Jack Thompson
Jack Thompson is an actor, born 1940.
Thompson is one of the central figures of the Australian New Wave, the run of films that gave the country a film industry again in the 1970s. He was in Wake in Fright at the start of it, and through the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s he was the leading man of Australian cinema, in Petersen, Sunday Too Far Away and The Club. He has won both Cannes and AFI acting awards, and he is a Member of the Order of Australia.
The voice does a lot of the work, a low unhurried drawl that sounds like it is telling you the truth. Breaker Morant uses it best. As the defence counsel at a court martial he is a country lawyer out of his depth in a proceeding whose outcome has already been decided, and the performance builds from bluff decency to genuine fury without a single false step. The Sum of Us, more than a decade later, is the other side of the same instrument: a widowed father whose support for his gay son is played entirely without self-congratulation.
The later career is character work in other people's blockbusters. He is Cliegg Lars in Attack of the Clones, the doctor framing the story in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, and Kipling Flynn in Australia and its television recut. Alongside those he kept doing the local films that matter more, from Mystery Road to High Ground.
Movies (40)
- Original Sin (2001)
- Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)
- The Great Gatsby (2013)
- Broken Arrow (1996)
- Short Circuit (1986)
- Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983)
- Flesh + Blood (1985)
- Australia (2008)
- Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)
- The Light Between Oceans (2016)
- Swinging Safari (2018)
- Poker Face (2022)
- Man-Thing (2005)
- Excess Baggage (1997)
- Last Dance (1996)
- Wind (1992)
- Leatherheads (2008)
- Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)
- The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004)
- The Good German (2006)
- High Ground (2021)
- Feed (2005)
- The Man from Snowy River (1982)
- Breaker Morant (1980)
- A Far Off Place (1993)
- Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2004)
- The Magic Pudding (2000)
- A Woman Called Golda (1982)
- Wake in Fright (1971)
- Mystery Road (2013)
TV (3)
Where to start with Jack Thompson
Everything starts with Breaker Morant. He has the courtroom, the closing argument and the moral weight of the film, and nobody has ever made better use of that voice.
Then go back to Wake in Fright, where he is a young man in the film that effectively reopened Australian cinema, and forward to The Man from Snowy River for the popular version of the same national myth. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is the harder, better companion to both.
The Sum of Us is the warmest thing he has done and the one most likely to surprise you. For the modern character work, Mystery Road is the pick, a slow outback procedural that gives him a small part with real edges. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones and Australia are where most international viewers will have seen him without knowing it.