PATRICIA LOVELL, 1929-2013
Making eyes ... Pat Lovell with Mr Squiggle in 1962, while Norman Hetherington pulled the strings.
The depth and breadth of Patricia Lovell's achievements in Australian television and film were remarkable.
This clever, gritty, glamorous, driven woman first appeared on the ABC in 1957; half a century later she was still ''trying to get a documentary off the ground''.
Her hallmark as a producer was quality, and if her output was only a handful of films, among them were two of Australia's best-loved films: Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli.
Lovell produced the iconic Australian film Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Patricia Anne Parr was the first daughter, and the eldest surviving child, of six born to Harold Parr, an optometrist, amateur actor and charmer, and his wife, Leticia (nee Forsythe), a talented author of children's books, but a distant mother.
Lovell was born on the lower north shore but the family soon settled in Campsie in a big old Federation house from where her father practised. From the beginning she would paint stage sets, co-opt other children into acting, and charge her parents to watch plays she invented.
Her parent's marriage buckled under the strain of the deaths of two sons and a daughter, and they divorced when she was 15.
After a short time living with her father, Lovell went to live with her mother and a brother and sister in Moree, and was later sent to board at PLC Armidale.
She fell in love with film during school holidays in Sydney with her father. Some films that made a particular impression on her were Anthony Asquith's Pygmalion (1938), Marcel Carne's Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) and Jean Cocteau's La Belle et La Bete.
She trained briefly as a librarian, then worked in community theatres, where she met her husband, the actor Nigel Lovell, a widower with one daughter. They married in 1956. She had joined the ABC in the early 1950s, and after a few years in radio she became a compere of the Children's TV Club in 1957. It was broadcast live and she recalled an early show featuring ''Tom the naturalist'' who hypnotised a chicken and left it with her.
The role that made her forever famous to viewers of a certain age was Miss Pat - the only flesh-and-blood member of the cast of Mr Squiggle and Friends. For 15 years from 1960, Lovell encouraged and admired the upside-down art created by Mr Squiggle's nose, while the brilliant Norman Hetherington pulled the strings.
In 1964, Lovell joined ATN-7's panel show Beauty and the Beast, filling the need, as she said, for "a nice little housewife type", ''one of the lesser beauties'', beside Dita Cobb and Maggie Tabberer.
In 1969, Lovell and Bruce Webster co-presented ATN-7's early morning show Sydney Today. All these experiences taught Lovell how exciting it could be behind the camera.
Her fame was sufficient to earn her, in 1970 after some years of unhappiness, a front-page photograph in The Sun, when she and Nigel divorced. She, their son and daughter settled in a cottage near Pittwater.
Soon afterwards, she bought a copy of Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock and immediately saw its potential as a film.
She put down her last $100 as a holding deposit on the film rights and engaged the film director Peter Weir, whose short film, a black comedy, Homesdale (1971) she had admired.
After a series of setbacks, the film appeared in 1975. It was a haunting, lyrical gem that co-starred, as did most of Lovell's films, the Australian landscape. It was the vanguard of a revival of filmmaking in Australia and earned her the respect and support of an industry legend, Ken G Hall.
Two films followed, both directed by Ken Hannam: Break of Day (1976), a love story set in country Victoria in the 1920s, and Summerfield (1977), a mystery set on Phillip Island. Neither was a great commercial or critical success, but both had Lovell's special quality.
In 1979, Weir invited her to produce Gallipoli, written by David Williamson and starring Mel Gibson, and financially backed by Rupert Murdoch and Robert Stigwood.
It was the most expensive Australian film to be made to date, and it was a massive box-office hit and the first Australian feature film to be released in the United States by a major house. Gallipoli earned almost $12 million but, as ever, Lovell saw little of it.
An adaptation of Helen Garner's first novel Monkey Grip (1977) appeared in 1982, replete with brilliant performances by Noni Hazlehurst and Colin Friels and some critical acclaim. The film historian Graham Shirley said it was "the most dramatically potent and timeless of all Lovell's productions".
After Monkey Grip, three projects foundered in a row, but in 1987 Lovell produced The Perfectionist, adapted from a Williamson play. She had to raise capital so often for her projects that the screenwriter Peter Yeldham wondered if her cottage was the most mortgaged property in Australia.
In 1995, Lovell's autobiography No Picnic was published. It charted her tragic early life, her years with the ABC and Channel Seven, as a Beauty and anchor; but it is the detailed picture she paints of her battles to produce films that is most riveting. Time and again she was let down or sidelined, yet she fought on like a tigress.
Clean Straw For Nothing, based on George Johnston's novel, came to nothing and an adaptation of Shirley Hazzard's Italian novella, The Evening of the Holiday, never saw the light of day.
The hardest blow, however, was the collapse, before a single film was made, of Lovell Gibson, her partnership with Mel Gibson in 1988, just as he became a superstar. As she wrote, without bitterness: "Quite ironic, really, Lovell Gibson began and ended with weapons lethal."
In 1997, after what Lovell called ''almost 10 years of disaster'' in which she produced no features, she joined the Australian Film Television and Radio School, which she credited with saving her life.
"I was able to give back to my students some of the inspiration that I'd had over the years," she said. To date, four of her students have been nominated for Academy Awards for short film or animation.
Lovell was awarded an MBE in 1978 and an AM in 1986. Her reaction to being named the 1983 Bulletin-Qantas Business Woman of the Year bordered on incredulity: "I don't know why the hell anybody in their right mind would want to honour me now" - but she accepted it with pride.
In 2004, she was awarded the Raymond Longford lifetime achievement award by the Australian Film Institute. Her receipt of the Ken G Hall award in 2010, in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the preservation of Australian film history, must have brought her particular joy.
In 2006, and in her 70s, Lovell was interviewed by the film critic Peter Thompson. The passion to produce was still very much in evidence. She was still inspired by books and characters, and was "trying to get a documentary off the ground".
As Thompson said: "This flame's still shining bright".
Pat Lovell is survived by her children, Jenny and Simon, and two granddaughters.
Mark McGinness
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