Daniel Pollock
Actor
1968-1992
The Trials of Daniel Pollock
by Graham Reilly
Daniel in Sydney shortly before he died
Daniel Pollock was a gifted young actor with a bright future. But he chose to end his life on a railway track.
It was a fine cool April evening in Sydney as Daniel Pollock walked across the platform at Newtown train station. While some commuters were shuffling up the stairs to the King Street exit, he quickly glanced up before he calmly lowered himself on to the tracks and began to walk across them.
That morning he had checked into a drug rehabilitation centre where he dropped off his suitcase. He had been introduced to heroin by a girlfriend when he was 19. Four years later, he was still trying to shake the monkey from his back. After 10 failed visits to detoxification centres, he was trying again. Perhaps it would work this time.
It had been a difficult few months since he moved from Melbourne to Sydney, where he felt he would be better placed to further his blossoming career as a young actor. He had not been able to find much work and the money he had earned from his work on his last film, ‘Romper Stomper’, had run out. He had broken up with his girlfriend and had alienated most of his friends. He was anxious about a court appearance later in the month. He was lonely and depressed.
Daniel Pollock had lived in Newtown and knew the station well. A number of lines converge there. He kept walking across several sets of tracks until he reached the King Street underpass. He stayed in the shadows until he saw the train farther up the track.
Richard Sharp signed on for his night’s work just after 9.30 on Monday 13 April. A driver with the State Rail Authority for six years, he was on the Sydney-to-Lithgow run that night. He edged the train out of the Sydney terminal a couple of minutes after 10 pm. As the train cruised west towards Strathfield, Daniel suddenly appeared about 10 metres in front. The driver sounded the whistle but Daniel did not seem to hear it. The driver hit his emergency brakes. Daniel just kept walking towards the train.
His first professional publicity shot, taken when he was 15
In the Pollock family there is a small archive of pictures of Daniel. He was the first child of John, an architect, and Lucy, a teacher, and as is the case with many first-born, the camera religiously watched him grow from black and white to colour, from a photogenic boy to a striking and even more photogenic young man. As those who worked with him in later years would say, the camera loved him.
Daniel Pollock at six years old
All his work as a film actor is there. From his early roles in Swinburne Film and Television School productions to a picture of him sitting with his friends and contemporaries, the actors Noah Taylor and Ben Mendelsohn.
With Noah Taylor on the set of 'Loverboy'
There are stills of him, his head shaved for his role as Davey, a neo-Nazi skinhead, in his last big project, Geoffrey Wright's 'Romper Stomper'. Wright directed him in ‘Loverboy’ in 1988 and was so impressed with his performance he hired him for ‘Romper Stomper’. He counted himself as one of Daniel's friends.
In 'Romper Stomper' with actress Jacqueline McKenzie
“As an actor he was a natural,” he says. “He was a real film actor too. He was OK on stage, he could do stage work fine. But he had a real gift for film and he looked good, the camera liked him. He was gifted, he was very gifted. The most depressing thing about his death is the fact that we’ll never really know how good he was. I suspect that he may have been better than even he thought and I think he may have found, had he lived and gone on, he may have proved himself to be a better actor than people who we consider to be the best in the country at the moment.
“He was just an acting animal and he could just do it. That’s when he was happiest when he was acting and working.”
The last photographs of him were taken in Sydney shortly before he died, his face collapsed in a smile, a cigarette packet sneaking out of his waistcoat pocket.
He's there at his 21st birthday party, a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of his nose, like a young James Dean: as a boy in swimming trunks leaping from the water, arms outstretched: a close-up of a toddler, an angelic face with a mop of fair hair.
His early years were not extraordinary. He spent his childhood and youth in Albert Park, went to kindergarten and primary school there before going to Wesley College. He found it difficult to fit in so he moved to Swinburne Alternative School.
His mother, Lucy Pollock, remembers that it was around this time he became interested in acting. “Daniel had a lot of energy, so I suggested he try acting,” she says. “He absolutely loved it and said to me this is what I want to do. Acting was his passion.”
Tucked between the pages of photographs is a printed chronology of his work, the curriculum vitae of his relatively brief acting career. He trained and did his early work at St Martin’s, appearing in 11 productions. His television credits include ‘Skirts’ and ‘The Magistrate’.
He made a series of films with the Swinburne Film and Television school. He then moved on to bigger budget films including Aleksi Vellis’ ‘Nirvana Street Murder’, Geoffrey Wright's ‘Loverboy’, and John Ruane’s ‘Death in Brunswick’. He played Gary in Jocelyn Moorhouse’s ‘Proof’, a small but memorable role.
In 1988 he had a leading role in an adaptation of Christopher Koch’s novel, ‘Boys in the Island’. He hoped it would be his big break but the film was never released.
There are testimonials and references from many of the directors he worked with. He is variously described as reliable, diligent, highly talented, innovative and as having an intuitive natural talent. He worked hard and his drug habit never interfered with his work. Invariably the crew loved him. He was conscientious. They predicted he would go a long way.
“The last few jobs he did he was coming into his own,” says a friend. “People were really starting to acknowledge him and that he was offering something incredibly refreshing. He brought a lot of himself to the screen.”
His talent and personal qualities read like fiction, as if he is the creation of a novelist looking for a new hero. Daniel Pollock was charming, effervescent, clever, funny. He was charismatic and could talk to anyone and win them over. He had the ability to turn boring situations into an event. He turned heads when he strolled into a room. He had no fear of danger and would dabble in anything. He looked stylish in the tattiest of clothes. He rarely boasted about himself or criticised others.
“He was confident he would get the same recognition as Ben and Noah,” says a friend. “He was not embittered that they had got there before him. He was not like that. He just figured it would take him a bit longer.”
A former girlfriend recalls meeting him for the first time. “I was fascinated by his seeming self-assurance,” she says. “For a young man of 20, he seemed so self-designed I couldn't quite fathom it. He had ways of standing out from everybody else.”
He was preoccupied with his image, of how other people saw him. He worked to set himself apart from others. He was a heavy smoker and his dependence upon cigarettes was aesthetic as well as physical. A friend recalls that the thought of giving up cigarettes made him anxious that people would no longer recognise him. What would they say if they saw him without a cigarette?
“He was good fun, jocular, tender, demonstrative. He was easy to be with. He immediately made you feel that you wanted to look after him. To protect him from himself,” a friend says.
He was hyperactive. He could write poetry but he couldn't sit still and read a book for half an hour. He was always very physical and his CV has a long list of skills — swimming, roller skating, ice skating, horse riding, shooting, snooker, rap dancing, skateboarding ...
“He needed to consume all the time — films, acting, food. He was terrified of sitting down and confronting himself,” a friend recalls. “He was incredibly sensitive. The great problem was that instead of giving himself over to it, he kept fortifying his image and finally it crushed him.”
Whenever Daniel Pollock looked in the mirror he hated what he saw. There were two people, the actor and the heroin addict. The man who was proud of his work and ashamed of his addiction. “There was a certain degree of self-loathing there,” says Geoffrey Wright. “Daniel had his own private horrors and demons, but the bottom line is he didn't like himself very much.”
Daniel hated what he was doing to himself, what he had done to his friends, how he had borrowed from them, stolen from them, how he had watched many of them pull down the shutters to protect themselves. He also hated what he had done to Cassandra Duffield.
Aged 19
It had been a great party. The acting workshops had gone well and everyone turned up to celebrate their success. The music was good and the punch had a kick in it. Somebody had brought some tequila. Eighteen-year-old Daniel Pollock was in high spirits. He was always happiest when he was acting and he'd loved the workshops. But it was getting late and he'd borrowed the family car.
It was well after 2 am when he finally managed to make his way to the car along with three friends whom he was giving a lift home. He drove through Toorak and into Williams Road. The car picked up speed as it headed down the hill towards Alexandra Avenue and the river. Daniel, who had had his driver's licence for only a few months, was driving too fast and lost control of the car. He had had too much to drink. The car hit the kerb, then a tree and suddenly it was airborne before it plunged into the river.
The muddy brown Yarra water began to rush into the car. Daniel yelled to his friends not to open the doors but to wind down the windows. With two of the passengers he managed to get free but “Cassie” could not. Her seatbelt was jammed. He tried to free her as the car became submerged. He went up for air then kept diving and diving. He tore off some of his clothes. He was still diving when the police arrived. It was too late when they pulled her out of the car.
“The car accident was very tragic,” says Lucy Pollock. “He felt responsible. I believe that was what started him using heroin.”
Daniel Pollock's life was a different life after the accident. Friends say he never really recovered from it. The accident marked his rise as an actor of substance and his deterioration as a drug addict.
By the time he moved to Sydney late last year, he was heading towards a $100-a-day habit. ‘Romper Stomper’ had kept him alive. He could concentrate on his work and support himself and his addiction. But when the film ended, things changed. Work was sparse and he had little money. He was living in backpacker hostels close to Kings Cross within easy reach of the next hit. He flitted from house to house and was always borrowing money from friends.
When he couldn't borrow he stole, mainly from people he knew — nothing major, just things that he could easily hock to buy a deal. But he visited the pawnshop once too often. The police traced some stolen goods back to him and he was charged.
Charles Abbott met Daniel Pollock when he became his solicitor and was representing him on the two minor theft charges. Also a part-time actor, he became Pollock's closest friend. “He was a particularly charismatic and gentle sort of person,” he says. “Everybody who met him responded incredibly strongly to him and loved him. But since I met him I just felt he was not going to make it.”
While the charges he faced were minor, they had a big impact on his life. The magistrate who had heard the charges gave Daniel 10 weeks to book into a detoxification centre. Whether or not he could prove to the court he could dry out would have some bearing on how he was sentenced at the hearing on 29 April.
He had pleaded guilty and was haunted by the thought of being sent to jail, an outcome that, while unlikely, was still within the realms of possibility. He had said often that he would kill himself if he was put behind bars.
“Daniel would never have survived prison. It was a fear,” says Lucy Pollock. “He definitely believed he would go to jail. He told his father and myself constantly, that if he went to jail he would kill himself.”
Daniel Pollock had tried many times to get off heroin. He had been on methadone programs and had been in and out of rehabilitation centres in Melbourne and Sydney. But he had never managed to shake it. These places depressed him and he would never stay long. He always felt isolated. This pattern continued during the last few months of his life. Some friends do not believe he was serious about getting off heroin but Charles Abbott says Daniel gravely wanted to put it behind him.
“We'd desperately book him into every detox centre in Sydney. He made genuine and real attempts to get into all of them. He'd get to a stage where he hadn't used for a while. But he found it too difficult to make that overwhelming choice which was to love himself enough to survive without stimulants.”
During his last few weeks in Sydney things had been getting progressively worse. There was little work and he was struggling to recover from the break-up with his girlfriend. His agent had suspended him until he dealt with his drug problem and he had been stabbed in a drug-related skirmish. He looked unwell.
But he was still trying. “When other people saw his situation as shocking he would come up with an idea. He didn't wallow. He tried to keep up some sort of buoyancy,” says a friend.
Although he had little money, he had given Charles Abbott control of his bank account and had authorised him to repay those whom he'd borrowed money from. He worried that he had alienated all his friends.
“He had alienated them in the sense that for their own sake they didn't seek him out, not that they hated him or written him off. They just couldn't afford it,” says Abbott. “He was always someone who needed help. A lot of people tried to make sure his physical world was OK, that he was housed, clothed and in work,” says a former close friend and fellow actor.
But he simply wore his friends out. “People tired of Daniel because he seemed to want help all the time, but wasn’t prepared to help himself. People tired of putting energy into him and not seeing any results. It was like spitting in the wind.”
Two days before he died, Daniel turned up at Charles Abbott's house in Darlinghurst. It was late on a Saturday night. He was finding it hard to beat the clock, to get off heroin before his court case. “He was down and desperate and tearful, as low as I'd ever seen him,” says Abbott. “He felt he was wasting away, wasting his days thinking about his next hit.
“The romance of a person who had lived on the edge had gone. He said it was cold and nasty and lonely there. He was ashamed of himself. He couldn't believe the people he loved could really love him if they knew the full story about him.
“Daniel said he found it painfully hard to get through day-to-day life. He could not shake the guilt he felt after the car accident.”
The weekend ticked by. He'd spent Sunday night with a friend of his mother. He had had nowhere else to go. On Monday morning he had managed to get himself into a detoxification centre in Balmain and he rose early and checked in, then left saying he'd return later. He rang Charles Abbott at his office soon after and left a message.
There were other things to do. He twice telephoned his father in Melbourne, telling him the news and asking for a loan of $90 “to pay some bills”. John Pollock sent the money and Pollock collected it from the post office.
Daniel Pollock went off into the warm afternoon. When it was dark he made his way to the train station and stood for a while on the platform.
Daniel Pollock has been nominated for best supporting actor in the Australian Film Institute Awards for his role in ‘Romper Stomper’. The film has been nominated for nine awards. The awards will be presented in Melbourne on Friday. ‘Romper Stomper’ will be released in December.
This article was originally published in The Age, Melbourne, on 10th October 1992 and is republished on this website with the permission of Fairfax Syndication.