. I think I was chosen because I recorded one of the highest ratings of recognisability in one of those marketing surveys.
So, for you personally, retirement is not on the horizon?
Well, there are times when I think it would be easier not to work. And as I get older I’m not all that keen on the repetition of the theatre. You know, doing the same thing night after night. I find TV more entertaining to be involved in because you’re doing a different story every week and you have different actors coming in to work with you every week.
The hardest thing about going into My Fair Lady was that I took over the role with only three days to learn it. Normally you have several weeks to work it all out. So, getting the lines to stick was hard.
Most of us feel that age is catching up. Don’t you?
I don’t really notice any change, I am slowing down physically obviously. Vocally I still manage. When I think about ageing of course, there was a time when I was the youngest person in the room. And I had a very funny experience the other day sitting in Reg Livermore’s dressing room and I mentioned that I always seemed to be the youngest person in the room. And I looked around at him and Rhys McConnochie and Nancye Hayes and I realised I was still the youngest person in the room.
Bud Tingwell’s 83 or 84 and still working. Bob Hornery, a very old friend has had a run-in with cancer in recent times, but he still works when he can. Acting is like any creative activity. I think it’s that you’re in contact with your muse all the time that it keeps you active.
I imagine that if I was living in one of those retirement villages that I would be organising shows, poetry readings or performing in some way. Once you’re a performer you’re always a performer it seems. It’s in your blood I guess.
Apart from the stimulation of acting though, do you think the baby boomer generation have a younger outlook on life?
I think our attitudes are younger. I rolled out of bed the other day and looked at my body in a mirror and I thought how old it was, yet how come it’s still got the brain of a child. I guess one of the things that an actor does need is a childlike approach to the world in order to believe that they can take on the persona of another human being. You still need to be able to play in the way that children see the world. At the moment I’m pretending to be Alfie Doolittle and soon I’ll be pretending to be Monk O’Neil (in Jack Hibberd’s play A Stretch of the Imagination).
I’m at the age when if I was in England I’d certainly be thinking about having a crack at King Lear very soon. You wouldn’t want to leave it too much longer because you wouldn’t have the stamina. I mean John Bell (Bell Shakespeare Company) always surprises me because he’s older than I am and he’s been playing characters like Lear for years.
So what should people be thinking about when they approach this nebulous retirement age?
The places I advertise are probably the kind of place I would finally retire too, because as you get older certain things get difficult or dangerous to do, like cleaning out the gutters. In the retirement village they’ve got somebody else to take care of those responsibilities.
There have been times right through my career, I’ve thought I wouldn’t mind stopping now and say, do some painting lessons. I still play the guitar when I get the chance, which isn’t often enough. So, it would be nice to do those things. But you know, I can’t really imagine even in retirement that I would spend time on those things. There’d be too many other things to do.
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