The Thorn Birds

Yeah.

It, it sort of reminds me of, we were, when we were talking about Barbara Stanwyck on our episode and in The Thorn Birds where she has that scene with Richard Chamberlain and she's talking about, "I'm an, I'm an old woman, but I still have, you know, feelings and things that I want, desires." And when he was hitting himself in the face, you know, it makes you wonder, was Jackie Gleeson okay with himself physically? And I just thought in that moment this was, uh, certainly the story, but was it also a parallel to the actor really wanting to hit himself and, and not, and not be, um, positive about who he was-

Yeah

... as a, as a man.

In fact, Dr. Kildare so thoroughly typecast Chamberlain that he had trouble finding work when the series ended in 1966.

But in the late 70s and early 1980s, he resuscitated his career by playing a rugged frontiersman in Centennial, a 17th century sailor turned samurai in the original Shogun, and as a lovelorn priest in The Thorn Birds.

The erstwhile Doc carved out a new niche as the dashing king, of the miniseries.

People will always be entranced by a good love story.

I'm happy they captured it.

Okay, number four, The Thorn Birds.

The Thorn Birds, well, I remember the audition for that.

I went in, and I knew it was Australian, and so I went in and did it with kind of a halfway Australian rhythm, you know.

Mm-hmm.

War games.

War games.

Well, that was interesting because I just finished or I was just finishing the Thorn Birds when When they called me for that, John Badham had been hired to replace the original director on that movie, and the only person that he recast was the general, the part I played.

From Breaker Morant and Newsfront to Two Hands and Sweet Country, a huge number of classic Australian films have Bryan in a starring role.

In the 1980s, working on the American-made series The Thorn Birds utterly changed Bryan's life.

He and his British co-star, Rachel Ward, fell in love and married soon after.

In 2018, Bryan won a Lifetime Achievement Award at The Actors, Australia's version of the Oscars, and in his speech, he spoke about his enduring love of playing Australian blokes and also paid tribute to his late mum.

And it's interesting, like, a number of people, even today when I go somewhere, Vietnam vets that are American will come up and say, "I really love that movie." And I remember reviewers saying to me, in New York, a reviewer saying to me, "You know, the, great movie.

You, you know, it's about the My Lai massacre, isn't it? You've ma- that's been fashioned for that." And I went, "No, this is a true story of our own." So it really was at the right time for what was happening about Vietnam at that stage.

After Hollywood came calling, you ended up in a TV series called The Thorn Birds.

Mm.

He'd come off Breaker Morant.

He was about to go into The Thorn Birds.

This was a Crawford production.

And at the time, it set a record for the amount of money spent on a miniseries.