“I wanted to record, not so much about me, but my family’s history in Australia,” says Lex Marinos, the renowned Greek Australian actor, director and drama teacher these days, about his ‘irresponsible memoir’, a term he uses to introduce his new book titled Blood and Circuses.
He took the decision to write it just after he was in remission from leukaemia in an effort “to contemplate what my future would be and what my past had been”.
I met him in the foyer of the ABC studios in Melbourne, a space so familiar and close to his heart and career, as the ‘irresponsible memoir’ of his reveals, something that those who have followed his four decade career know very well.
He has been connected with the public broadcaster from his first steps in show business. He was there as a very active producer at the birth of Triple J, he contributed as a sports commentator and he served the organisation either on screen or behind the microphone in many instances. Recently though, through another work of his at the ABC, the TV series The Slap, this connection became a lot more close and personal. His role as Manolis gave Lex a different understanding to a very important and, for some years of his life, quite contentious relationship; the one with his father. It would be hard to escape the significance of the Manolis character in his life. After all, he is the one that he chooses to prologue his ‘irresponsible memoir’.
Blood and Circuses can be regarded by some as a book that documents the history of show business in Australia. Covering a time span from the early sixties and early seventies to today, Lex wanted to document the big social and cultural change that was happening back in those days all around the world and certainly in Australia. The public spheres that he entered through his professional experience and achievements are the ‘circuses’ in the life and the book of Lex Marinos. But it is not everything…
There is ‘blood’ in his book. This refers to his own personal story. It is the story of a Greek Australian boy born in Wagga Wagga, who could not understand racism, tried to live with it and eventually managed to deflate it, put it behind him without allowing it to haunt him for the rest of his life. “My story is not more remarkable than anyone else’s is. It is a migrant’s story. It is a typical Australian story, as we are all migrants in this country.”
His story is also the story of a grandson, a son and a father who tries to comes to terms with his ‘blood relationships’, not only with his immediate family per se but with the country and the culture of his ancestors.
There is, though, something quite remarkable about his ‘blood story’. And it is the fact that while he dedicates a certain amount of space and he goes into detail about his ‘circuses’ experiences and adventures, when it comes to the ‘blood’, his personal story, he narrates it in a succinct way.
That’s why it comes as no surprise when he confesses that his decision to visit the past was taken easily, to return there was a different and rather difficult process. When Lex shares with his audience some difficult personal moments, such as the issues he had with depression, a special affection he had for alcohol, his many absences from his four children and his wife, the moment he set foot for the first time in Rizomilos – his father’s village in Achaia, he makes small references. I point out to him that as a reader I saw that as an overt attempt to restrain his feelings.
“I am certainly a person that does not look back, so I found the book challenging in that sense. I am not a natural nostalgic, I do not look forward that much either. I tried not to make the book self serving,” he says.
He sounds calm, cool and collected now but when I ask him to expand on those ‘blood moments’ in his book a different Lex comes to the fore…
The ‘blood’ of the pages in his ‘irresponsible memoir’ migrates to his eyes when he talks about his father, his quest to understand him and find those binding threads that worked as a transformative mechanism that helped him to incarnate the persona of Manolis.
“My dad was a lovely man, very friendly, very compassionate, very happy. He loved life and I hope I inherited that from him. It is a great gift I inherited from him. I think he had a tough life. He is an important figure in the book for me. In an ironic way my work was about being lucky and he was a gambler who did not have luck. I feel I inherited all the good luck which he lacked. He was a bad gambler and the gambling broke up our family. That had a big impact for me at the time. I loved him very much and I didn’t want my parents to split up. I maintained though a great love for him and I suppose as I grew up I understood his shortcomings much better. It was mainly him that drove me through that role of Manolis. For me it was about my dad’s story and the story of his generation. The story of those early years migrants, who worked in the factories, trying to face the world. I knew they were always put down, described in a certain kind of way, and when they made a brief appearance they were always seen as silly, as peasants, or wogs. I wanted to try some way to give them a status and a dignity that I thought they deserved. So I went back to my dad’s life, I went through all his photos, I heard an interview that he gave before to Alexakis as part of an oral histories project, I wanted to absorb all that.”
He admits that the whole process was very hard emotionally. He wanted to be honest but also respectful about his father. In reality, subconsciously he was trying to bring his father back to life, through himself. “I used his key ring on set,” he says, and adds that it was not the only item of his father that he used while playing the role of Manolis.
And while we all observed Manolis’ character on screen, Lex was becoming Mr Fotis Marinopoulos. “I was sitting on the make-up chair, waiting for the moment that I could look in the mirror and not see myself, see my dad. And he emerged. And this is when I felt ready to do it. And this was happening every day. It was a process that I loved, very taxing but I loved it. It connected me with my father. Even now when I see a clip of it I say ‘oh that’s dad’. I can look at a photo of Manolis and I can find you a photo of my dad where they look the same. I did not do that consciously, it just happened.”
He admits that the catalyst for him in understanding his father was when he landed for the first time in his life in Greece.
As he goes on to describe that moment, there is no doubt that the blood connections with his ancestors go beyond the people themselves. The moment he set his foot on Greek soil he could not escape performing, neither wanted to escape the ritual of kissing it. He admits to the tears and to the unexpected feelings. He knew it immediately. “I felt apart. I was at home but in a different way,” he says. He struggles for words when he tries to describe the moment he met his auntie Chrysanthi. “Το αίμα, το αίμα…” said his theia, and there was no need for more words. That moment, those words, will never be forgotten.
“I never hide my Greekness, never did. I can’t,” he says and the … blood flows from his eyes back to his ‘Greek’ heart.
His eyes become happy as he adds… “I thought forward to the next generation, having grandchildren now it very important to me for them to know, to have some sense of where they came from. I really wanted to make sure. They were my immediate audience, and probably the most important reason I wrote this book”.
* Blood and Circuses: An Irresponsible Memoir is published by Allen & Unwin and you can find it in all good bookshops