‘Dying changes you. I’m more understanding now’: Ian Smith on cancer, celebrity – and 40 years on Neighbours
As the show’s beloved star Harold Bishop, Smith has seen actors from Margot Robbie to Guy Pearce come and go. Offscreen, he has battled grief, finding out he was adopted in his 50s and now a terminal diagnosis. Here, he reflects on a remarkable life
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.
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