On a windy Monday afternoon, actor and singer Simon Burke stands outside the home where his family lived for his first 13 years of life, a two-storey cream Victorian terrace in inner-Sydney’s once raffish Paddington. Fifty years on, the wooden front door is unchanged.
At four, little Simon would sit on a letterbox here, pretending to play piano on this spiked wrought-iron fence. We gaze up at the jacaranda on the street, its purple spring flowers blooming above the power lines. “This was literally planted by my mum when I was born,” says Burke, 63. Since then Burke has played on stages from the Sydney Opera House to London’s West End, on screens big and small. “Look how old it is now! Old and gnarled and still puts on a good show, just like me.”
Good memories? “Mixed,” he says, demeanour turning quietly reflective as he stares into the middle distance. “It’s the house I grew up in, it’s the house my parents broke up in.”
His parents had been increasingly unhappy as Burke reached adolescence. “Things were pretty rough in my family life,” he says. It will later become clear as we talk that Burke felt distant from the world view of his father, a “tough cookie” cop at the local Darlinghurst police station.
Opportunity knocked here in 1971, when Burke, then aged nine, was asked by his next-door neighbour to carry some costumes she had designed for an amateur production of a children’s play, The Magic Travel Box. He walked on to the stage there and thought, “I wish I could be in this play”, and was promptly cast in his first role, as Roboy, a boy robot.
After more amateur productions, Burke was cast at 12 in his first professional play, Kookaburra, at the Nimrod theatre in Surry Hills, in 1974, directed by Richard Wherrett, and then at 13 by Fred Schepisi in the film The Devil’s Playground, shot in Werribee, south-west of Melbourne, in 1975, a role for which Burke became famous. Wherrett and Schepisi meanwhile became father figures.
“All three of those experiences, I felt like I was saved,” Burke reflects now. “I wasn’t the happiest kid, but then becoming an important cog in the wheel of that film, there were these adults who were amazing role models.”
We are about to set off walking the newspaper sales and delivery route Burke used to do around here as a kid with his best mate from Darlinghurst public school. Burke is glad to be home, in nearby Surry Hills, after touring for four years – most recently, he has put in 800 performances in Moulin Rouge! The Musical and more than 200 in Wicked. When we meet he is preparing for the upcoming Sydney premiere of two-part play, The Inheritance, in which Burke will perform the characters of Morgan and Walter, who suffered incalculable loss during the Aids crisis.
Burke and I turn up towards the frock shop on Oxford Street that once housed a newsagent. For three years beginning at age eight, Burke and his mate Steven “Fitzy” Fitzpatrick would drag a huge, yellow metal barrow here up these steep streets, to be filled with some 200 afternoon newspapers to sell at the local hospital and to the soldiers behind the sandstone walls of Victoria Barracks.
“Are you ready for this?” he says, as we climb steep Ormond Street. “This will show you how little a hill means to an eight- or nine-year-old.”
As we walk past a chic boutique – which was once “disgusting corner shop” – Burke is taken back to his time growing up in the area. He remembers his mother, a stenographer, and later a judge’s personal assistant. She would write to Burke a letter at age 13 when he was in the middle of filming The Devil’s Playground to tell him she and their father had separated.
It fell to Schepisi’s late second wife, Rhonda, to break the news on set, and comfort him as he cried. Burke had “slotted into” Fred and Rhonda’s family unit, living with them during the eight-week shoot. “I’ll never forget, Mum had spoken to them and written a letter to me. Rhonda gave me the letter and was there, waiting for me to … ” He trails off. Did he compartmentalise the loss and carry on filming? “I think I did. I had a big cry with her.”
Burke’s policeman father was then stationed near Sydney’s gay golden mile, Oxford Street, during an infamous period of police violence against the LGBTI+ community. “I shudder to think he might have been there [on duty] among the 78ers.” In June 1978, the first Sydney Gay Mardi Gras, as it was then called, ended in the arrests of 53 marchers at Kings Cross, with police beating some arrestees in the Darlinghurst cells. Burke wonders if his dad might have participated in the violence.
“I don’t think he would have shied away from any of the stuff that went on, to be quite honest.”
Burke then brightens, remembering the best attributes of the father taken by cancer at age 63. “I spent a lot of my 20s, 30s and 40s not realising what I got from him, which was his sense of humour, and my work ethic has a lot to do with him. It’s been an interesting journey, coming to that.”
Burke knew nothing about that first Mardi Gras, when he was 16, and the march would not be on his radar for a few years. He came to terms with being gay early – but only “to a certain degree”. “I was in the theatre and felt very comfortable with colleagues and friends and acquaintances, but even a millimetre out of that circle, I was extremely uncomfortable about being gay, and I was terrified that, particularly as a young, potentially leading man at that time about [losing roles].
“I’m absolutely certain it’s been an impediment with certain, particular people in particular jobs. I still think that’s the case, actually. That sucks. But I’m also grateful every day for having my long career, that I get to do mostly the stuff I want to do.”
Burke has taken on queer stage roles in the past, but rehearsing Walter’s monologue in The Inheritance, in which the character talks about one person after another dying, has taken Burke back to a period when he lost many of his own friends to Aids, including those who were “extremely close”.
“The first time I did it in front of the [fellow younger cast members] it was like PTSD, almost,” he says. “One of the guys said to me afterwards, ‘It must have been like being a soldier in the world war two.’ I’m not saying that I lost all my friends; no more than anyone else my age in my community, but I didn’t realise how much I’d blocked it out until I started working on this play.”
Just like the fictional character he plays, Burke himself landed at age 20 in New York’s Times Square in 1981, just prior to the HIV outbreak. Walter recalls in the play that one by one, people he knew were getting the “look”.
“That related to me in Sydney,” says Burke. “You’d run into someone you hadn’t seen in a few months, and he had the ‘look’ … the sunken, sallow thing … I don’t want to overstate it, but I have to say it surprised me how much I had gotten on with life. Not so much [forgetting] the people you’d lost, but what life was like then.”
We round the corner back to Burke’s childhood home. He lifts his left hand with its silver engagement ring when I ask whether he has plans to marry magazine art director Peter Citroni, his partner now for 20 years.
“I proposed five years ago, on our 15th anniversary, and he said four things as we were taking a walk along the beach,” Burke recalls with a smile. “He said, ‘Why are you acting weird? What’s that in your pocket? Get up. Maybe.’”
So, Burke won him over? He laughs. “Still unmarried,” he says. “A work in progress.”
• The Inheritance Part one and Part Two is at Seymour Centre Sydney 7 – 30 November 2024.
