Guy Pearce - Biography

Name: Guy Pearce

Born: 5 October 1967 (Age: 42)

Where: Ely, England

Height: 5' 11"

Awards: No Major Awards

For all its Oscar-winning qualities, the film LA Confidential had another claim to fame. With hindsight, we can see it to have been the launching-pad for two huge new stars - Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce. They were both antipodean, both fine actors, both good-looking leading men, but extremely different in character and approach. Crowe was tough on the outside, but sensitive and turbulent within, and a very hard worker. Pearce, on the other hand, was tremendously well-balanced and instinctive in his work, keeping research to a minimum. Crowe, of course, would storm to worldwide fame with The Insider and Gladiator. Yet, with Memento a big critical hit and The Time Machine topping the box-office charts, Pearce soon joined him in the upper echelons of Hollywood. Here's how he got that far.

Like Crowe, Guy Pearce is a famous Australian who's not actually from Australia. He was born on the 5th of October, 1967, in Ely, just to the north-east of Cambridge. His father, Stuart, had been in the New Zealand air force, and moved to the UK to work with the RAF. The family then moved briefly to Bristol and then, when Guy was 3, Stuart took them to Australia, specifically to Geelong in Victoria, about an hour's drive south of Melbourne. There they would spend the next 5 years - Stuart, his English wife Anne (a teacher specialising in needlework and home economics), Guy and his mentally retarded older sister Tracey.

Stuart was the chief test pilot on the Nomad programme. On the morning of the 6th of August, 1976, his plane crashed shortly after take-off from the Avalon airfield, near Geelong. He was only 39. His death made headlines across the country and, of course, affected the Pearce family deeply. Anne decided to stay in Australia with the kids and Guy "had to grow up quickly". He was told he had to be responsible and - despite being desperately insecure about his own identity due to his father's mythic status - so he became. It's been said that it was Guy's identity problems and maybe the overwhelming sense of responsibility that made him so quick to assume the identities of others - that is, act. What's for sure is that, so Guy himself has said, he felt 100 years old.

At school - he attended the strict and prestigious Geelong College - Guy was keen on music and the arts, wherever possible shying clear of maths and science. This did not go down well with the establishment. Geelong College boys were meant to become lawyers and doctors, not shiftless artists. But Anne fed Guy's creative nature. From a very early age, she took him to performances at the Geelong Society of Operatic and Dramatic Arts (GESODA).

A young wizard at mimicking accents, Guy was keen to join in, and made his stage debut at age 9. This was as a Cockney Artful Dodger-type in a school production called Smith. By 11, he was involved with GESODA, appearing as the Dormouse in Alice In Wonderland, and also in The King And I, Fiddler On The Roof and The Wizard Of Oz.

Another pastime took his fancy - and again perhaps through insecurity. Surrounded by much older actors, Guy became worried about his ability to communicate verbally, to be as eloquent as everyone else. But his efforts at self-improvement took him in another direction, into the more controllable area of body-building. Here he could reinvent himself totally, from the outside in. And he did. Naturally a very skinny fellow (another reason for insecurity), by his mid-teens he'd won Mr Junior Victoria, creating a physique that still impresses today.

As said, Geelong College was not big on acting. But Guy's drama teacher, John Gibson (he'd become a good friend and mentor) noted Guy's enthusiasm and advised him to write to TV companies, asking for auditions. And so he did, including the Grundy Organisation, and they replied. On November 29th, 1985, a Friday, Guy took his final exam. On the following Tuesday, he started work as hunky student-turned-teacher Mike Young in Neighbours. He'd also won an agent AND a Mars Bar commercial. It was looking good.

With hindsight, we know Neighbours to have been a phenomenal success, launching the careers of Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan and Natalie Imbruglia (going back to LA Confidential's pedigree, Russell Crowe made a few appearances in Neighbours, too). But back in '85, things were a little shakier. The series had been started by the Seven Network, who'd dropped it due to risible ratings. In stepped Network Ten and a super-series was born. Guy and the rest became teen idols in Oz and particularly in the UK. Bizarrely, when you think about it now, that UK fame allowed him to enjoy two seasons in British panto, first in 1987 as Dan Dean, then in 1989 as Buttons at Preston, both times in Cinderella.

Personally, things were pulling back together, too. His mother Anne had remarried, and was now running a deer farm with husband Laurie Cocking at Dean's Marsh, near Geelong (Guy being a fiscal partner in the venture). Tracey was doing well, though she was once extremely confused when Guy phoned her while she was watching him in Neighbours. And Guy had found love, too, with Shaney Stone, a young woman studying childhood development. They'd stay together till 1993.

Another string to Guy's creative bow was his music. Aside from drawing and painting, he also loved to sing and play guitar. He's written 100s of songs, and became proficient on sax and piano (he often plays piano to relieve his anxiety). In 1987, this would come in very, very handy when his agent called to say there was a part going in a movie to be called Heaven Tonight, and the lead must be able to sing. Guy had to get a demo together - that night.

Luckily, with his Neighbours loot Guy had constructed a small studio in his house, and set about recording a cover of Icehouse's Nothing Too Serious. A few months later, he heard that he was in, playing the leader of a sub-Gary Numan techno-pop band called Video Rodney, who comes into major conflict with his dad, himself a musician in a revivalist Sixties outfit. Some of Guy's own songs were used.

. The ponytails and octagonal drums were horrible, but the experience was invaluable. And the connections were even better. The writer and producer of Heaven Tonight was one Frank Howson. A theatre performer from the age of 7, Howson had been a successful singer, songwriter and music publisher (he had his own hits in Oz and published Pseudo Echo when they went US Number 3). Then he wrote his own theatre hits and, in 1987, turned to movies, his Boulevard Of Broken Dreams winning 7 Australian Film Institute nominations. He was a winner, and an all-rounder, and he saw something special in Guy Pearce (remember, most saw him simply as a beefcake soap star).

Howson really took Guy under his wing and cast him in a further 3 movies in the next couple of years (though they would not all see an immediate release). Hunting saw Guy as a vicious bodyguard-come-businessman-come-hitman, working for corporate swine John Savage as he builds a collection of firms and people. Some of Guy's songs were featured here too. Friday On My Mind saw a street kid caught up in the wheelings and dealings of big business. And then there was Flynn, a biopic of film star Errol, which concentrated on his turbulent youth in Australia, before the Hollywood years. Guy looked like him, he spoke like him and behaved like him - but distribution problems meant the movie would not see the light of day for years - no one knew how good he was.

Unfortunately - actually, probably fortunately - the producers of Neighbours didn't want Guy to play Errol Flynn, a notorious bad boy and womaniser. Guy had a little think about his future - he is, after all, a serious man, whose favourite author is Goethe, favourite musician is Kate Bush, and fave film is The Elephant Man - and left Neighbours.

This was in 1989, a year that also saw him tread the boards in I Hate Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Guy has always loved theatre, but recalls getting terrible gyp from the actors who'd studied at NIDA - he was, they thought, just a soapie. Slowly, those movies were released and along came more soap. Home And Away had followed Neighbours up the TV charts and - though he refused to join full time - Guy agreed to occasionally drop into the show as David Croft, long-lost brother of Lucinda, who returns to Summer Bay looking for forgiveness and finds romance with young Sophie.

There was also a brief role as a villain in Bony, and then came Grease. Musicals are hugely popular in Oz - Russell Crowe spent ages in The Rocky Horror Show - so Guy took on the role of Danny Zuko, John Travolta's character in the movie. The production premiered on September 26th, 1991.

After this came a role that, he felt, wasted his time, and changed his life. The McGregor Saga was an ongoing series spawned by The Man From Snowy River, and saw Guy as rugged Rob McGregor, battling the elements and everything else, out in the savage outback. Guy believes he stayed on the show too long, causing him to lose a part beside Cameron Diaz and Harvey Keitel in the Hollywood flick Head Above Water. He got very frustrated. But the show did buy him a house AND he met Kate Mestitz. Or rather he RE-met Kate Mestitz. They had first dated when Guy was 12 and still at school. Now they re-encountered each other on the Snowy River set and are still together today, having got married in 1997.

Guy may have been frustrated by his lack of progress while playing Rob McGregor, but the two film roles he took during those 3 years stood him in amazingly good stead. With these, Guy first revealed himself to be a courageous actor, unafraid of destroying his public image. Yes, he REALLY went for it with Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert.

Here he played a drag queen who, along with a fellow queen (Hugo Weaving) and a trans-sexual (Terence Stamp), crosses Australia in a lavender bus (Priscilla) to play a drag show in Alice Springs. And Guy - the hunky star of Neighbours and The McGregor Saga, a man's man if ever there was one - wasn't simply a drag queen. He was a screamer - shrieking, squealing, flouncing and hilariously bitching. It was a brilliant performance in an important movie and all the more impressive when you know that Guy, Terence and Hugo, one day after dress rehearsal and still in full drag, actually went out drinking in the drag clubs of Sydney. Guy says it was the first time in 8 years that he went out without being recognised.

Priscilla gradually became an international hit, and secured Guy an agent with ICM in Los Angeles. His next role would be impressively out-of-the-ordinary too. In Dating The Enemy, he played a neatness-obsessed TV host whose relationship with a messy scientist (played by Claudia Karvan) is collapsing. Then one day they find they've switched bodies. Thus Guy played a man and a woman, even getting to portray a man's reaction to his own menstruation - sadly, John Wayne never got that opportunity.

Now Hollywood came knocking for the first time, and Guy was cast in LA Confidential alongside Crowe. Here, the film being set in 50s Los Angeles, Guy played super-straight cop Ed Exley, a golden boy who'll do anything to get ahead, except sell out. Crowe played his supremely aggressive colleague, while Kevin Spacey was fame-hungry Jack Vincennes, who sells police stories to the papers and TV but nonetheless joins the other two in their hunt for an unconscionably brutal murderer.

Guy doesn't like to do too much research, just enough to allow him to be instinctive. He went out with an LAPD officer but hated the experience ("I didn't like him," said Guy "he was a racist"), visited a shooting range and watched a few police training videos from the Fifties. Then he got on with it. He's said he couldn't possibly work as Crowe did, with a voice coach on hand to correct him at every turn. Then again, Crowe's not blessed with Pearce's natural gift for mimicry.

After the shoot, Crowe claimed Guy had really helped him. He also told the story of how Guy had been really good friends with a girl Crowe had dated for years. Every time they met, Guy would hug and kiss the girl - kiss, kiss, darling how are you? - while Crowe stood there brooding, "like a lemon". "A much weaker man," said Crowe "would have reacted to my stupidity but I really respected the fact that he didn't do anything". Guy later claimed that he was simply terrified of Crowe and scared to react. But Crowe said "I don't believe that, and I told Curtis Hanson (director of LA Confidential) that Guy had balls of steel".

Guy may have cajones of cast-iron, but he doesn't like to take them to LA very often. Can't stand the place. He'd much rather stay in Melbourne with Kate, hanging with the animals, digging the garden and smoking pot. He gets his agent to organise 20 auditions in 2 weeks and flies back to Oz. "I sort of go in, hit hard and get out of there".

So, it should come as no surprise that, after LA Confidential threatened to make him a star, he steered clear of Hollywood for three years. First came a futuristic war movie, called Woundings, where the government was recruiting women to start a colony of a remote island (the Falklands?) with a bunch of battle-scarred soldiers. Ray Winstone and Emily Lloyd co-starred. Then there was the charming A Slipping Down Life where Guy played Drumstrings Casey, a low-grade rock star in North Carolina, whose fallen for by shy girl Lili Taylor.

And then there was the confusion of Ravenous. Guy was off filming in the Czech Republic, with co-star Robert Carlyle, when the producers, worried about the film's viability, suddenly sacked director Milcho Manchevski (Before The Rain), replacing him with Raja Gosnell, who'd given the world Home Alone 3. Given that the movie was about cannibalism, madness and murder on a desolate US army outpost in the Sierra Nevadas in the mid-1800s, the actors felt the director of Home Alone 3 to be entirely inappropriate.

Guy and Carlyle refused to work with him, with Carlyle suggesting Antonia Bird, with whom he'd earlier made Priest. In she came and, trying to balance the actors' creative desires with the producers' desire for a movie that might sell, she did her best. It turned out gruesome, funny and strange.

. 2000 brought yet more success. Guy went back onstage, playing Jack Manning in Face To Face in Melbourne, then turned up in William Friedkin's Rules Of Engagement. Here he was Major Mark Biggs, vigorously prosecuting Samuel L. Jackson for allowing the shooting of demonstrators in Yemen while he was trying to rescue Ambassador Ben Kingsley and his wife, Anne Archer. Tommy Lee Jones provided the court-room opposition.

Then came Memento, a sleeper hit that took two years to reach peak popularity. It was complicated, but brilliant. In it, Guy played Leonard, a fellow suffering from short term memory loss, who's hunting his wife's killer but can't remember anything he learns, having to resort to notes, Polaroids and even tattoos. We flash back, we replay, we have no idea if the people he encounters are imposters. It's a head-spinning trip.

Memento made him. From here he moved on to The Count Of Monte Cristo, where he played Fernand de Moncerf, a friend of young sailor Edmund Dantes who frames him, gets him jailed in the infamous Chateau d'If and marries the love of his life, Mercedes. Woe betide him should Dantes take lessons in absolutely everything from jailed aristo Richard Harris, break out, find Harris's mindboggling stash of jewels and seek terrible revenge.

Now came Guy's first major smash. In a remake of HG Wells' The Time Machine (interestingly the original lead, Rod Taylor, was an Australian), he scored his first big-budget lead AND went to Number One in the US. It had been a hard shoot, so hard that director Simon Wells (actually the great-grandson of HG) was taken off with a few weeks to go, and replaced by Mouse Hunt director Gore Verbinski (he also did the Budweiser frogs). Guy himself broke a rib during a particularly rough chase sequence.

Concerning a nerdy Victorian mathematician who zips 800,000 years into the future, into the cruel world of the wicked Morlocks (led by Jeremy Irons) and cute Eloi, The Time Machine was good fun, but still not enough to keep Guy in Hollywood. He returned to Australia for a comedy drama called The Hard Word where he played a crim who, along with his two crim brothers, is conned into a major race-course heist by a smarmy lawyer who also happens to be "seeing" Pearce's wife, Rachel Griffiths. It was a taut, physical thriller, like British noir filtered through Tarantino, with some thankfully realistic prison sequences and a superb on-foot chase. Guy would excel once again, particularly in his scenes with the manipulative but perhaps still loving Griffiths.

There'd also be more theatre, when he'd return to Melbourne as Chance Wayne, the wannabe film star who, along with a fading diva (played by Wendy Hughes), returns to his home town to face the lover he ruined in Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird Of Youth. He'd keep up the classy work by then appearing in Two Brothers, playing an explorer who inadvertently brings together two tiger cubs separated when young and causes them to battle against one another. Written and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, it was beautiful and moving both, much like his earlier classic The Bear.

2005 would see Pearce back in Oz for The Proposition, a tough outback drama penned by rock bad boy Nick Cave. Here, as one of three Irish outlaw brothers in 1880, wanted for the murder of a pregnant woman, he's captured by the authorities in the shape of Ray Winstone and is forced to make a choice. Either he tracks down and kills his notorious elder brother, holed up in Australia's most unforgiving territory, or Winstone hangs the other brother, also captured. It was dark and violent stuff, crammed with Cave's usual biblical morality and dilemmas, and impressively gritty.

Very different would be 2006's Factory Girl, directed by George Hickenlooper, who'd earlier helmed the original version of Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade. This would tell the glamorous but tragic tale of Edie Sedgwick as she dropped out of Harvard in 1965 to become a Holly Golightly figure in New York. Pearce would follow in the footsteps of Crispin Glover, Jared Harris and David Bowie by playing Andy Warhol, then a hungry young artist who promises to make Sienna Miller's Sedgwick a star, inadvertently helping her down the road to mental dissipation. First Snow would then take Pearce back out into the wilderness as he played a man increasingly racked by fear and panic after being told by a psychic of his impending death. Seeking the truth and battling against this destiny, his journey would be fraught and lonely, an existential quest rarely seen on screen since the pioneering days of the 1970s.

Looking at Guy Pearce now, this hunky teen idol who reached the top in Hollywood without really even trying, it's impossible to tell exactly where he'll go next. If you were to bet that he'd now veer between big American projects and smaller, more psychologically exploratory affairs (often Australia-set), you'd probably be close to the mark. One thing's for sure, though - his progress will be fascinating.

Dominic Wills