Jan William Smith, November 3 1935-May 14 2025

Tributes have been pouring in from members of the Canberra theatre community for the late actor, broadcaster and writer Jan William Smith, who died in Gordon on May 14. He was 89.

Smith was born at Dalby, Queensland, in 1935, and was educated at Toowoomba, Southport and Canberra.

Praised as a private, humble and sensitive person, he began his journalism career with a cadetship on the Toowoomba Chronicle and a long career as a journalist on daily newspapers would follow, in Mackay, Toowoomba and Sydney, on ABC radio and TV in Mackay, Toowoomba and Canberra and in media liaison for the Federal government in Canberra.

While a young journalist moonlighting at the Mackay Community Theatre, he met and befriended newly-graduated dentist Dr Russell Brown, whom he would later introduce to Canberra Repertory, where from 1967, Smith was appearing regularly after moving to the ACT that year. Brown remembers him as a dedicated man of the theatre and as “kind, generous and unpretentious”.

But Smith did not confine himself to Rep and was seen in many roles, including several for the late director Ralph Wilson’s Classical Theatre Ensemble and in the lead part of Don Quixote for Tempo Theatre’s Man of La Mancha in 1980.

He and his wife Lorriane, an admired operatic soprano whom he had met in Rep’s 1977 production of A Toast to Melba, enjoyed a peripatetic lifestyle, moving around the region, where he produced and directed plays as far afield as Narooma and Tumbarumba, though regularly returning to Canberra, where they eventually retired.

Still going strong in the new millenium, he played James Telfer in Rep’s 2006 Trelawney of the Wells, directed by Tony Turner, and designed the set for Rep’s Humble Boy in 2011, also surfacing to participate in the late actor Phil Mackenzie’s annual Bloomsday celebrations and poetry readings.

But Smith had not confined himself to theatrical activity and published three books with Big Sky Publishing – Hitler’s Tractor, Mackie and Jack and most notably, The Glass Cricket Ball, a biography of Napier Waller, who designed and created the mosaics in the Hall of Remembrance at the Australian War Memorial. For that he won Marion Ink’s Nonfiction Big Press award in 2023.

He had been in poor health for some months after a cancer diagnosis and died peacefully in his sleep at Amala Uniting Care, Gordon on Wednesday morning.

Smith had requested a private funeral service.

He is survived by his widow, Lorraine, his stepchildren Mark, Christine, Lorraine (Rani) and Sammy, and by a daughter, Susan, from his first marriage.