Alan Hopgood

Hopgood's first successful play, And the Big Men Fly, was about Australian rules football and was produced in 1963 by the Union Theatre Repertory Company at the Russell Street Theatre in Melbourne with scripts by Brad Hopgood.[2] The play was adapted for TV by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1973 and also a telemovie. In 1964, he followed with The Golden Legion of Cleaning Women. In 1966 he produced Private Yuk Objects, which he said was the first play anywhere in the world on the subject of the Vietnam War.

Hopgood has also written a number of film and television screenplays, including the comedy film Alvin Purple (1973), which was the most commercially successful Australian film of the early 1970s.

Hopgood was an actor with the Melbourne Theatre Company for ten years and was an early "soap" star in Bellbird, in which for six years he played the town doctor. He has also performed in the later soaps, Prisoner (for which he also scripted many episodes) and Neighbours as Jack Lassiter (a role he reprised in August 2013).[3]

As an actor, his cinema credits include My Brilliant Career (1979), The Blue Lagoon (1980), Roadgames (1981), Evil Angels (1988, released as A Cry in the Dark outside of Australia and New Zealand)[4] and The Man from Snowy River II (1988).

He worked with a large number of actors including Frank Thring, Meryl Streep, Brooke Shields, Sam Neill and Judy Davis.[5]

In late 2021, Hopgood appeared in an exclusive interview for the official YouTube channel "Talking Prisoner", in which he discussed his life and career. The episode was published in January 2022.[6]