Alan Hopgood has been one of Australia's leading playwrights since 1963, when the first of his successful plays for the
Melbourne Theatre Company, And The Big Men Fly, was presented. He followed this in 1964 with The Golden Legion
of Cleaning Women and, in 1966, the first play in the world on the subject of the Vietnam War, Private Yuk Objects. Following
the success of And The Big Men Fly, Alan adapted it for television, followed by a sequel, And Here Comes Bucknukle.
Then followed
a career in film and television, winning Australian Writer's Guild awards for And The Big Men Fly, The Cheerful Cuckold and The Bush Bunch
and writing several feature films, including Alvin Purple and the documentaries,
The Prophecies of Nostradamus and The Fountain Of Youth.
His collaboration with Michael Easton produced the children's opera
Little Redinka for the Victorian State Opera and Petrov
- The Musical for the Summer Music Festival in 1992 and the musiographies Oh, Mr Porter!, Rogers And Hart and Callas - The Woman.
He collaborated with Michael Harrison to produce
The Mario Lanza Story for Mietta's
in 1994-5, the Melbourne Concert Hall and a tour of Queensland.
As an actor, Alan spent ten years with the MTC; six years as the popular Doctor
Reed in Bellbird, and then created the characters Wally
in Prisoner and Jack Lassiter in Neighbours.
His performance as Rumkowski in Avraham Cykiert's
mono-drama The Emperor of the Ghetto played seasons in Melbourne and won him the
Best Actor at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in 1994. He has now performed the play 150 times, eighty of them for schools.
In 1996, his book about his surgery for prostate cancer, Surviving Prostate Cancer: one man's journey, was published to wide acclaim. As a result,
Alan has addressed many Conferences, Men's Health and Rotary nights and, seeing the need for information, he adapted his story into a comedy about
men's health, intimacy and cancer, For Better, For Worse, which premiered at Chapel Off Chapel in Melbourne in 1997 and then toured
regional areas in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. The video of the play is regularly shown by the Cancer Council,
most importantly in rural areas, followed by a forum and discussion.
In March 2000, Alan's play, The Carer, starring Charles 'Bud' Tingwell,
premiered at Chapel Off Chapel in Melbourne. The play has been widely praised for its sensitive treatment of loss and Alzheimer's
disease and its warmth and humour. The play had two seasons at the Ensemble in Sydney and then toured Australia twice, with
Bud giving 260 performances. It was also filmed for video. In 2005, the play toured New Zealand with Ray Henwood and had a
brief season in Washington DC. Alan now performs the play, having toured to Cairns, Devonport as well as giving several performances in Melbourne.
In 2004, Alan was commissioned to adapt the War Diaries of Sir Edward "Weary"
Dunlop for McPherson Touring and this
play premiered in Canberra in February 2005, prior to seasons in Melbourne and Tasmania.
In January 2005, Alan was made a Member of the Order of Australia
for service to the performing arts as an actor, playwright and producer and to the community through raising awareness of men's health issues.
Currently, Alan's plays on health themes now number six, adding stories with the themes of widowhood, diabetes, geriatric sex and palliative care to prostate cancer. Again, all these plays are followed by forums and tour rural areas.
Alan has two new screenplays in pre-production - The Whistler and I Hear Voices.
For more information, please email: alanhopgood@hotmail.com