HUGH JACKMAN
THE BIOGRAPHY
ANTHONY BUNKO
‘If you love something, or someone, whatever, just go for it!’
Hugh Jackman
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Prologue – Claws and Paws
Chapter 1 – Ten-pound Poms
Chapter 2 – Chicken Legs
Chapter 3 – More Than Just a Shopping Mall Heart-Throb
Chapter 4 – Soul Mates
Chapter 5 – Jackman Goes Mutant
Chapter 6 – Someone Likes Hugh
Chapter 7 – Here Comes their Sunshine
Chapter 8 – Howling at the Moon… Again
Chapter 9 – The ‘Queen’ of New York
Chapter 10 – Van the Man
Chapter 11 – Singer’s Last Stand
Chapter 12 – No Rest for Mr Nice Guy
Chapter 13 – The Film from Oz
Chapter 14 – Dancing with Wolverine
Chapter 15 – Mr X-Appeal
Chapter 16 – Walking on Broadway!
Chapter 17 – The Real Deal
Filmography
Plates
Copyright
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all of the people who went out of their way to help me write this book, especially Mam, Sen Sen and Jackie, Allie, Sharon and John Blake for giving me the opportunity.
Also for my two daughters, Danielle and Georgia, for putting up with me during my madness.
Stay Free
Prologue:
Claws and Paws
21 April 2009
With his shock of grey hair, his smart suit and his suntanned face, Jay Leno looked relaxed as he stood on the makeshift platform in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. In front of him, pressed up against the barriers in the stifling heat of the LA sunshine, were 500 fans, many clutching homemade Wolverine claws. To his right, an army of photographers were all vying for the best position; opposite them a host of dignitaries sat in folding chairs trying to keep cool under the shade of a large marquee.
‘Straight guys love him… gay guys love him… women love him, in fact I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to be him,’ Leno’s voice boomed out.
The crowd clapped and hollered. Backstage, Hugh Jackman broke away from the two bodyguards, who looked as though they had just come off the set of Men In Black, to sign autographs and talk politely with two women handing out water bottles.
Hugh could hear his good friend and TV presenter, Leno, finishing off the rest of his short introduction. The Hollywood actor made his apologies to the women and headed towards the exit. He stood there nervously, pinching himself to make sure it wasn’t all a dream. It had been a hell of a year. He had recently been crowned Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine, beating off old favourites like George Clooney and Brat Pitt. Then he was asked to host the Oscars, and was so well received that before the last of the awards had been handed out, his name was already being pencilled in for the next year’s event. And now, to top it all off, he was waiting to be inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
‘He hosted the Academy Awards,’ Leno added, ‘he sings, he dances, acts… everything I can’t do… Ladies and gentlemen, Hugh Jackman!’
On cue, the 6ft 3in Australian appeared through the beautifully ornate Chinese doors onto the red carpet in a blue polo shirt, dark trousers and the coolest of sunglasses. He looked like a rock star with the body of an Olympic swimmer and arms that an American football quarterback would die for.
He waved and smiled, acknowledging friends and family, and in particular, the fans.
‘By the way,’ Leno added, ‘Hugh’s going to put his face in the cement, unlike the normal stars who only put their hands and feet into it.’
They both laughed. Hugh had been on Leno’s The Tonight Show many times during his rise through the ranks of Hollywood, and on each occasion Leno found him to be the perfect gentlemen and a model star to interview. ‘One of the nicest guys I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with,’ Leno has often said.
‘Thanks, everyone,’ Hugh took over the microphone. ‘This is a dream come true for me… Jay Leno, my opening act.’ The mutual respect was evident as the good friends ribbed each other.
Behind him, massive posters of Hugh in full Wolverine costume, including the outrageously epic sideburns, were draped over the walls. They announced the fourth X-Men movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, to be released on 1 May. It was latest in the series of superhero blockbusters that had propelled Jackman into the spotlight and made him hot property in Tinseltown.
He stared across to where his wife Deborra-Lee Furness, his eight-year-old son Oscar and his three-year-old daughter Ava were sitting in the VIP section with a group of Hollywood bigwigs, including the owner of the Twentieth Century Fox film studio that was releasing the movie, Rupert Murdoch. It was a proud moment for them all.
‘I have to tell you,’ the Sydney-born forty-year-old said, ‘this particular block of real estate has brought me two moments in my life I thought would never ever happen…’ As all good actors do, he left a small pause before continuing. ‘Hosting the Oscars, and now here today. It means the world to me.’
He continued to thank the people who had supported and helped him to achieve the honour before he promptly switched his attention towards the ones he loved most. Full of pride, he looked over at them as he told the world that if it hadn’t been for his family, none of it would have been possible, and without them by his side, it certainly wouldn’t have been as much fun.
He turned to his son. ‘How I am doing, Oscar?’ he asked.
Everyone stared at the little boy; camera crews focused in on Oscar’s cute little face. Hugh held his breath thinking back to earlier in the day when Oscar had told him that he was only coming to the ceremony if he didn’t do a long, boring speech.
So over breakfast, Hugh had discarded the more ‘formal’ speech he’d written and in typical laid-back Australian style, promised his son he wouldn’t talk for too long, although he couldn’t guarantee that it wouldn’t be boring.
Under the shade of the tent, the little boy gave Hugh the thumbs-up, then immediately turned his head away to start checking out the ‘hot chicks’, which according to Hugh was his new fascination. Hugh smiled and carried on.
‘It’s a very humbling moment as an actor to be here. You look down at the names, from Fred Astaire to Cary Grant, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, Steve McQueen, John Wayne, and to think that those have been immortalised and pretty soon I’ll be putting my hands in wet cement.’
Another loud cheer rose up from the crowd as six men carried the cement and placed it in front of the stage. Hugh kneeled down, placing his hands and feet into the wet concrete. He held up his dirty paws to the great delight of fans and to the flashes of hundreds of cameras; across his face was spread the biggest of grins.
To date, there had been just over 2,000 stars privileged enough to have their hands and footprints immortalised forever outside Hollywood Boulevard’s historic Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Now he, Hugh Michael Jackman, would be joining some of his very own heroes; the stars he had watched on television or at the cinema while he was growing up. And to make it extra-special, his position on the pavement was in between two of the biggest legends of all time, Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne. He knew it didn’t get much bigger than that: he was joining a select and elite band of fellow Australians who had also had their foot and handprints immortalised in the theatre’s iconic forecourt over the past 70 years – the likes of Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman and Olivia Newton-John. Not even Mel Gibson or Russell Crowe, two of the Antipodes biggest-known stars of recent years, had had their hands set in stone as
yet.
However, the deep significance of the humble moment hadn’t been lost on the superstar, who had not only wowed audiences with his all-action movies like X-Men and Van Helsing, but had defied critics with masterful stage performances on New York’s Broadway and in London’s West End. It was unbelievable to think that only 12 years earlier, on his first visit to LA, the Walk of Fame was the exact Hollywood landmark that he and his wife had come to see first. They’d spent hours walking the stretch of pavement on both sides of the street, reading all the names, taking in all of the history. He remembered placing his hands into the imprints of one of his all-time heroes, the late, great Peter Sellers. Never in a million years did he think that one day he would be doing it for himself.
Looking back, the unassuming star’s rise to the top hadn’t all been plain sailing. There was his tough, uncompromising childhood, which had led to lots of anger and frustration in the early part of his life, and the bouts of loneliness and self-doubt he’d suffered as a drama student and struggling actor. Yet through the rejections and some bad decisions along the way, he had stayed focused and determined as he climbed the ladder to stardom, to arrive on the rung where he stood at that moment.
He cleaned the cement off his hands and politely posed for photographs with his family as the mass of hungry paparazzi verbally pulled him one way and then the other. He didn’t really like bringing his children to publicity events, but on this particular, special occasion Deb had persuaded the soon-to-be ‘Walk of Famer’ to let them come along and experience the moment first-hand.
His daughter, arms dangling round his neck, whispered into his ear, ‘Daddy, how does it feel?’
Hugh whispered back, ‘Well, Ava, it’s a big day for your daddy, and for all of us, all the family. It’s a great honour.’
But the innocence of youth cut him off. ‘No, Daddy, how does the cement feel on your hands? Can I draw in it as well?’
He laughed out loud before waving one last time to his army of fans. It was time to enjoy the rest of the day with the people he loved most in the world. He disappeared back through the doors carrying his daughter and his son.
Across the street, Matt Balke, another forty-year-old actor, who made a living dressing as the Wolverine character in his white vest and razor-sharp claws, looked on in admiration at the hero he copied everyday. He had left the spot where he made part of his living posing for photographs along with a host of other lookalikes, such as The Incredible Hulk, Superman, Captain Jack Sparrow and old favourites like Marilyn Monroe, earlier than normal, just to catch a glimpse of his idol. The Wolverine impersonator, too, had the widest of smiles on his side-burned face as he thought about the new movie shortly due for release that would certainly mean continued success for both himself and Hugh Jackman.
‘I will be honest; I was touched to receive the accolade on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. My dad does not usually say much, but when he found out he hugged me. He was really proud, and that meant a lot to me.’
Hugh Jackman
CHAPTER ONE
Ten-Pound Poms
‘Australia needs you and you need Australia,’ the advertisement in the magazine assured readers. It portrayed a suntanned family lying on Bondi Beach with waves crashing in the background. It promised lots of space, good food, a healthy lifestyle and free tertiary educational opportunities. It was a brand new country where you could be a completely different person in a class-free society.
To Chris Jackman, this exciting lifestyle was a million miles away from the England where he was born and bred. A country that, although still nursing an almighty hangover from winning the 1966 World Cup, was balancing on the edge of upheaval, social decline and the rapid loss of family values.
So in 1967, Chris, an accountant with one of the world’s largest professional services firms, Price Waterhouse, who also had a degree from Cambridge under his belt, emigrated with his pregnant wife Grace and their three children, Ian, Ralph and Sonya, to the land of promise as ‘Ten-pound Poms’. The aim of this scheme, run by the Australian government at the time, was to attract skilled, educated people from Britain and Canada to their shores: the package offered citizenship and a whole load of incentives, which included sailing an entire family halfway across the world for the grand old sum of 10 English pounds. Employment prospects, housing and a generally more optimistic lifestyle in a land that only 100 years earlier was used as England’s penal colony were promised. It was all part of the ‘Populate or Perish’ policy, which was designed to substantially increase the population of Australia by attracting workers from countries with booming industries (and which, truth be told, was only offered to educated white workers from middle-class backgrounds).
Once in Australia, the Jackman clan quickly settled into life in the leafy middle-class suburb of Wahroonga on Sydney’s North Shore, located 20km from Sydney’s main business district. Wahroonga, an Aboriginal word meaning ‘our home’, was first settled in 1822 by Thomas Hyndes, a convict who became a wealthy landowner. In the early days, residents thrived by cutting down the tall trees that grew there and selling on the wood. Later on, the trees were harvested for their fruit instead, and when the railway was built it became a popular place for businessmen to build out-of-town residences with large gardens in the 1920s and 1930s.
The Jackman family’s introduction into this new way of life was pretty straightforward, and in sharp contrast with many other British families who had also arrived. Many immigrants were placed in basic hostels and the expected job opportunities were not always readily available. Often they fled back home, escaping ‘Pommy bashing’ and resentment from Australians for job-stealing. But one statistic at the time claimed that nearly half the families that went back home returned later after reassessing life in England, thus becoming known as the ‘Boomerang Poms.’
‘My dad is pretty tight-lipped about a lot of things,’ Hugh said, ‘but I asked him why Australia and he just said that it seemed like a wise decision for the family. He already had three kids with a fourth on the way; I was number five. He was an accountant for Price Waterhouse, and was doing okay, but I think he thought living in London with five kids was going to be a nightmare, so he moved out to Australia. Back then, the country was still a bit of a frontier, not dissimilar to the country we depict in the film Australia, and my parents were drawn to the idea that there was space and opportunity to live there.’
Other than the birth of their fourth child, Zoe, their first year was reasonably uneventful as they adapted to the new environment. Chris, as normal, knuckled down and worked hard, some would say too hard, often not arriving back home from the office until late in the evening. However he enjoyed the work and his employer was more than happy with their conscientious new recruit. He quickly got promoted and was given an office along with his own secretary.
Initially, his wife Grace loved the place with all its new experiences, and she was regarded as a pleasant woman who would go out of her way to help anybody she could (a trait not lost on Hugh to this day). However, before too long, their cosy existence became disrupted. Chris, already a devoted born-again Christian, began to get more serious about his religion. Together with his wife, he had been converted to the faith back in Britain years before while attending a crusade by American evangelist Billy Graham. Years later, he would insist on taking Hugh and the rest of his children along to hear Billy Graham lecture when the religious road show came rolling into Oz with all its glamour and glitz.
‘My dad was religious. He was converted by Billy Graham and he used to take me to things like that.’ Initially, Hugh found something appealing about those itinerant preachers; maybe their power to spellbind a crowd. ‘For two or three years I thought I might want to be a minister – I became spiritual – but ultimately, the Christian religion didn’t really click with me; it left too many questions unanswered. I couldn’t get past the fact that 95 per cent of people on the planet are going to hell because they are non-Christian, so I went soul-searching later in life,
which has given a lot more meaning to my life.’
Meanwhile, his mother Grace gradually fell out of love with the Church and lost her faith along the way. She began to drift into serious bouts of depression, bordering on mental illness. Up to that point, she had always been a creative person, very much a free spirit, but the realisation that she was becoming more and more of a corporate wife living in northern suburbia, plus the added pressure of an over-religious husband and looking after four kids with another one on the way, began to take its toll. She slowly disappeared into her own world, becoming more and more distant to those around her.
Then, on 12 October 1968, Hugh Michael Jackman was born, weighing in at a respectable 9lb 6oz. Most hoped the birth of her new son would be the catalyst that would snap Grace out of her poor state of mind, but in fact it had the opposite effect. She suffered postnatal depression so severely that Hugh had to spend the first 18 months of his life with his Australian godparents, Tim and Deborah Collis-Bird, who lived on the next street along from the Jackman family.
‘My mother was not well. She was probably suffering from postpartum depression. It may not have been diagnosed, I’m not sure, but she was going through a tough time. Actually, for the first year of my life, I didn’t live at home; I went to live with my godparents.’
It was a strange time for everyone, especially Hugh’s brothers and sisters, who were still very young themselves, didn’t really understand what was going on with their mother or why their new brother wasn’t living with them. Their father, a man of few words at the best of times, found it hard to explain this to them.
Chris only saw his new son on weekends, while Grace hardly saw her baby at all because she spent most of the time in the hospital suffering from a list of symptoms that included depression and fatigue. It was only in his later years that Hugh realised just how much of a nightmare it must have been for his godparents to look after a baby for all that time, to have loved that child, and then be forced to give it up. Hugh, now with two children of his own, really appreciates what his godparents did for him and his family: ‘They were amazing people. My dad told me they had a huge impact on my life because they were incredibly loving and caring and calming.’
Hugh Jackman Page 1
