For a man who was supposed to be dead next month, Ian Smith looks good. Astoundingly good: huge smile, glowing skin, that famous wobbly chin. There is only one visible clue that he has terminal cancer: a freshly shaved head, over which he frequently rubs his hand. Chemotherapy left him with “an awful half shaggy, half bald look”, so he buzzed it all off. “First time I’ve been bald since I was a baby,” he says, happily. “Apart from no hair, you can’t tell I’m sick at all.”
Smith is among Australia’s most recognisable actors, although you may not know him by his name. Charlie Brooker once described him as “probably the friendliest face on television – a cross between 10 Toytown mayors and a baby”. Perhaps you know him as Harold Bishop from Neighbours. Smith joined the cast in 1987, two years after the show launched, and became one of its longest-serving members, appearing in more than 2,100 episodes over five decades.
Harold had the most spectacular storylines. He was swept out to sea and returned five years later with no memory. He almost strangled a guy to death. He had a stroke, which temporarily turned him into a peeping tom. He survived cancer, car accidents, a heart attack. He was a Christian white-bread suburban patriarch, decency personified – and an audience favourite. When the cast flew to the UK to perform in the 1988 Royal Variety show, it was at the personal request of the queen mother, a huge Neighbours fan: “She shook my hand and said: ‘Oh Mr Smith, I do enjoy your Harold.’” George Harrison once came up to say hello: “And he asked for my signature!” Smith says, delighted. “For his niece.”
Neighbours was a hit in Australia, but a bigger one in the UK, launching the international careers of Kylie Minogue, Guy Pearce, Margot Robbie and Jason Donovan. While other actors came and went, Smith was always Harold. When he and Pearce returned for the finale in 2022, he told Pearce: “I could have been an actor.” Pearce laughed, but Smith wasn’t entirely joking: “I saw so many good actors come and go – but they always go. My father had instilled in me to never walk away from money. And the money was very good. To be in work, I learned, is a privileged position. And to be in permanent work, with holidays for Christmas, is fantastic.”
By the time he realised the world saw him only as Harold, “it was too late. I had been on the show too long. I would love to play something outlandish, like a vampire or a serial killer,” he says wistfully. “But all the people in casting today were brought up with Harold – one even told me that was the reason I was being typecast.” Did he make peace with that? “Unwillingly,” he snorts.
Smith is nothing like dithery Harold: he is a cheeky old thesp, who wants nothing more than to talk about his days in the theatre, touring Gilbert and Sullivan or doing pantos in the UK. “Wonderful work. I remember this one kid in York – on opening night, I went out and he yelled: ‘It’s behind you!’ I said: ‘What’s behind me?’ and he said: ‘Your career!’ Apparently, he did it every year.”
Smith dialled back his involvement in Neighbours in 2007, then left the show to go travelling with his wife, Gail, in 2009. Over the following decade, he returned for a few short stints to fund their travels and came back for the final episode. When Amazon surprised everyone by rebooting the show, he returned for a few episodes, before signing on again as a regular in May 2024. It seemed Smith was never quite done with Harold – but, then again, neither were we.
Then, in December 2024, Smith announced he was leaving Neighbours again, this time for good: he had been diagnosed with pulmonary pleomorphic carcinoma, a rare and aggressive lung cancer. His doctor cried when he delivered the news. Smith collapsed: “I thought I would be stronger, but I am as a weak as any human.” He began doing “very dramatic things, like looking at every sunset, watching children play. The week before, I would have killed them!” he says, with a twinkle in his eye.
Smith was told he would be dead by March. “Dying does change how you live,” he says. How has he changed? “I vainly say I am a better person now, but I think I am more forgiving, more understanding. It is a pity that I couldn’t have come to all these realisations [before] I was sick – I could have done somebody some good in the world.”
He began chemotherapy and immunotherapy, a newer treatment that uses your immune system to fight the cancer. Remarkably, just after he revealed his cancer to the world, his doctor called with good news. He jabs at his phone and shows me his first scan, two tumours blazing red in his chest. He then shows me his latest scan. It’s startlingly clear, without a speck of red in sight.
“That’s why I’ve got this solid grin on my face,” he says. “Apart from being 86, I feel good. I’m in no pain. I know how strange that sounds.” Suddenly, he has more time than he thought; he is mulling over buying an electric car and he has just got a new cat, named Sisi (“after the Hungarian empress”).
“I know I have cancer, because doctors keep telling me I have it,” he says, smiling. “I may get very sick again one day. But I have lived the most privileged life.”
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Smith was raised by working-class parents in Williamstown, now a boojie seaside suburb in Melbourne. He was a Walter Mitty type, “always the hero of my daydreams”. He had the “most spoiled childhood” and “the best education I didn’t want”. His parents, Connie and Gordon, were “beautiful people”: even though neither of them had a flashy bone in their bodies, they encouraged their teenage son when he began performing in amateur musical theatre.
“I was in heaven,” he says wistfully. “I had been working in a warehouse and here were young people who talked about the things I thought about – loveliness, beauty, poetry, how a piece of art could affect you. At work, it was all about pies and sheilas. It was a revelation; it was the start of my life.”
Smith was a natural on stage: his first role (in Oklahoma!) was in the chorus; by his second (Carousel), he was the lead. He was “a very romantic, impressionable, randy little bugger”, constantly falling in love with his co-stars. “I thought I looked old-fashioned, but some of the girls later told me I was very good-looking. I had such a big head. It took a long time for me to become this perfect,” he jokes.
How did he meet his wife? “This won’t make me sound like a very nice person,” he warns. “At my ex-fiancee’s birthday.” Smith was performing in Fiddler on the Roof in Melbourne; his fiancee was working as an usher at another theatre, with Gail. “I walked in and, honestly, it was like a dreadful, soppy American soap – we saw each other and that was it. The next night, I went into the show and told everyone I had just met the future Mrs Smith. They all laughed at me!
“Gail was the biggest softie under the sun,” he says, tearing up. They were married for 51 years, until her death from pancreatic cancer in 2019. “I discovered I knew very little and she taught me everything. She taught me how to be a decent human being. I was caught up in being a star.”
It was “the most beautiful marriage”, he says. They never had children “because we found out what caused them”. He is joking, but they never wanted them.
“Gail and I just didn’t suffer – and I used the word deliberately – maternal or paternal instinct,” he says. “We had completely different childhoods. Gail was one of nine; I was one of one. She was always trying to escape her family – all through our marriage, she loved being one of two.”
But for all their happiness, Smith suffered from depression and panic attacks. “I was going to a shrink about it and he said: ‘You know, you are so typical of someone who was adopted,’” he recalls. “I went back a week later and said: ‘Guess what!’”
That week, his mother, Connie, called unexpectedly. She was about to undergo hip surgery and was worried that she wouldn’t survive. She told her 54-year-old son that he was adopted.
Smith doesn’t know what happened next. “I think I passed out, standing up. One day, I was Ian Smith, born in 1938, this is my mum and this my dad. All of a sudden, that is not my mum and that is not my cousin and my grandma wasn’t my grandma. Everyone had lied to me. And I hated them all. They were asked not to tell me. But I hated them.”
At first, he didn’t want to know who his biological mother was. Eventually, he changed his mind. He went to an organisation that specialised in helping adopted children affected by past adoption practices, which tracked down his mother.
Her name was Peg Kline. She was only 14 years older than her son; she had been raped by her older brother’s friend when she was 13 and he was 26. “He was a paedophile and a rapist,” Smith says, bluntly. When Kline went into labour, the nurses held a blanket over her lower half and whisked him out of the room before she could see him.
Smith wrote her a letter. The first time Kline laid eyes on her son, he was a greying, middle-aged man, although they both felt relief at their resemblance; same watery blue eyes, same fleshy face. “There was nothing of my father left,” Smith says.
Kline was married and had adult sons; Smith, always the only child, now had half-brothers. But he never developed a filial connection with Kline; she was just a good friend, until her death in 2005. “I never learned to love her,” he says. “I never called her mother. I think she would have loved that, but I couldn’t do it.”
***
Smith got into television after he noticed that the actors who turned up to theatre rehearsals had better cars than he did. It turned out they all did television. He promptly made his way through several huge Australian shows: Homicide, Bellbird, Matlock Police, Division 4.
He was still plugging away when a friend asked if he might try his hand as a script editor on Prisoner, a popular 1980s Australian soap set in a women’s prison. Smith edited the scripts, but also acted in it and even became an associate producer. On the final day, the creator, Reg Watson, thanked Smith for his time and asked if he would “care for a little part” in his new show, Neighbours.
The five-week part was Harold, the childhood sweetheart of an established character, Madge Ramsay. Smith was desperate for the work: “Some people say you must suffer for your art – bullshit! If it is easy, you have a licence to try a few things, rather than just being desperate.”
He played Harold for two uneventful weeks when, suddenly, the entire camera crew laughed at one of his takes. “They are a hard bunch to make laugh. I thought: what the hell did I just do? So I asked. One of them said: ‘Smithy, you were a silly old fart.’ I said: ‘Will you tell me if I do it again?’ So we went again, they all laughed and I said: ‘Right, I’ve got it.’ And that was Harold.” A week later, he got his first 12-month contract.
He played Harold for four years, until 1991, when the character was swept out to sea. In reality, Smith had been sacked – which he discovered by reading the storylines and realising Harold was no longer in them. “I was very angry. How could they do it without me? Don’t they know who I think I am?” he says, faux grandly. It was soon after this that he found out he was adopted.
“I went down the gurgler. Way, way down,” he says, miming self-harm. Did he ever hurt himself? “No, no. But I went down the deepest, darkest hole and all the black dogs were waiting down there for me.”
Gail saved him. “I can’t tell you what she did for me. She was beyond human,” he says, wiping his eyes.
What was it like returning as Harold five years later? “Fantastic!” he says. “Because I still had my raw – and I mean raw – nerves working for me. I was playing a man who was totally messed up in the head, and I was so messed up. My black dog had pups and they were all black, too.”
When Smith met the qualifications for voluntary assisted dying (VAD) last year, a pharmacist rang and asked if he would like the drugs sent to his home, to keep for the day he decided to die. “And I said no,” he says. “I’m awfully glad I did, too, because there have been times I would have taken it. I really would have. And I would have missed out on that wonderful day in December when I was told of my progress. My first thought was: ‘My God, I could have been dead.’ And I would have been, if I’d had the mixture at home.”
Smith “wholeheartedly” approves of VAD, having watched his parents, birth mother and wife die of cancer: “I just disagree with it being left in the home. For so many reasons – you could be robbed! It is as good as a loaded gun.”
His life expectancy was first moved to this Christmas and is now Christmas 2026. “I am in this funny, vacuous place,” he says. “They can’t say the cancer has gone – in fact, they mustn’t, because it has come back in other people and they have died of it. But honestly, if they told me it had come back now, I would be ready this time.”
Does he feel proud of his life? “You can’t help but be,” he replies. Recently, a film crew who are making a documentary about his experience with VAD were told their funding application was approved because Smith was “culturally significant”.
“Culturally significant!” Smith crows. “I rang my agent and said: ‘I give you permission to tell your friends that you knew me.’ He said: ‘God, I was hoping they wouldn’t tell you.’”
• In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978
• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland and 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
