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Russell Crowe, Mad Max and Mel Gibson: George Ogilvie looks back on a dramatic life

Peter Munro

Russell Crowe arrived late to the audition, bursting into the room and gasping for air. "Am I too late?" he asked, between big breaths. His dark hair was mussed up and one of his front teeth chipped. His eyes had a hungry look about them. "Russell Crowe," he said, grabbing the director's hand. "I'm sorry – am I too late?"

George Ogilvie stood behind his desk and stared at the future star. "He was desperate, but from the moment he walked in he knew he belonged there," he says. Casting the young Crowe in his first film role, as the rebellious Johnny in Ogilvie's 1990 Australian drama The Crossing, was little more than a formality.

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"Oh, I just loved him," he says. "He was a force. He worked hard but he did expect everyone around him to work hard as well, there was no give and take."

He pauses and smiles. "None of the crew liked him, thought he was an arrogant little pisspot."

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He delivers the punchline with perfect timing as we sit at a cafe for lunch on a steamy Wednesday near his home in Potts Point, surrounded by small dogs and big sunglasses. Ogilvie rests his walking stick on a chair. He's wearing a grey zippered hoodie over a blue shirt, with black braces and slacks. He has a soft smile and old man's eyebrows.

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He has always known how to make the audience laugh, from the moment he strode on stage as an eight-year-old schoolboy soprano in a home-made military uniform. He stops eating scrambled eggs to teach me the art of the double-take, opening his dark eyes wide and gawking at something strange.

"Comedy is a quickness of mind and the humour has got to be in your eyes," he says. "You have to be laughing in your eyes."

The 85-year-old has seen so much over his long, diverse career. He has been an actor and mime artist. A director of theatre, opera, ballet, television and film. A teacher of drama students. A talent spotter. Casual name dropper: Crowe, Mel Gibson, Hugo Weaving, Dame Joan Sutherland, Germaine Greer (whom he once cast as a countess in a French farce, only to later advise her "that although her presence on stage was spectacular, it would be unwise of her to make acting her future profession".)

His CV straddles the artistic chasm between Don Giovanni and The Dismissal. Between Blood Wedding and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which he co-directed with George Miller, filming amid hundreds of pigs in an underground pit in overalls and gumboots. The set smelled of disinfectant, he says.

Ogilvie's new role is an old one, directing the Australian Ballet's production of Coppelia, which he first recreated in 1979 with artistic director Dame Peggy van Praagh and costume designer Kristian Fredrikson.

The cheery tale of sorcery, romance and dancing dolls has been called ballet's great comedy. "It's a ballet about hope, in that the third act is a harvest festival and everyone is getting married," Ogilvie says. "It's a time of renewal. There is hope that the next year will be as good as this year or better."

He has been thinking about final acts of late, assessing and reassessing his life and work. "I guess I have been doing a bit of that because I am coming to the end, it won't be that long."

Ogilvie has reached an age at which journalists hector a man about his best moments and biggest regrets. He poses in a director's chair for photographs. "I haven't sat in one of these for some years." He sits on the single grey bed in his studio apartment to put on socks and shoes, before we shuffle the short distance to the cafe, taking several rest stops along the way.

"Are you thinking of retiring, George," asks photographer Janie Barrett. "Yes, I am," he says. "But they won't let me, the bastards."

Later, over lunch, he tells me that offers to direct have all but dried up. "I've worked in most theatres in Australia and done most things. But I think everyone has decided that good old George is a bit of a legend, we'll leave him alone, which is fine. I don't have the energy to do the work anymore."

Once, acting and directing were his compulsions. His parents were Scottish-born bakers who settled in Canberra. His twin brother Jim started a farm and family. But Ogilvie was struck by the stage. He recalls his mother whispering words from Macbeth to her young brood at night: "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow."

"I needed to become an actor so badly that during my school years I would lie, cheat, flirt with anyone in order to be part of any performance," he wrote in his 2006 memoir Simple Gifts: A Life in the Theatre. "My only reality became those moments on stage, performing in front of an audience, becoming someone else."

He put down his pen in the middle of his final taxation exam and walked from the room, living out the dreams of so many chartered accountants. He acted abroad and studied mime in Paris, before settling back in Australia as a stage director – including a stint with the fledgling Melbourne Theatre Company in the early 1960s.

He worked in ballet, opera and theatre before a chance encounter with filmmaker Miller, who watched him direct a young Mel Gibson in Death of a Salesman. Miller invited him to lunch and then to direct an episode of the 1983 television miniseries, The Dismissal. They went on to work together on the TV series Bodyline and later Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

Ogilvie's credits reel in TV and film also includes Short Changed, The Shiralee, The Place at the Coast and Blue Heelers. "I don't do fancy stuff," he says. "Good actors know what they're doing, so you just put the camera on them. I have always believed they know more than most directors think they know. What I do as a director is give them the world to work in."

In his memoir, he wonders whether the nature of acting is "simply one of evading the truth, reinventing oneself constantly, like a child running away from the bogeyman".

What were you running from, I ask. "I don't know. I had very fine parents and a twin brother and we had a good time together," he says. "Perhaps acting is more to do with the fact that you want to be everyone, not just plain old me. I want to be a king. I want to be a duke. I want to be something important. I want to be a tragic figure."

He tells me that he is happy with the choices he made in his life and career. He fell in love once, with an actress in England. But he chose to remain a "career bachelor" and she ended up marrying his friend. He stays with them when he visits London.

"I'm sorry of course," he says. "Did I have to make that decision? Did I have to be so one-eyed about it all? I don't know." He pauses while searching for the answer. "No," he says, finally. "I think I made the right decision. Because I have really had such a good time."

When lunch is over, we walk back to his apartment, laughing about celebrities in their 20s who have already published their life stories. "I have had the luckiest life," he says, when we reach his building. I hold open the heavy front gate for him. Thanks for your time George, I say. "My pleasure," he says. "We may meet up again some day."

The Australian Ballet's Coppelia is at the Sydney Opera House until December 21.

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