Juliet Herd talks with Philip QuastPhilip

The Face - The Weekend Australian 14 April 2001 Picture:

Tim Anderson (click on image to see a larger version)

THERE was a time when Philip Quast found himself plagued by female fans. He was once followed to Australia by an Englishwoman eager to see him perform in Coriolanus, and a Japanese airline flight attendant used to send him a dozen long-stemmed red roses every week.

Bemused by the unsolicited attention, the amiable, usually mild-mannered Quast finally snapped. Matters came to a head three years ago when one young fan began stalking him in London, to the point where he had to take out an injunction against her.

"It got so bad that at Charing Cross Station one Friday night I screamed at this girl just to f off and leave me alone," says the dashing Royal Shakespeare Company actor, voice rising in disbelief at the memory. "She fell over in the middle of Charing Cross and I could see all these people looking at me and saying, 'You bastard', like she was my girlfriend. She's lying on the ground with a sprained ankle and I'm saying, 'Leave me alone,' and she's left there, crawling along the ground."

Although Quast now laughs at the absurdity of the situation, it was an ordeal at the time.

The former Play School presenter is pacing his darkened dressing-room in the bowels of the Aldwych Theatre in London's West End, where he is performing nightly in the acclaimed RSC production of The Secret Garden. Based on the children's classic by Frances Hodgson Burnett, it is the company's first musical for more than a decade and it broke box-office records at Stratford-upon- Avon, where it opened last November.

Quast, 44, plays the lead role, the reclusive, hunchbacked Uncle Archibald who brings his orphaned niece Mary to live with him and his invalid son Colin on the Yorkshire moors. His moving performance as the widowed Archibald, still mourning the death of his young wife 10 years earlier, has earned Quast effusive praise from British critics.

Benedict Nightingale of The Times credited him with bringing "authority to an impossible role". "I can't think of many actors who wouldn't seem preposterous if they had so often to mooch through mist looking like a blend of Mr Rochester and the Phantom of the Opera, with a bit of Quasimodo thrown in; but Quast manages the feat," Nightingale said.

More important to Quast has been the overwhelming audience response, mainly from family men in their 40s and 50s who have lost a partner. No longer bombarded by over-familiar letters from besotted female fans, Quast finds himself unofficial counsellor to bereaved men.

"It is men who have reacted to this in an incredible way-I've had about 50 letters," he reveals, jumping up to make a cup of herbal tea in the tiny kitchen area of his comfortable, candlelit dressing-room.

"I've lived with the same partner for 25 years and we've been married 20 years, so it doesn't take much imagination when you have three young children to actually think of the pain of losing that person. There are a lot of men who have lost wives to cancer and brain tumours, who have got children, and those children are a reminder of that wife and the guilt of moving on.

"Women are able to cope with bereavement easier than men, partly because they're conditioned to expect the man to go first and because of the unfairness of the way society functions. Women have to deal with adversity; they have to have contingency plans just to walk to the shops when it gets dark. Men walk through life blissfully ignorant of that adversity."

It is this combination of sensitivity and outspokenness that marks Quast as something of a (welcome) anomaly in the ego driven acting world. He is passionate about a wide range of issues, from the dangers posed by Pauline Hansonesque attitudes and the decline of the ABC to the destruction of the British education system and colleague Gale Edwards's "unjust" sacking as director on The Boy From Oz's American transfer.

"I think it's broken her heart. It was a disgusting thing to do - the injustice of that," rails the boy from Tamworth, who worked most recently with Edwards in the Sydney Theatre Company's production of The White Devil as part of the Olympic Arts Festival.

Although not an obvious heart-throb - he's too shaggy and bear-like to qualify - there's a mesmeric quality to Quast that gives him a commanding presence both on and offstage. He is one of few Australian actors to have established themselves as a leading theatrical name at home and in Britain - where he and his wife, Carol, and their three sons, aged 11, nine and five, have been largely based since the late 1980s.

A graduate of NIDA, he has twice won a prestigious Olivier theatre awards in London - in 1990 for Sunday in the Park with George and eight years later for his portrayal as a gay polio victim in The Fix, directed by wunderkind Sam Mendes.

He first performed in The Secret Garden in Brisbane six years ago, playing the role of the scheming doctor opposite Anthony Warlow's Archibald. That production was directed by American Susan Schulman, who had been part of the original Broadway team. Quast deliberately plays Archibald "much darker" in RSC director Adrian Noble's production.

Quast, who made his name internationally as Javert in Les Miserables, has always been drawn to parts that are "angst-ridden and painful", playing "men who are isolated and alone". Even in the cult television series Ultraviolet he played a dying priest. For this reason, the comedic part of Hook in last year's ill-fated panto Pan at Sydney's Capitol Theatre appealed. "It did feel like Play School meets the RSC," he says.

He attributes his loner mentality to growing up on a farm. "I didn't have any friends, except my younger brother and older sister, and I spent a lot of time on my own," he reflects. "I get the same feeling in rehearsals that I did working on the farm. Being part of a team to bring in the sheaves is similar to problem-solving as a team in rehearsals."

As his sons approach secondary education, Quast feels he has reached a point where he and his family must decide between Australia and Britain. "When we went home this last time, I thought, 'Oh God, the beach' - but after five months I started missing it here. You have a sense of your own mortality here, whereas you feel immortal in Australia."

He has always been careful to avoid overexposure and doesn't lament his lack of high-profile film work ("not many marriages stay alive in film") but believes by the time he is 50 he may have "a whole other career" in Australia, playing father-type film roles.

In the meantime, this reluctant pin-up turned accidental male-awareness spokesman is busy putting together an album of songs containing material "I can speak to men about."

We would like to thank Elizabeth for providing us with this article.


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