John Morrison Clarke (born July 29, 1948) is a comedian and writer. He was born in Palmerston North, New Zealand, but has lived in Australia since the 1970s. He is a regular actor and writer on Australian TV.

He first became known during the mid-to-late 1970s for portraying on film and television a laconic gumboot-clad farmer called Fred Dagg, singlet-clad and supposedly attended by numerous associates all named 'Trev'. Clarke also recorded a series of records and cassettes as Dagg.

Clarke also became known for his screenwriting when, in 1985, he was responsible for the prominent mini-series Anzacs. He provided the voice of Wal Footrot in the feature-length cartoon film, Footrot Flats: a Dog's Tail (1986), based on the cartoon strips by Murray Ball. Towards the end of the 1980s, he featured in a number of other films, and began to be known for his political satire.

In 1989, along with collaborator Bryan Dawe, Clarke did his first mock interview for the Nine Network current affairs programme A Current Affair. Clarke would take on the persona of a politician or prominent figure and be interviewed by Dawe. The pair continued to do mock interviews for the program until 1997, satirising a wide range of figures, including Paul Keating, Alexander Downer and Alan Bond. After a break, the pair then reappeared on ABC TV's The 7.30 Report in a similar format. The interviews have also been compiled into several books and CD releases, one of which won the pair the 1990 ARIA Award for 'Best Australian Comedy Record'.

During the early 1990s, Clarke featured in two somewhat successful local films, Death in Brunswick, alongside Sam Neill and Prisoners of the Sun. Over the next five years, he continued to write and act in a handful of films, on top of his continuing series of mock interviews.

Clarke had another commercial success in 1998, when he wrote and starred in The Games, a mockumentary about the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG). The series, in which he played a character with the same name as his own, ran for two seasons, and featured guest appearances from a wide variety of figures, such as singer John Farnham.

In 2001, Clarke wrote the screenplay to The Man Who Sued God, which starred Billy Connolly, and in 2002 appeared in an uncharacteristically villainous role in the hit movie Crackerjack. After something of a quiet period, he re-emerged in 2004, adapting Melbourne author Shane Maloney's Murray Whelan series for film. As of 2004, this franchise has resulted in two films, Stiff and The Brush-Off, both starring David Wenham and Mick Molloy. Clarke directed Stiff himself and made a cameo appearance in The Brush-Off, which was directed by his old friend Sam Neill.

External link

• IMDb entry on Clarke (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0164819/)