Timothy Spanos' Prisoner Queen was inspired by the cult serial Prisoner."Prisoner's Jude Kuring is an inspiration for many, writes Jake Wilson.
EVEN among the prostitutes, thieves and murderers who comprised the cast of the long-running Channel 10 serial Prisoner, Jude Kuring's hardbitten Noeline Bourke stood apart: a career criminal with a sneering underbite and an undisguised contempt for anyone not related to her by blood. Yet the force of Kuring's personality and larger-than-life acting style made Noeline an icon for a generation of gay men and women.
More than one generation, in fact. The 30-year-old Melbourne filmmaker Timothy Spanos says that when Channel 10 started showing re-runs of Prisoner late at night in the mid 1990s, the show became a cult favourite all over again among many of his friends.
Memories of that period inspired Spanos' film Prisoner Queen (2004), which will screen in a tribute to Kuring that begins at ACMI this weekend as part of the Midsumma Festival. The program also includes a couple of vintage Prisoner episodes, the colonial-themed rarity Journey Among Women (1977), and the pilot for Buck House, billed as the "world's first gay and lesbian sitcom".
One of the most talented Australian filmmakers to emerge in the past decade, Spanos recently completed post-production on his fourth low-budget feature, which involves "two boys from Boronia stealing from hard rubbish", and which he hopes will be screened at festivals later this year.
An unabashed connoisseur of vintage Australian TV, he's worked over the years with a number of Prisoner veterans, less by design than as a natural consequence of his tendency to write roles for older women. "I think every 40-plus actress in Australia appeared in Prisoner at one time or another," he says.
A flamboyant comedy-drama about role playing and the need for escape, Prisoner Queen features Spanos' regular collaborator Tim Burns in the lead role of Alex, who works in a cafe by day and by night goes to gay bars and clubs dressed as a Prisoner warder. In her first screen role for two decades, Kuring plays his dying mother, who appeared on the show many years before.
Spanos cast Kuring after meeting her at a party where they clicked instantly. "She's my Aunty Jude now," he says.
Full of praise for her ability to lose herself in a role, he describes her as a "real lady" who in person couldn't be less like her Prisoner Queen character, a warm-hearted but shameless old biddy whose idea of performance art involves sitting at a Carlton bus stop yelling obscenities at passers-by.
Now retired and living in Tasmania, Kuring made her name as a member of the legendary Australian Performing Group. Spanos ascribes the success of Prisoner in part to "the fact that they used a lot of theatre actors and wrote really meaty parts for them". "Women," he says, "weren't just the mother or the housewife or the sister or the secretary."
He admires the show's sympathy for society's underdogs, and the outrageous storylines that often broke new ground. As far back as 1979, Carol Burns won a best actress Logie for playing the lesbian bikie Frankie Doyle.
With equal relish, he recalls the occasion when Catherine Roberts (Margot McLennan) took instant revenge on the rapist of her 10-year-old daughter. "We see the girl coming out with a torn dress, a broken umbrella, and cuts and bruises," says Spanos. "And then her character runs him over several times, like she keeps reversing."
Alas, that age of innocent excess has seemingly gone for good. Asked if he could imagine running a soap opera of his own, Spanos is surprised by the question. "I think Neighbours would probably boost their ratings if they got me involved somehow." Channel 10, take note."
Tribute to Jude Kuring, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, tomorrow and Saturday, February 14. Prisoner Queen screens on February 14 at 4pm.
