Background

Duigan was born on June 19, 1949, in Hartley Wintney, Hampshire, United Kingdom, to an Australian father, and emigrated to Australia in 1961.

Education

Duigan was a student of the University of Melbourne and received his Master of Arts degree in philosophy from it.

Career

Duigan turned his attention to writing and directing films very early. His first short, The Firm Man, was made on a budget of under twenty-three thousand dollars through the auspices of the Australian Council for the Arts. Upon its 1975 release, a Variety reviewer called it “Kafka-like” for its plot about an ordinary man who, after ten years at an ordinary firm, is recruited by a mysterious company which gives him unexplained, rote, courier tasks to do.

That nine-minute film served as Duigan’s calling-card to the Australian film industry. It led to the making of his first full-length feature, The Trespassers (1976), in which a young couple in 1970 becomes emotionally and, to some undefined extent, sexually entwined with a second young woman.

Next from Duigan was Mouth to Mouth (1978), still a low-budget production at one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. The movie followed the fortunes of four young Australians, two male and two female, as they establish a bohemian household in an abandoned waterhouse, with the local drunk as mascot. A Variety reviewer praised the film.

Making a shift to comedy, Duigan’s next work as director, Dimboola, was written by Jack Hilberd, and based on Hilberd’s play. A critic for Variety gave it a positive review for its comic-dramatic presentation of a wedding and related occurrences in a small outback town, but suggested that “comedy may not be [Duigan’s] forte”.

Duigan’s next project Winter of Our Dreams came in 1981. After 1983’s Far East and a couple of films made for Australian children’s television, Duigan had a commercial and artistic breakthrough with 1987’s The Year My Voice Broke. Intended as the first in a trilogy of films about adolescence, the film deals with a fifteen-year-old boy’s crush on a sixteen-year-old girl. New Republic critic Stanley Kauffmann called the film “completely sincere” and found it at times “touching.” The second part in the proposed trilogy, Flirting, came in 1993. It deals with a white Australian teenage boy who falls in love with a black girl visiting from Africa with her diplomat family, when the boy and girl are students at paired private schools. John Simon, in New York, called the film “incomparably better and, yes, bigger, than most biggies of the past year”.

Now working with larger budgets, Duigan went on to adapt a modern classic novel, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which retells the story of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre from a different angle—the view-point of Rochester’s first wife, a light-skinned Caribbean Creole. As co-writer of the screenplay and director of the film, Duigan, in the opinion of the New Yorker's Terrance Rafferty, “captures the book’s mood of shimmering ambiguity and heat-dazed emotional volatility.”

Duigan returned to his native Australia to make the 1994 film Sirens, which did well both critically and commercially. Starring Hugh Grant, Sirens was the story of a sexually repressed missionary and his wife who are transformed by a life-affirming painter and his entourage of beautiful women.

In 1995 Duigan directed a smaller film, The Journey of August King, based on a 1971 novel and a screenplay by John Ehle about a white farmer in North Carolina in 1815 who becomes involved in hiding a runaway black teenage slave. The film was exhibited at the Toronto and Telluride Film Festivals. Variety’s Todd McCarthy commented that the film offered “an utterly believable, highly specific evocation of a time and place”.

Duigan had directed a film on a morally weighted historical subject, for he had also helmed 1989’s Romero, the fact-based story of a Salvadoran bishop who was assassinated in 1980.

Duigan has also written several novels, his first being 1975’S Badge. Additionally, he penned the novelization of one of the scripts that he directed for Australian children’s television, 1985’s Room to Move, as part of a series of such novelizations called “Winners”.

Duigan's directed the film Lawn Dogs in 1997, as well as the next film Molly two years later. The film Paranoid came in 2000, and The Parole Officer in 2001. He also directed the movie Head in the Clouds in 2004.

Between 2005 and 2010, Duigan took time off from the film industry to work on a book on secular ethics, returning to Australia to direct Careless Love in 2011-2012.

Achievements

• Duigan's works were the winners of several prizes and awards. His 1974 film Mouth to Mouth became the winner of the Jury Prize at the Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards. Duigan’s 1981 ’s project Winter of Our Dreams won an Australian Writers Guild Award for his screenplay. The Year My Voice Broke won Duigan two Australian Academy Awards, one for writing and one for directing, and became popular worldwide. His mini-series Vietnam are multi-award winners.
  
  Duigan's Sirens became the Best Film at the St. Petersburg Film Festival. His movie Romero won the Humanitas Award, his movie Lawn Dogs won numerous prizes in European festivals, including the Grand Prix des Amériques from Montreal World Film Festival and Audience Choice Award from Stockholm Film Festival, both in 1997. He directed the film Head in the Clouds with Charlize Theron and Penélope Cruz, the film became the winner of four Genie Awards in Canada, and became the Best Film at the Milan International Film Festival.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Skelp the Aged

    (Mungo and Ethel live in genteel poverty in the decaying f...)

    2016
  • Room To Move 1987
  • Players 1988
  • Badge 1975
  • A Flying Life 2010

• movie

  • The Leading Man

    (A successful playwright falls in love with his new actres...)

    1998
  • Lawn Dogs

    (The film tells the story of a precocious young girl (Bart...)

    1997
  • Delirium

    (This spaghetti horror's storyline revolves around a forme...)

    1987
  • Sirens

    (When a painting is termed blasphemous, a young minister a...)

    1994
  • Paranoid 2005
  • Mouth to Mouth 1974
  • The Year My Voice Broke 1987
  • Romero 1989
  • Head in the Clouds 2004

Connections

Nammi Le is Duigan's wife.

Sister:

Virginia Duigan

Wife:

Nammi Le

References

• International Motion Picture Almanac
  1996