Daniel Pollock
Actor
1968-1992
Lived Fast, Died Young
Actor Daniel Pollock, Romper Stomper’s sensitive skinhead, seemed destined for stardom—but couldn’t escape his heroin hell - by Larry Writer
Weeks before his death, Pollock sported a knife wound on his forearm inflicted by a heroin dealer.
In Romper Stomper, Geoffrey Wright’s savage hymn to inner-city neo-Nazi street gangs, Davey, the sensitive skinhead, gets the girl and lives to fight another day. But life does not always imitate art. Unlike Davey, there was no happy ending for Daniel Pollock, the acclaimed young Melbourne actor who portrayed him. On a chilly night last April, his life ruined by heroin, Pollock ended his pain by walking calmly into the path of a Sydney commuter train.
Today, the love-it-or-loathe-it film plays to full houses around the country. Reviewers—whatever their misgivings about the movie—rave about Pollock’s performance as a modern-day warrior who triumphs over Russell Crowe’s white-hot-evil Hando.
But six months after his death, Daniel Pollock’s family and friends are still mourning a life that careened out of control. They tell how tragedy turned a prodigiously talented free spirit into a desperate addict and thief who, by his final days, had lost his career and self-respect and alienated all those who cared for him.
Actress Jacqueline McKenzie tried to help Pollock. “He knew he had hurt people he loved. I just live for a sign to tell me that he’s finally resting.”
“I loved him. I was besotted by him,” says Jacqueline McKenzie, the elfin actress who plays Pollock’s girlfriend Gabe in the film and became his real-life lover during the shoot.
McKenzie, 25, recalls the first time she saw Pollock on the screen, in a small role in Geoffrey Wright’s 1988 film, Lover Boy. “I thought, My God, that guy is the most amazing actor and the most amazing presence I have ever seen in Australian film.”
Arriving for rehearsals of Romper Stomper, McKenzie was startled when she encountered shaven-headed Pollock in the flesh. “He was bald as an egg and looked so bad, but he was a very caring person. He was looking out for me the whole time on the set because I had never done film. He was worried about me. I’d come to Melbourne from Sydney and if I was homesick he'd take me for coffee.”
Three weeks into filming last August, McKenzie had fallen in love with Pollock. Soon after, she learned he was hooked on heroin. She won’t say what triggered her discovery. So scarifying is the memory that as she discusses Pollock in the hotel in Melbourne, where she’s filming a TV series, she begins to cry. “When I found out, I was shocked. I had no experience with drugs at all. We’re talking on the one hand about someone with a vile heroin addiction, and on the other about this person with so much energy and care...drugs brought out the worst in him, like they would in anyone,” she says. “The ugliness was certainly him. But the overriding thing was that he was a good person and a phenomenal actor. He was just bloody born to act.”
“Daniel was fascinated by the myth that surrounded James Dean after his death. He loved the idea that an actor could become immortal on film,” says his mother, Lucy Pollock.
“Daniel was highly artistic at an early age,” says his mother, Lucy Pollock, 51, a teacher. “He loved to show off and in kindergarten got to play Joseph in the Nativity scene.” Recalling Daniel’s early years at the family’s lovely old house in Melbourne’s trendy, middle-class Albert Park, she describes the eldest of her three children as a “magical” and “jolly” lad. “But,” she adds quietly, her face drawn, “he had this very high energy level which, if it didn’t get directed, would become destructive.”
When Daniel was just 14, his parents hoisted him from Wesley College—“he really wasn’t much of a student and had problems with discipline,” says Lucy—to train as an actor at St Martins Youth Arts Centre. “He was so talented—getting parts in plays from the start. He said, ‘Mum, this is what I really want to do.’ ”
But there were other things the handsome young roughneck wanted to do, too. Like go to wild parties, stay up all night and get falling-down drunk. “There was no way of holding him back,” says his mother.
Pollock was 19 when, drunk and driving three friends home from a party, he lost control of his car speeding around a bend. It flew over a nature strip, across a park, hurtled into the Yarra River and sank. Pollock and two passengers scrambled clear but the third, a woman, was trapped inside. In spite of the actor’s frantic rescue bid, she drowned. Lucy Pollock weeps as she recalls visiting Daniel at the police station that night. He had suffered only minor injuries but, soaking and ashen-faced, looked as if he was the one who’d died.
Part of him had. “Daniel was depressed and suicidal after the accident,” she says. “He blamed himself and felt responsible for the girl’s death.” Though the courts convicted him of culpable driving, he would continue to punish himself. “That accident dogged him for the rest of his life,” says his mother.
Shortly after, guilt-racked and vulnerable, he fell in love with a heroin addict. When the girl suggested he inject heroin with her, Daniel went along. Lucy Pollock remembers her son rhapsodising over the drug. “He found it exciting. He liked the ritual. It gave him a rush. Nothing mattered.”
Normally gregarious and good-natured, Pollock’s personality changed after he became hooked. Remembers his friend Andrew Hingst, 22: “When he needed heroin he could become aggressive and he’d do anything and exploit anybody to get money to buy the drug.” Family and friends grew accustomed to retrieving missing belongings from hock shops.
Director Wright said Pollock, here with Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper, may have survived “had he lived to see the film’s success”.
But even as his habit tightened its grip, Pollock’s film career was taking off. “He was always looking for work,” says Lucy. And finding it in such movies as Lover Boy and 1990’s Death in Brunswick and Proof. Pollock’s scene-stealing performances convinced Wright he was a natural to play the brooding bovver boy in Romper Stomper. Says Stomper co-producer Daniel Scharf, 36: “He was fighting with a lot of demons...but he was a very fine actor. Whether he was stoned when working I don't know [but] I'd see him [on the set] and view the rushes every day and there was never a problem with Daniel the actor.”
Wright, 33, believes Pollock, whose performance as Davey was nominated for an AFI best supporting actor award, “was as good” as his more successful acting mates Ben Mendelsohn and Noah Taylor. “He used gut feelings in his work to an extent that I haven’t seen in any other actor. But he didn’t have the credibility. People knew about his drug problems.”
The director remembers Pollock as a warm man who liked to talk about his dreams and who was, “I think a lot of women would tell you, one of the sexiest guys you could meet.” But he did everything to excess. “At a party he would wipe himself out early. He wanted to have a good time and he wanted that good time to end in unconsciousness...and it nearly always did,” says Wright. “Romper Stomper saw him clean up his act a bit and there was a chance for him to start again. But after the film finished that discipline fell away.” Jacqueline McKenzie did her best to help Daniel kick drugs. “He really wanted to get off heroin. He was so ashamed of it.” From the onset of his addiction, Pollock had tried various clinics and treatments—including cold turkey—but all failed.
“Daniel could have gone on and become one of the most famous actors in the country,” says director Wright, here with co-producer Scharf. “He could have been anything. I’m very angry about his death.”
Filming on Romper Stomper ended late September 1991 and in December the couple travelled to Sydney, but the strain of Daniel’s addiction soon broke them up. After the split, Pollock was caught stealing from McKenzie's friends. “I couldn’t do any more for him,” she says. “My presence was detrimental. He had to do it on his own. It was so difficult because I broke up with the ugly person and had to sacrifice the good person. I saw him a couple of times after that but there was tension between us.”
Pollock now hit rock-bottom. Virtually friendless, consumed by his addiction and distraught that he could not beat it, he stalked the streets of Kings Cross as winter drew on, sleeping in dives, homeless people’s refuges and in parks. He was sacked by his agent and stabbed in the arm by a heroin dealer. A court appearance to face theft charges loomed and he feared he’d be jailed. He told friends he’d prefer death to prison. One, Paul Ritt, shouted the depressed Pollock a coffee in a cafe and gave him money to play the jukebox. His choice was Suicide Blonde by INXS.
“As a kid,” says John Pollock of Daniel, here at 13, “my son used to get into strife—fights, pinching things. He was easily led.”
As the end neared, Pollock turned to his family for money and comfort. “Daniel rang two days before his death and he was crying,” says Lucy. “He sounded the worst I have ever heard.”
Daniel Pollock's last performance was played to an audience of one. Laundry hand Kevin Gibbs was sitting in a stationary train at Newtown railway station at 10.05 PM on April 13 when he saw a man in jeans, cap and a football jumper lower himself from the platform onto the tracks. Gibbs told police, “He seemed to know what he was doing and was pretty cool and calm about it...Then I heard the sound of a fast train coming.” Daniel heard the train too and walked towards it.
When they dragged his broken body from the tracks, all police found in his pockets was small change, a packet of cigarettes, some heroin wrapped in foil, a tab of another illicit substance and a used syringe.
“There is still an enormous pain for us all,” says Daniel's dad, John, 52. “We haven’t inscribed his cemetery plaque yet, but his epitaph will simply say: “Daniel John Pollock. Born 24/8/68. Died 13/4/92. Underneath that I'll just put ‘Romper Stomper’.”
■ Norm Lipson
This article was published in Who magazine, 30th November 1992.