John Waters, 2013

John Waters (b. 1948), actor and stage performer, sang with a London band called the Riots before moving to Australia at the age of 20. In the 1960s and 1970s he performed onstage in the hit musicals Hair, Godspell (as Judas) and Jesus Christ Superstar (as Pontius Pilate). In 1972 he made his debut in Play School, on which he appeared regularly until 1991. Meanwhile, between 1974 and 1976 he set hearts aflame as Sergeant Robert McKellar in the ABC television historical drama Rush. In 1975 he won a best new talent Logie for an appearance in Division 4. He was still on television more than forty years later, appearing in All Saints from 2006 to 2009, Offspring from 2010 to 2014, Rake in 2016 and Mystery Road in 2018. Although his cinema roles have been relatively few, in 1988 he won the AFI best actor award for the film Boulevard of Broken Dreams. From 1992 he toured intermittently in the one-man stage show Looking Through a Glass Onion, which he co-wrote with Stewart D’Arrietta. A tribute to John Lennon, it was seen across Australia and ran for good seasons in London’s West End and Manhattan’s Union Square Theatre in 2014. Other stage roles of Waters’s include Captain von Trapp opposite Lisa McCune in The Sound of Music in 2000, and the Narrator in The Rocky Horror Show in 2008.

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Gift of George Fetting 2015