The prime minister’s son who found a home in Hollywood

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JULIAN DANA WILLIAM MCMAHON July 27, 1968–July 2, 2025

If the son of a prime minister was a strange idea for Australia’s homegrown acting community, a place where new actors are washed onto the set of a weeknight soap on incoming waves, then Julian McMahon would always be much more at home in Hollywood.

America is, after all, the land of actors-turned-politicians, where Ronald Reagan was a president, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was a governor. And yet, even there, McMahon was an object of some fascination: the actor son of a prominent politician, who regaled interviewers with stories of growing up in Australia’s version of the White House.

Australian actor Julian McMahon has died at 56. His wife, Kelly, said he died peacefully in his sleep.

McMahon, the son of former Australian prime minister Sir William McMahon and his wife, heiress and socialite Lady Sonia McMahon, grew up very much in the spotlight. His father was a career politician who was also the leader of the Liberal Party of Australia; his mother, a society figure whose own visit to the American White House in 1971 created sensational headlines because of a revealing dress.

It was not a frequent topic of conversation for the younger McMahon but, over the years, in various interviews with me, or in conversation at social events in Hollywood, he would reflect on his childhood, talking about making toboggans out of cardboard to use on the grassy hillside near Kirribilli House, the prime minister’s residence in Sydney.

Julian McMahon with mother Sonia McMahon at the 2005 G’Day LA event.

To some degree, because of his father’s early death and the extraordinary prominence of Lady Sonia in the nation’s social pages, the shadow the younger McMahon had to step out from under was often more his mother’s than his father’s.

A handsome young man who became a model and then a TV star and even married a Minogue – Dannii, from 1994 to 1995, who would later talk about her struggle to win her mother-in-law’s approval – McMahon’s career was almost cliché.

Like many Australian actors, he needed Hollywood to give him the legitimacy he would have struggled to obtain at home.

From a fairly modest start – a turgid Australian take on American daytime soaps titled The Power, The Passion, and later the nation’s leading actor starter school, weeknight soap Home and Away – McMahon ultimately created a richly textured American career for himself.

A small role in American daytime soap Another World allowed him to bounce into American primetime network TV, with roles on ′90s crime thriller Profiler, supernatural drama Charmed and, finally, the co-lead role in Nip/Tuck, which gave McMahon genuine legitimacy in Hollywood.

Created by Ryan Murphy, one of Hollywood’s auteurs, Nip/Tuck was a critical and commercial success.

Julian McMahon and Dannii Minogue attend the US premiere of Strictly Ballroom in February 1993.

On the cinema screen, McMahon played Victor von Doom – alias Doctor Doom – in the 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four films. With the announcement of McMahon’s death following a private battle with cancer, it is a sadly serendipitous footnote that the reboot of that franchise, in which Robert Downey jnr plays McMahon’s character, premieres globally in the next few weeks.

Later, McMahon was one of the faces of Law & Order producer Dick Wolf’s FBI franchise, starring in FBI: Most Wanted and appearing in its two sister programs, FBI and FBI: International. In Hollywood’s eyes, McMahon was unequivocally a leading man.

Despite his success, however, McMahon never really lost his Australian-ness. How could anyone whose first role was Speedo-clad Mick Dooley in a film titled Wet and Wild Summer?

Curiously nonmaterialistic, McMahon spent most of his working life living in the same house in Los Angeles.

He chose the house, he once told me, because it had a backyard view of LA’s Hollywood sign. That sign, which cast a long shadow, had talismanic properties in McMahon’s mind: a daily visual reminder of his ambition in moving to LA.

Marrying for the third time in 2014, to the former model and author Kelly Paniagua, McMahon finally sold the house in Hollywood a year later, a decision that, in hindsight, is more revealing than it might have seemed at the time.

Julian McMahon with his wife, Kelly, in 2017. He is survived by Kelly and his daughter, Madison, from a previous relationship.

Perhaps in his third act, McMahon, the little boy who grew up in the shadow of Kirribilli House, with a prime ministerial father and a truly formidable mother, no longer needed the talisman that had been his silent charm for decades. He had finally conquered his ambitions on his own terms.

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