From Australia’s Jewish past: Hyam (Henry) van der Sluice – Australia’s best kept secret – known Australia-wide as comic entertainer Roy Rene
Henry, to be known as Roy (Mo) Rene, was born on 15 February 1891, at Hindley Street, Adelaide.
Roy Rene
He was the fourth of seven children of a Dutch Jewish couple, Hyam (Henry) Sluice or Sluys and his wife Amelia. Hyam worked as a cigar maker and tobacco merchant in Adelaide, and it’s likely that he brought his skills and expertise in the tobacco trade with him from the Netherlands.
Around 1905 the Sluice family moved to Melbourne, where young Henry worked as an apprentice jockey. His two brothers were successful bookmakers and the horse racing scene was very much a part of their family’s life. However, the only thing that Henry ever wanted to do was to be a performer.
He started performing in talent quests and won a singing competition at an Adelaide market and, on moving to Melbourne, he appeared professionally in the pantomime ‘Sinbad the Sailor’ at the Theatre Royal and later at the Tivoli, with a black face and a singing and dancing act. When his voice changed, so did his name – he became Boy Roy. By 1914 he was working as ‘Roy Rene, Australia’s foremost delineator of Hebrew peculiarities’. He was a popular comedian and vaudevillian performer in the early 20th century, known for his distinctive style and catchphrases. Mo’s stage persona often drew on his Dutch heritage and Jewish identity. It is possible that his father’s background may have played a role in shaping Mo’s comedy- style and persona. Roy took his inspiration from several visiting Jewish performers.
For the best part of half a century, two bold letters – MO – outside an Australian theatre would guarantee a full house. Those were the days when Roy Rene, popularly known as ‘Mo’, was indisputably Australia’s clown prince. He had a place in the pantheon of immortals that included Ned Kelly, Nellie Melba, Les Darcy, Kingsford Smith and Phar Lap. In 1916 Roy and another young comic, Nat Phillips launched their infamous ‘Stiffy and Mo’ double act. As Stiffy, Nat was the fast-talking feed, the archetypal city ‘lair’. Mo was the ‘top banana’, the lisping, lurking, lewdly leering larrikin, always grabbing the last word and the loudest laugh. Naturally, they were crude, but theirs was a heady, healthy, light-hearted vulgarity, echoing the slang of the streets and the wit of the working class. Stiffy and Mo were an immediate success. They opened at the Sydney Princess Theatre and were an instant success, moving in December to the Grand Opera House, playing in the spectacularly successful, all Australian, pantomime ‘The Bunyip’’ and this was followed by a season in Melbourne. Roy’s catchphrases such as ‘Strike me lucky!’ and ‘You little trimmer’ very quickly became part of the Australian language.
In 1925, when money squabbles split the partnership, Roy conquered the legitimate stage, touring with American comedian Harry Green in the play ‘Give and Take’. Nat and Roy re-teamed in 1927, but soon split irrevocably. At the same time, Roy divorced his first wife Dorothy and in the same year married Sadie Gale, a pretty comedienne and soubrette – a type of operatic soprano voice often cast as a female stock character in opera and theatre.
In the early 1930s, Roy and Sadie began a long, happy association with the Tivoli variety circuit. Less successful was Roy’s only feature film of 1934, ‘Strike Me Lucky’. The indifferent script gave him little chance to compose without preparation and he missed the reaction and warmth of a live audience. Fortunately, the film’s failure did nothing to mar his theatrical popularity.
McCackie Mansion, an anarchic radio sketch series that was presented before a studio audience, delivered Roy to a new public, that of radio, where in one night, he could reach more people than could see him on stage in a year. His spluttering antics were compulsory listening in homes right across Australia. Roy made his last stage appearances in 1950. Though his health was frail, he continued to honour his radio commitments.
Survived by his second wife, Sadie and his son and daughter, Roy died of heart disease at his home in Kensington, Sydney on 22 November 1954 and was buried in the Jewish section of Rookwood Cemetery. There were 1200 people at his funeral, and the lights of theatres all over Australia were dimmed in his honour. In 1976 the Annual NSW Star Awards were relaunched as the Australian Entertainment ‘Mo’ Awards. Roy Rene never ventured further than New Zealand: not for want of offers; he just didn’t want to leave the audiences he was comfortable with. An unassuming, unpretentious man, he valued family and friends over fame or wealth. He clowned because he loved it and to make a comfortable home for his family. He worked instinctively and hard.
Although unknown overseas, ‘Mo’ was hailed by visiting celebrities such as Dame Sybil Thorndike and Jack Benny as a comic genius in the company of Chaplin. Lecherous, leering and ribald, he epitomised the Australian ‘lair’, always trying to ‘make a quid’ or to ‘knock off a sheila’; yet some of his funniest moments were when he was being ‘posh’, as in his outrageous parody of Noël Coward’s Private Lives in which Sadie also appeared.
Off-stage, he was serious but often quite unconsciously funny and an inveterate practical joker. He delighted in the recognition and adulation of his ‘mob’, yet sought constant reassurance from friends and colleagues, and other comedians were viewed as antagonists, regardless of their personal relationship.
‘Mo’s’ greatest asset was his superb timing, which enabled him to ‘get away with’ the suggestive double entendre—he never did say anything technically obscene. Able to make his audience laugh or cry, he was a master of physical nuance; his facial expression, gesture, stance and movement were welded within the black and white caricature of a Jewish comedian, with Australian mannerisms, delivering local vernacular with a semitic lisp. His departure from the Tivoli in 1945 marked the end of an era in Australian theatre. but his legacy as one of Australia’s most beloved and influential comedians lives on.
Note: Well-known Australian actor Garry McDonald played Roy Rene/Mo in the 1977 theatre production Young Mo, written by Steve J Spears and which became a television show in the 1980s.
The South Australian Government commissioned a statue to recognise Roy’s significant contribution to Australian Art and Entertainment. It is situated at Hindley Street Adelaide.
The AJHS acknowledges the following references in the preparation of this story: Australian Dictionary of Biography – Celestine McDermott; Wikipedia; History Trust of South Australia; Live Performance Australia
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