Everybody loves Vince

It is little wonder that some say Australia is very lucky to have Vince Colosimo.

VINCE Colosimo is woken by 10 chubby fingers trying to pry open his eyelids. The fingers are not those of an over-zealous personal trainer or Hollywood-style personal assistant.

They belong to his three-year-old daughter, Lucia. She%26rsquo;s an early-riser and Vince, a regular family guy, living in a regular family home in inner-Melbourne, has to get up and make her breakfast.

%26ldquo;That%26rsquo;s how I wake up most mornings,%26rdquo; the actor says with a satisfied smile. %26ldquo;I wish I could say I don%26rsquo;t get out of bed for anything less than $10,000, but the truth is I get out of bed for my daughter.%26rdquo;
Meeting Colosimo is like meeting a fast-talking, knee-slapping, frequent-swearing, long-lost cousin.

He walks into the room unaccompanied by publicists or entourage and sends the seen-it-all stylists into a fit of giggles. He%26rsquo;s wearing a simple white T-shirt, jeans and a brown leather coat.

He looks everyone deep in the eye, asks their name and holds their handshake just a little bit longer than necessary.

Is it hot in here or is it just Vince?

As he casually takes off his T-shirt to try on the wardrobe selected for his shoot, Ken the stylist loses his cool.

%26ldquo;Oh, Vince, you%26rsquo;re just adorable!%26rdquo; During the photo shoot, Ken keeps up the flow of compliments.

%26ldquo;Incredible!%26rdquo; %26ldquo;Gorgeous!%26rdquo; %26ldquo;Searing!%26rdquo;

This last comment cracks Colosimo up. %26ldquo;Mate, I know it%26rsquo;s all crap, but there%26rsquo;s nothing like having someone telling me I%26rsquo;m wonderful every four to five seconds.%26rdquo;

See, Vince Colosimo is your man%26rsquo;s man. He%26rsquo;s the kind of guy who gets excited about a $10 steak deal; his favourite band is the Red Hot Chili Peppers (he thinks Coldplay have only one decent song, %26ldquo;Yellow%26rdquo; %26ndash; %26ldquo;All the rest is folk, I want rock%26rsquo;n%26rsquo;roll!%26rdquo;); his favourite store is Bunnings (%26ldquo;I love a bit of DIY%26rdquo;); and he loves cable TV, especially The History Channel and National Geographic (%26ldquo;that stuff blows my mind%26rdquo;).

He also reads all the newspapers, but thinks Chris Isaak banging on about not being able to get a girlfriend is %26ldquo;just bullshit%26rdquo; and the Socceroos %26ldquo;were robbed%26rdquo;.

Colosimo%26rsquo;s easy, bantering style has made him one of the most popular actors in the industry.

Everybody loves Vince. He%26rsquo;s funny, he puts people at ease and %26ldquo;he%26rsquo;s a hell of a lot of fun%26rdquo;, according to Claudia Karvan, his co-star in Network Ten%26rsquo;s The Secret Life of Us.

%26ldquo;He has such an infectious laugh.%26rdquo;

She%26rsquo;s not the only one to fall for his charms. Jacqueline McKenzie, his co-star in his current film, Opal Dream, a heartwarming story of imaginary friends, thinks he%26rsquo;s the funniest man she%26rsquo;s ever worked with.

%26ldquo;He%26rsquo;s saying something hilarious all the time. And when it comes to the acting, he%26rsquo;s an acting animal, it%26rsquo;s all gut instinct,%26rdquo; she says.

%26ldquo;I would get on a plane anytime to work with him again. I love Vince, I love Vince! He%26rsquo;s just the best.%26rdquo;

Director Morgan O%26rsquo;Neill, who cast him in his recent film Solo, says Colosimo%26rsquo;s knockabout manner can mask the fact that he%26rsquo;s one of the best actors in the country.

%26ldquo;The guy is a phenomenal performer,%26rdquo; says O%26rsquo;Neill.

%26ldquo;He%26rsquo;s really affable, clever and a larrikin, and he talks about his beloved football all the time. But he has a very strong intellect that he disguises with humour.%26rdquo;

Yet he%26rsquo;s no overnight sensation and it%26rsquo;s taken more than charm to keep him in acting work.

Born and bred in Melbourne%26rsquo;s Little Italy, the young Vincenzo Colosimo never wanted to be an actor. He wanted to play football. Not the round-ball game either. AFL is his game and the only team for him is his beloved Carlton Blues. Through thick and thin, rain and hail, Premierships and wooden spoons, Vince is in the stands.

%26ldquo;All the boys in my neighbourhood had faces that said, %26lsquo;We%26rsquo;re from somewhere else%26rsquo; %26ndash; mostly Italians %26ndash; but we all followed the one team, Carlton,%26rdquo; recalls the 39-year-old.

%26ldquo;Girls and football were my passion. I didn%26rsquo;t know anything about theatre or acting. I%26rsquo;d never heard of Ibsen or Chekhov and I couldn%26rsquo;t quote a line from f**king Shakespeare.%26rdquo;

All that changed when a casting director visited his school looking for boys to play roles in Moving Out, Michael Pattinson%26rsquo;s pioneering 1983 movie about second generation migrants hitting their teens.

Colosimo was 12. He%26rsquo;d grown up just off Lygon Street, one of twin boys (%26ldquo;Mum dressed us the same, but I was the loud one%26rdquo;), with an older sister and a younger sister who had passed away.

He wasn%26rsquo;t from a theatre family. Far from it. His father held several jobs, mostly at the same time %26ndash; taxi driver, milk-bar owner, waiter %26ndash; and his mother (who still calls him %26ldquo;Vincey%26rdquo;), worked as a clothing factory machinist.

Colosimo had failed drama school (where he was nicknamed %26ldquo;Cenz%26rdquo;, short for Vincenzo, a name his long-time partner, actor Jane Hall, calls him to this day) but he auditioned for Moving Out anyway.

He landed the lead role of Gino, a kid trying to break with the ways of his migrant parents and be more Australian. It was one of the first films to portray migrant family life without reducing it to caricature.

%26ldquo;Before that, the only migrants on screen were the son-in-law from Kingswood Country, the one they all called %26lsquo;Dago%26rsquo;, or the Italian on The Paul Hogan Show %26ndash; %26lsquo;Luigi the Unbelievable%26rsquo;,%26rdquo; Colosimo says.

He made Moving Out when he was 14 and scored a nod for the Best Actor AFI Award for his performance. The film was in cinemas for six months.

%26ldquo;I%26rsquo;m still really proud of that film. I didn%26rsquo;t know how to act, so I just played myself. I%26rsquo;m sure my voice broke during the filming!%26rdquo; he says.

%26ldquo;But I grew up too fast after it was released. I had girls falling at me and I was smoking and drinking and I was only 15.%26rdquo;

Another film followed, Street Hero, with Sigrid Thornton, but then he went back to high school before auditioning for the Victorian College of the Arts School of Drama.

He was 17 and the youngest student ever to enrol in the prestigious institution. It wasn%26rsquo;t easy.

Colosimo had private tutors to teach him elocution because, like all his Lygon Street mates, he was saying %26ldquo;fink%26rdquo; and %26ldquo;fort%26rdquo; instead of %26ldquo;think%26rdquo; and %26ldquo;thought%26rdquo;.

%26ldquo;They made me say, %26lsquo;The rrrr-ain in Spain falls mainly on the plains.%26rsquo; I was thinking, %26lsquo;What the f**k?%26rsquo;%26rdquo;

He also relied on tutors to bring him up to speed with the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov. It paid off.

After graduating from the three-year course, Colosimo was soon accepting roles with the Melbourne Theatre Company in A Streetcar Named Desire, Othello and Twelfth Night.

Now, after more than 20 years on screen, Colosimo is one of Australia%26rsquo;s most commanding leading men.

Leaving behind the %26ldquo;Italian Stallion%26rdquo; image of The Wog Boy (2000), he%26rsquo;s appeared in a string of outstanding films including Chopper (2000), Walking on Water (2002) and The Hard Word (2002), but it was Lantana (2001) that won him an AFI Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Between movies, he worked with his twin brother, Tony, sanding floors.

His latest project, Opal Dream, directed by The Full Monty%26rsquo;s Peter Cattaneo, is a children%26rsquo;s film set in the outback mining town of Coober Pedy, South Australia. Colosimo plays Rex, a struggling opal miner in a tale of fatherhood, lost innocence and big dreams. It%26rsquo;s the kind of working-class hero, rugged husband-and-father role that Colosimo excels in.

%26ldquo;We all had to wear fly-nets on the set; the flies were just insane. And if it wasn%26rsquo;t the flies, it was the dust storms,%26rdquo; he says.

%26ldquo;Coober Pedy is extreme %26ndash; a place where people go to hide. But on the weekends, we went to one of the two pubs in the town. I swear to god, if you didn%26rsquo;t drink, there was nothing else there. So I hung with the locals. I just wanted to be one of the blokes and be part of it.%26rdquo;

Colosimo%26rsquo;s masculinity is what caught the eye of director Ray Lawrence, when he was casting for the role of a serious young father in Lantana.

%26ldquo;When he acts, he reminds me of Robert Mitchum. He has a very masculine way about him. He%26rsquo;s definitely one of the few leading men in Australia,%26rdquo; says Lawrence.

%26ldquo;He has such a huge range. He%26rsquo;s very funny and can do comedy. He can play a leading man in a show like The Secret Life of Us, he can play the working-class father and he makes a great cop. There%26rsquo;s almost nothing he can%26rsquo;t do. That masculinity is great for a director to work with, but Vince also has a highly developed feminine side.%26rdquo;

The role

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