George Ogilvie

In 1989, George Ogilvie was closing the casting session for his forthcoming drama, "The Crossing," when an unkempt man with a chipped tooth burst in and asked, "Am I too late?" The answer was "No," and so Russell Crowe landed his first film role. Ogilvie himself started out as an actor in Wales in the early 1950s and studied mime in Paris before returning to Australia to co-found the Melbourne Theater Company in 1965. Equally inspired staging opera, ballet and drama, Ogilvie won numerous directing awards in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne before venturing before the cameras in the 1978 teleplay "The Sound of Love." Four years later, he was persuaded by George Miller to direct an episode of the political mini-series "The Dismissal" (in which he also played a senator) and the pair collaborated again on the 1985 Mel Gibson vehicle, "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome." In between times, Ogilvie had directed the cult cricketing saga "Bodyline" and, over the next couple of years, he alternated between features like the 1986 racial prejudice drama "Short Changed" and the 1987 adaptation of Jane Hyde's novel "The Place at the Coast" and such TV-movies as "The Shiralee" and "Touch the Sun: Princess Kate." Unfortunately, "The Crossing" proved to be Ogilvie's final feature, although the 1990s did see him follow the crime duo "The Feds: Seduction" and "The Feds: Deception" with the teleplays "The Battlers" and "The Last of the Ryans" before his 2003 comeback from a theatrical sabbatical on the cop show "Blue Heelers." George Ogilvie died on April 5, 2020 in New South Wales, Australia at the age of 89.