Biographie
Born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, Jeremy Kewley made his professional acting debut at the age of 14 in The Devil's Playground (1976). The film, directed by Fred Schepisi, went on to win the Australian Film Institute (AFI) Award for Best Film of 1976. This was followed by his role as Gideon MacPherson in Mad Dog Morgan (1976) opposite Dennis Hopper and Jack Thompson.
While still attending school at Melbourne's prestigious Haileybury College, Kewley was cast in a number of films and television series in Melbourne and eventually moved to Sydney to star in the ill-fated Arcade (1980). The highly publicized television series was a critical and commercial failure but it gained Kewley a following, and lead to a succession of roles both on stage and on screen - particularly in comedy.
Returning to Melbourne, Kewley spent the next decade working regularly not only as an actor, but also as a writer and producer. Through his company Pearly White Productions, he has won numerous awards for his television commercials and short films, and for his Australian television documentaries Funny by George: The George Wallace Story (2000) and Young Talent Time Tells All (2001).
Kewley spent many years performing on stage in comedy shows (which he also wrote and directed), and gained a reputation as one of Australia's foremost television audience warm-up comedians, particularly on Young Talent Time (1971) which he worked on in the 1980s and The Footy Show (1994) which he worked on from its beginning in 1994 until 2015; including the high-rating UK specials, broadcast live from the Theatre Royal in London during 2001 and 2005; the World Cup special broadcast live from Munich in 2006; and the ever-popular annual Grand Final specials, performed in front of live audiences of over 12,000 people at Melbourne's Rod Laver Arena.
In 1994 Kewley was cast as one of the leads in Janus (1994), a hard-hitting law and order television series which brought him back into the spotlight as a dramatic actor and led to on-going roles in two different Australian television series, Blue Heelers (1994) and Stingers (1998). He played the semi-regular role of Mt. Thomas journalist in Blue Heelers (1994) on and off between 1997 and 2006. At the start of 2000 he joined the cast of Stingers (1998) to play the role of bumbling cop Detective Senior Sergeant Bryan Gray, and continued in the role until the series ended its run at the end of 2004. In 2007 he began playing the recurring role of Adam Gardiner in the Australian outback series McLeod's Daughters (2001) followed by recurring roles in the Australian comedy series Very Small Business (2008) and Whatever Happened to That Guy? (2009) for Foxtel's The Comedy Channel. In 2010 he played one of the lead roles in Underbelly Files: Tell Them Lucifer Was Here (2011) and in 2014 he played Des 'Tuppence' Moran in the series Fat Tony & Co (2014).
He toured Australia in a stage revival of West Side Story from 2010-2011 and then starred in stage productions of Equus, Flesh Wound, Death Of A Comedian, and Doomsday Devices between 2012 and 2014 before touring New Zealand in the play The Underarm.
As well as his roles in a number of Australian pictures, like Amy (1997), Kewley has also appeared in the US pictures Disappearance (2002) (set in New Mexico), and The Extreme Team (2003) shot in the New Zealand Alps. His more recent motion pictures include roles 10Terrorists (2012); playing the lead role of US film producer Jerry Goldman in the comedy Frank & Jerry (2011), and starring as Roy Rogers in The Legend Maker (2014) for Ian Pringle.
