OBITUARY: PATRICIA LOVELL

The international film community is mourning the loss of Australian producer Patricia ‘Pat’ Lovell, who passed away Sunday at her home on Sydney’s northern beaches with her children by her side after a long battle with liver cancer. She was 83.

Lovell parlayed a successful career before the cameras in the early days of Australian television into an internationally recognised role as one of Australia’s most successful film producers.

Having endured an arduous childhood that saw her experience the deaths of several of her siblings and the subsequent divorce of her parents, Lovell discovered the magic of the cinema during term-breaks while attending private school in the central-west town of Armidale. Citing the French classics Les Enfants du Paradis and Le Belle et le Bete as her earliest influences, she was soon expressing her own creativity as an on-screen presenter for the children’s programming division of the national broadcaster, ABC.

It was here that she would create one of Australian televisions most iconic TV pairings, as ‘Miss Pat’ opposite the marionette ‘Mr Squiggle’, a role she played for 15 years (pictured, top). Other jobs included panellist duties as one of the original ‘beauties’ on the hugely successful advice-format panel show, Beauty and The Beast and a six year stint as host of the morning talk-show, Sydney Today.

By the mid 1970s, the well-educated Lovell sought to broaden her industry role. In 1973, she produced the controversial TV doco Monster or Miracle?, a critical assessment of the Sydney Opera House. She established contact with legendary Australian film pioneer Ken G Hall, who would become her mentor. Most importantly, she introduced herself to a young film director named Peter Weir, whose 1971 short film Homesdale had left a lasting impression. Lovell seized upon the opportunity to work with the like-minded Weir and produce an adaptation of one of her favourite works of Australian fiction, Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.

The film would be an international sensation, become the flagbearer for a period of film production known as ‘Australia’s Film Renaissance’ and remains to this day one of the most successful local productions of all time. Lovell teamed with director Ken Hannam for her follow-up films, the chamber piece Break of Day (1976) and the contemporary thriller Summerfield (1977), before reuniting with Weir to produce the breakout blockbuster, Gallipoli (1979). The first local production to secure a studio distribution deal in the US, it would set star Mel Gibson on course to global fame and ensure Weir (pictured, right, with his 1981 AFI Best Directing award) became one of the world’s most in-demand filmmakers.

Lovell did not follow her film to Hollywood, instead producing Ken Cameron’s version of Helen Garner’s dark, autobiographical novel Monkey Grip (1981), a troubled production that put her in hospital having suffered a nervous breakdown (a period she reflected upon in the 2004 short documentary, Aqua Profonda, which chronicles the making of the film). She would produce only two more works, the 1987 telemovie The Perfectionist (a collaboration with her long time friend, playwrite David Williamson), as well as Trevor Graham’s opera expose Tosca: A Tale of Love and Torture (2000).

Some of her most influential years in the Australian film industry were as Head of Producing Studies at The Australian Film, Television and Radio School, a role she undertook from 1996 to 2003. A holder of both an MBE ann AM for services to the film industry and recipient of the AFI Raymond Longford Award (2004) and National Film and Sound Archive’s Ken G Hall Film Preservation Award (2010), Lovell’s contribution to the stature of the Australian film industry on the world stage is immeasurable.