Arthur DignamFilmography

Sydney: A Story of a City

Actors: Paul Mercurio, Mitch Mathews, Penne Hackforth-Jones, Arthur Dignam

Synopsis: Produced in the run-up to Sydney's 2000 Olympic Games, this film is an unapologetic publicity piece for one of the world's most beautiful cities. A sharp Englishwoman (Lucy Bell) returns to Australia seeking her family's history. Along the way she meets her Great Aunt Claire, who tells her about Read More

Dating the Enemy

Synopsis: A pair of disparate battling lovers get a chance to live in each other's shoes in this lively Australian sex comedy. Though they have been together over a year, Tash and Brett have reached a point where they believe that neither understands the other. Tash is a serious, highly intelligent science Read More

Escape from Jupiter

Synopsis: Aimed at the ten- to 18-year-old demographic group, the Australian-Japanese science fiction series Escape From Jupiter actually began on the Jupiterian moon of Io, where a mining colony of Earthlings was located. Forced by a series of devastating volcanic eruptions to vacate Io immediately, a Read More

Nostradamus Kid

Actors: Noah Taylor, Miranda Otto

Synopsis: This genial Australian coming-of-age film is based on the experiences of its narrator, writer and director Bob Ellis. The first part of the film covers the difficulties teenaged Ken (Noah Thomas) has at a church summer camp run the the Seventh Day Adventists; he is not "with the program," and Read More

Isabelle Eberhardt

Actors: Mathilda May, Tchéky Karyo, Peter O'Toole, Richard Moir, Arthur Dignam

Synopsis: Isabelle Eberhardt dramatizes the tragic true story of the iconoclastic Swiss-born writer, who gained notoriety for both her lifestyle and her work in North Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. Eberhardt (Mathilda May) began dressing as a man and converted to Islam in her teens. As the Read More

The Dreaming

Actors: Arthur Dignam, Penny Cook, Gary Sweet, Laurence Clifford, Ktistina Nehm

Synopsis: In keeping with its title, the Australian sci-fier The Dreaming has all the earmarks of an extended hallucination. A young doctor experiments in mind-expanding drugs. While doing so, he accidentally discovers an additional dimension where dreams are reality and vice versa. Will he ever escape Read More

Shadow of the Cobra

The Right Hand Man

Actors: Rupert Everett, Hugo Weaving, Catherine McClements, Arthur Dignam, Jennifer Claire

Synopsis: Harry Ironmaster (Rupert Everett) is an aristocratic and wealthy young man, which in his time and place should put him pretty much on top of the world. However, he is responsible for a horse-drawn coach accident in which his father is killed and he himself loses an arm. Not only that, but his Read More

Burke and Wills

Actors: Jack Thompson, Nigel Havers, Greta Scacchi, Matthew Fargher, Ralph Cotterill

Synopsis: Based on a true story, this film tells the tale of Robert O'Hara Burke (Jack Thompson) and William John Wills (Nigel Havers), who in 1860 set forth to create the first accurate maps of the interior region of the Australian continent. To this end, Irish explorer Burke and British scientist Wills Read More

Those Dear Departed

Actors: Garry McDonald, Pamela Stephenson, Su Cruickshank, John Clarke

Synopsis: Max Falcon (Garry McDonald) is a pompous and immensely popular actor who stars in "Freud The Musical" in this offbeat comedy. His wife Marilyn (Pamela Stephenson) is having an affair with her Polish chauffeur Richard (Marian Dworakowski). The two conspire to murder Max by putting broken glass in Read More

The Everlasting Secret Family

Actors: Arthur Dignam, Mark Lee, Dennis Miller, Heather Mitchell, Paul Goddard

Synopsis: "Everlasting Secret Family" is the name of a sub-rosa homosexual brotherhood in this riveting Australian film. Two of the ESF members are a middle-aged politician (Arthur Dignam) and a boarding-school student (Mark Lee). The younger man begins chafing at the "plaything" status imposed upon him by Read More

King Solomon's Mines

Synopsis: H. Rider Haggard's popular adventure novel King Solomon's Mines has been translated to the big screen on several occasions. Tom Burlinson and Arthur Dignam contribute their vocal talents to this 1986 animated version of the venerable tale of hunting treasure and lost explorers in darkest Africa. Read More

Comrades

Actors: Robin Soans, William Gaminara, Stephen Bateman, Philip Davis, Jeremy Flynn

Synopsis: Set in the 1830s, this historical drama stars Robin Soans as George Loveless, a Methodist minister whose flock is a group of working families in Tolpuddle, a small town in the British Southwest. Most of the workers in the community are under the thumb of Frampton (Robert Stephens), a ruthless land Read More

The Schippan Mystery

The Return of Captain Invincible

Actors: Alan Arkin, Christopher Lee, Kate Fitzpatrick, Bill Hunter, Graham Kennedy

Synopsis: This patchy, uneven combination of fantasy and musical comedy is hilarious in parts and embarrassing in others, though the premise has great potential in itself -- a screwball Captain Invincible is out to save the world from his nemesis, Mr. Midnight, the white supremacist. Captain Invincible (Alan Arkin Read More

The Dismissal

The Wild Duck

Actors: Liv Ullmann, Jeremy Irons, Lucinda Jones, John Meillon, Arthur Dignam

Synopsis: Director Henri Safran adapts Henrik Ibsen's stage play to an Australian setting and a turn-of-the-century ambience in this uneven presentation of an illicit love and its consequences. Harold (Jeremy Irons) is a somewhat over-the-edge photographer who has lost out at a career in the sciences. His Read More

Duet for Four

Actors: Wendy Hughes, Michael Pate, Diane Cilento, Gary Day

Synopsis: When a Melbourne toy manufacturer discovers his wife is having an affair, he can't really get too distressed. After all, he's having an affair as well. However, when his mistress decides she wants to get married, his life becomes complicated and his business affairs have to be put on hold. ~ Tana Read More

We of the Never Never

Actors: Angela Punch McGregor, Arthur Dignam, Tony Barry, Tommy Lewis, Lewis Fitz-Gerald

Synopsis: Even today, the Australian outback (the never-never of the title) is a daunting place to be left alone. In 1901, it was even more rugged and wild. In this artful drama, Jeannie Gunn (Angela Punch McGregor), a very genteel and citified Victorian-era newlywed, joins her husband in the Northern Read More

Strange Behavior

Actors: Michael Murphy, Louise Fletcher, Dan Shor, Fiona Lewis, Arthur Dignam

Synopsis: Dead Kids, aka Strange Behavior, is a creepy exercise from director Michael Laughlin--who conceived this as part one of an abortive "Strange Trilogy" which also included 1983's Strange Invaders. Although lensed in New Zealand, the film is set in a sleepy American town, in which a series of gory Read More

Grendel, Grendel, Grendel

Actors: Peter Ustinov, Keith Michell, Arthur Dignam, Ed Rosser, Bobby Bright

Synopsis: In the late 1970s, Grendel by John Gardner was a highbrow best-seller that everyone with pretensions to intellectual sophistication was reading. In it, the author retold the epic Anglo-Saxon hero myth of Beowulf from the point of view of the monster the hero killed, rather than from the hero's Read More

Cathy's Child

Actors: Michelle Fawdon, Alan Cassell, Bryan Brown

Synopsis: Based on a true story, this drama stars Michelle Fawdon as Cathy Baikas, a woman of Greek heritage who lives in Sydney, Australia with her three-year-old daughter. When the girl's father kidnaps the child and takes her back to Greece with him, Cathy discovers the authorities can do little to help Read More

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

Actors: Tommy Lewis, Freddy Reynolds, Ray Barrett, Jack Thompson, Peter Carroll

Synopsis: Based on a novel by Thomas Keneally, which was in turn inspired by actual events, this drama is a shocking indictment of the racism inflicted on the indigenous people of Australia. Jimmie (Tommy Lewis) is a half-white, half-aborigine young man raised by a Methodist minister. Feeling outcast among Read More

The New Avengers: Sleeper

Actors: Patrick Macnee, Gareth Hunt, Joanna Lumley, Keith Buckley, Arthur Dignam

Synopsis: Government scientists develop a knockout gas, designed to peacefully quell terrorist uprisings. The gas, and its antidote, inevitably fall into the Wrong Hands, those hands belonging to a gang of crooks who plan to send all of London off to slumberland so that they can embark upon a wholesale Read More

Summer of Secrets

Actors: Arthur Dignam, Rufus Collins, Andrew Sharp, Kate Fitzpatrick

Synopsis: This off-beat comedy-drama from the director of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, follows two young lovers who end up marooned on a desert island. They find a seemingly abandoned beach house there and decide to pop in for a little lovemaking. They have no idea that their antics are observed by a Read More

The Devil's Playground

Actors: Arthur Dignam, Nick Tate, Simon Burke, Charles McCallum, John Frawley

Synopsis: Fred Schepsi wrote and directed this tense melodrama which takes place at a Roman Catholic boarding school. The film deals with the charged emotional tensions of a group of pubescent boys, who find their sexual urges stifled by the school's oppressive atmosphere. Depicting the chaste lifestyle of Read More

Between Wars

Actors: Judy Morris, Corin Redgrave

Synopsis: Corin Redgrave plays a highly principled Australian doctor in Between Wars. As indicated by the title, the film concentrates on Redgrave's activities while the world around him is engulfed in combat. Arthur Dignam and Judy Morris are also featured. Between Wars was originally produced for Read More

Jock Petersen

Actors: Jack Thompson, Jacki Weaver, Joey Hohenfels, Amanda Hunt, George Mallaby

Synopsis: This comedy follows the exploits of Tony Petersen (Jack Thompson), a mature married man with two children who decides to go back to school for an undergraduate degree. Tony has one problem, which he probably feels is only a minor complication: he is like catnip for women. Luckily for him, he likes Read More

Libido

Synopsis: Four Australian directors explore different angles of the title topic in this generally downbeat anthology. In "The Husband" a husband increases his arousal during lovemaking by imagining his wife in different sexual liaisons without realizing that his fantasy may based on fact. The second Read More