Australian actor Colin Friels received the best male actor gong last week, as the Green Room Awards were announced.
The Victorian premier performing arts honour for the best actor was given to Friels for his portrayal of painter Mark Rothko in Melbourne Theatre Company’s Red, directed by the well known Greek Australian director Alkinos Tsilimidos.
The master of American abstract expressionism and a tormented artist, Mark Rothko is the subject of the play Red.
“The performances are the great strength of Alkinos Tsilimidos’s production,” it was said in the Herald Sun review of the play.
This is not the first time Tsilimidos and Friels have worked together – in 2004, Tsilimidos directed Friels in his role as a middle-class man who willingly joins St Kilda’s homeless ranks in the feature film Tom White.