Nico Lathouris
Nico Lathouris is an actor, born 1944.
Nico Lathouris turns up in the first Mad Max (1979) as Grease Rat, which is a fine place for an Australian screen career to begin and a strange one to be remembered for, given where the connection eventually led. He is a writer as well as an actor, and he shares screenplay credit on Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), which makes his relationship with that series one of the longest anyone has with a film franchise.
The acting he is actually known for is a pair of Greek Australian fathers. He played George in The Heartbreak Kid (1993) and George Poulos in the television spin-off Heartbreak High from 1994, and in both he is the patriarch whose son is the protagonist. The film role brought a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the 1993 Australian Film Institute Awards. Playing the same social position twice in two years could easily have flattened into caricature, and the reason it did not is that he plays the father as a man carrying his own disappointments rather than as an obstacle in somebody else's story.
The rest of the page is small and Australian: Mustafa in Death in Brunswick (1991) and Lenny Ryan in Phoenix (1992). Five credits is not much of a filmography. The two Heartbreak titles alone would justify the page.
Movies (3)
TV (2)
Where to start with Nico Lathouris
Watch The Heartbreak Kid first. It is the source of both the character and the series that followed, it is much sharper about class and migrant families than a romantic comedy needs to be, and Lathouris is the reason its domestic scenes carry any weight.
Heartbreak High then makes sense as an expansion rather than a repeat, and it is worth a few episodes to see how the same father plays across long-form teen drama. Mad Max is the historical curiosity given where his writing career went, though the part is tiny and you will have to look for him.
Death in Brunswick is the best straight comedy on the page, and Phoenix is the serious television option if you want him in a register with no warmth in it at all.