Second chance Jack

At 80, Aussie screen legend Jack Thompson treasures every moment: his first memory of his mother by the water; a film for which it was worth defying death; and the woman who captured his heart and has held it tight for 50 years. He shares it all with Samantha Trenoweth.

- Samantha Trenoweth

His eyes betray his youthful heart: they’re bright, alert, sapphire blue. Yet his hands have seen ages: weathered and sometimes bruised, a side effect of chronic kidney disease. His voice is the same as ever: strong, resonant, with a hint of the larrikin; but there are also those measured vowels that suggest the store his parents put in education, and a penchant for reading poetry and debating in that long-ago childhood in a very different Australia.

Screen legend Jack Thompson is 80, and life has never felt more precious.

“Here I am,” he begins, sitting by a wide-open window. He surveys dewy garden, wooded hills, silver-white sand dunes beneath a blanket of scrub; pauses to hear the cackle of a kookaburra, the roar of the waves. “Here I am in this fortunate paradise by the sea. It’s a magic day.”

A year ago, the hills were ablaze behind this patch of paradise on the NSW mid-north coast. Jack and his partner of 50 years, Leona King, returned from Europe to find their garden strewn with charred leaves.

“Ten days later,” Jack says, “we were told to put everything we absolutely needed into a bag, and if the alarm came, we were to head east. If the fire had hit, we would have been standing in the Pacific Ocean with a little bag carrying, what I discovered in the end, was very little. What do you really need? All those things you’ve collected – the paintings, books, music – have to go. You realise that your life is much more important than the material objects in your life, although I was already well aware of that.”

That lesson was brought home to Jack powerfully in February 2018, when he was suddenly diagnosed with renal failure.