Chris Haywood

Not all successful Australian actors look to make the leap to Hollywood. Case in point: Chris Haywood, who could very well at one point or another during his accumulation of eight Australian Film Institute (AFI) award nominations have chosen to try his luck in Los Angeles. Instead, he has continued to work pretty much exclusively Down Under in both TV and film. One of Haywood's better known roles was as Detective Hummer in the 1997 crime drama "Kiss or Kill." Writer-director Bill Bennett's tale of a young criminal couple on the run won best film and directing awards in Australia that film year, and while Haywood did not win in his AFI category, he was voted best supporting actor for his performance by the nation's main film critics association. Haywood's first AFI nomination was for an early Philip Noyce movie, 1978's "Newsfront." Other kudos have come for everything from the crime TV series "Stingers" to the Paul Cox Greece-set female-centric drama "Island." Overall, Haywood has won three AFI acting awards, beginning with Best Actor for 1985's "A Street to Die," in which he played a Vietnam veteran suing the government for exposing him to the cancer-causing risks of Agent Orange.