As Crocodile Dundee: The Director’s Cut hits cinemas, we revisit our interview with Delvene Delaney from the May 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly, in which she talks about the making of the film — and how it inspired her to make one of her own.
Love comes in many forms. For Delvene Delaney she feels fortunate to have experienced it in various guises throughout her 73 years. There’s been a great romantic love with her late husband, John Cornell. There’s been boundless love for family, including her two daughters, Allira and Liana, and friends. And there’s also been an incredible passion for work and for the land she calls home.
All of those forms of love collided when, a few years ago, she went in search of the original master tapes for Crocodile Dundee — the iconic film John and his best mate, Paul Hogan, had blown the world away with in 1986. It’s still being screened all over the world, Delvene tells The Weekly today from her home in Byron Bay.
As John became increasingly unwell after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2001, it had gradually fallen to Delvene to look after the running of his company, Rimfire Films, of which Crocodile Dundee was undoubtedly the star. And with questions coming in about contracts, trademarks and copyrights, she reached out to her friend Victoria Dombroski.
Before they’d met at the local school Delvene’s grandchildren and Victoria’s kids attended, Victoria had worked for a film distribution company. Would she mind helping out one day a week, Delvene asked.
That day quickly became weeks and then years as the duo uncovered a treasure trove of archival material.
It led them to make the documentary Love of an Icon: The Legend of Crocodile Dundee, which revisits the events of the late 1970s and early 80s which would change Australian culture forever.
“Everybody has a story about what Crocodile Dundee means to them,” Victoria says. “It’s passion for our country. It’s the sounds of our childhood. It was incredibly successful for so many reasons, but it also had these incredible values that underpinned it that were real, authentic, and all came from a place of love.”
Delvene first met Paul Hogan at a TV function in 1975. Having spent two years in the UK earlier that decade, she remembers her surprise at leaving a country that had Stuart Wagstaff reading the news in his clipped English accent, only to return to see “Hoges” appearing regularly on A Current Affair with his broad Aussie drawl.
“We came from this time of being fairly stitched up by a long umbilical cord from Great Britain,” she says of the times. “Paul Hogan and his authentic attitude to being a proud Australian — both John and Paul were hugely patriotic; he didn’t give us a voice, but he gave us permission to have our voice.”
Delvene was a fledgling TV personality, having presented the weather in Brisbane and with a few stints on soaps under her belt. Paul, who had been discovered by John while still working as a rigger in 1971, was a bona fide star after the duo launched The Paul Hogan Show in 1973.
“We really hit it off,” she recalls of that fateful event. “He was natural and approachable, and very funny. Unbeknownst to me, apparently John had been perving on me in TV WEEK. So Hoges reported back to John, ‘I met that Delvene Delaney bird mate, and she’s a bit of alright. You’d like her, she’s a good bird. I think she’d be good for the show, she’s funny.’”
Shortly thereafter, John spotted Delvene one night at a Sydney pub. Both were on dates with other people, but it didn’t stop him from sliding over to introduce himself and ask if she’d like to be on the show.
The answer, of course, was an instant yes. And while previously the show had a rotating series of actresses, Delvene was clearly a perfect long-term fit. Not just with Hoges and Strop (the dopey sidekick character played by John) but with John himself.
“There was instant chemistry,” she says now with a smile. “He was 10 years older than I am, which I liked. He was funny and smart and kind and into nature. After the second show, we went to a party together. I went with one guy, but I left with him.”
John was recently divorced with a five-year-old daughter. Delvene was 23 and in uncharted territory. John was flat broke with nothing but a battered old Valiant car to his name. Delvene had saved $10,000 from her previous jobs, a veritable fortune at the time.
“After about six months, I gave it to John because I thought, ‘I’m going to invest in this and I’m going to invest in you’,” she says. “We had this very complementary relationship because he was very imaginative, very clever, and a big thinker. He had an expansive imagination, but sometimes he wasn’t great on the last row. But I am. I would quite happily be in the role of getting things started and doing the work. We always bounced ideas together. A lot of people say you shouldn’t work with your wife, but we had a really productive relationship, and it was enjoyable because it was part of being creative together.”
The pair married on December 31, 1977. With Delvene by his side, John continued to make great strides in the worlds of business and entertainment. Earlier that year, he’d helped Kerry Packer launch the renegade World Series Cricket competition and put Australia on the map.
“Kerry adored John because he wasn’t sycophantic,” Delvene says of the relationship between the two. “And John never took a cent for World Series Cricket … You don’t expect a paycheck when you do things from the heart.”
The same applied when John and Hoges went into partnership with Tourism Australia without charging a cent. The pair were in London when they spotted a poster in Australia House urging people to visit our country alongside a picture of a kangaroo and a koala. Back at home, they got together with a creative team from ad agency Mojo and revolutionised the tourism industry.
“They said, ‘We can do better than this’,” Delvene reflects on the campaign which saw the phrase “throw another shrimp on the barbie” go global.
“You can go anywhere and see a skyscraper or a museum, but you can’t meet real Aussies. [The ads] showed that you can come to our country and we’re friendly, we’re approachable. We live on a beautiful island surrounded by gorgeous oceans and wildlife, and why wouldn’t you want to invite people to come and share that?”
As Love of an Icon revisits, we’d just won the America’s Cu,p and Australians were brimming with pride at our nation. And when Hoges showed John his next idea, a hastily scribbled early scene for Crocodile Dundee, we were about to get a turbo boost of extra patriotism.
Victoria recalls sifting through the Rimfire Films archive boxes over three decades later and finding “a folder of gold”. Along with Hoges’ original riggers ticket from working on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, there was a treasure trove of unseen behind-the-scenes footage and handwritten scripts in various draft stages written on hotel notepads.
“You can feel the essence in those notes of John’s musings and what he was thinking … You can see how that thought process was translated into something for the film. You’d open a box and get goosebumps.”
Where was Crocodile Dundee filmed?
John, says Delvene, had “absolute, unshakeable faith in Paul”. So too did the Australian public. When the duo struggled to raise the entire $8.8 million needed to get their film made, a tide of “mum and dad” investors — including Delvene’s own parents — swooped in to help. And so, on July 13, 1985, filming began in the tiny Queensland town of McKinlay.
At that time, Delvene was co-hosting Sale of the Century, was a popular Weekly cover star, and a mum to six-year-old Allira. She was going backwards and forwards in her breaks from the show, but when her contract wrapped, she quit, took Allira out of school, and joined the crew full-time.
Delvene was on hand to watch another love story unfold. While they’d butted heads at the start of filming, Hoges and his leading lady, Linda Kozlowski, were clearly falling in love — despite the former being married.
“It was a surprise really, because in all the nine years that I did The Paul Hogan Show, I never even saw him look at anyone else,” she says now of a romance which would make headlines across the country. “He was married [to first wife Noelene] with five kids and not that man at all.”
Linda, recalls Delvene, was struggling to adjust to Australia — the heat, the bugs, the isolation. So each time she visited the set, she’d spend lots of time with the American actress to help her feel more at home.
“It was during one of these trips,” shares Delvene, “that she totally freaked out because she felt this attraction to Paul and him to her and she was worried, saying, ‘he’s married and what do I do?’ And that was when I said to her, ‘You have to follow your heart’.
“When you make films, there is something called ‘location fever’, and there was a bit of pairing up on Crocodile Dundee. But they did the right thing, and they kept apart. I give them credit for that.”
Of course, two years later, they’d reunite for Crocodile Dundee II, and the passion remained. The duo married in 1990 and had a son, Chance, together before divorcing in 2014.
But back to 1985. It was magic on the set of Crocodile Dundee. Having enlisted The Paul Hogan Show director Peter Faiman to direct the movie, John knew he’d need an established crew to support this first-time filmmaking trio. Picnic at Hanging Rock alum Russell Boyd was brought in as cinematographer, and Mad Max 2’s David Stiven enlisted as editor. And they were just two of the heavy-hitting names to end up in the credits.
But it was the magic between John and Hoges that would ultimately make the film a success.
“In their writing sessions, from what I observed, John kept pushing and prodding, annoying Paul to say, ‘We can do better’,” says Delvene of their creative dynamic. “Then he’d throw a line in — and John was really funny — then Hoges would top that and then it would go back and forth until they got there.”
How successful was Crocodile Dundee?
When Crocodile Dundee was released in Australia on April 24, 1986, it broke box office records and went on to take over $47 million. When it was released in the US in September, it would debut at number one and become the highest-grossing non-American film of all time, taking in close to US$175 million. In the UK, it was equally successful, raking in £20 million.
In Love of an Icon, John is pictured at the Australian premiere, being asked why he had so much faith in the little film that could.
“Well, they say films are a gamble, but in this case I knew the horse and the horse talks to me,” he said with a smile. “And I’ve got great faith in Hogan. Always have and probably always will have.”
“I think a large degree in their success together was the absolute trust that Paul had in John, because John believed in him,” says Delvene with a smile, her love of the relationship the two men shared clear. “When somebody believes in you that much, it gives you free license to be creative. To go places you may not otherwise because you know someone’s got your back.”
Post Crocodile Dundee II, however, it was time for the pair to focus on new ventures — ones that felt closer to home.
Hoges moved to LA with Linda and focused on building a movie career in America. And John and Delvene settled in Byron Bay, where they had their second child, Liana, and began a hotel empire.
And then John fell sick when he was just 60 years old, and, says Delvene, “we became not reclusive … but private. We found ourselves a sanctuary. John and I used to rarely give interviews unless there was a really good reason for it. I think this story is the most open I have ever been in my life. And I think [Love of an Icon] is a good reason to invite people in to share the story.”
Hoges was firmly on board when Delvene told him of her plan to make this film. Both he and Linda appear, as do many other contemporaries and players from that era, to share their memories and talk about the long-lasting effect John had on their lives.
John passed away on July 23, 2021, close to 20 years after his diagnosis.
“Through it all, I’ve never seen anyone be more brave,” Delvene recalls in the documentary of those final years. “He never whinged, he was stoic, and he was accepting and never sorry for himself.”
When she asked him how he would want to be remembered, he said he’d like it to be as a kookaburra, because they always make people laugh.
In the backyard of the home they shared is a tree festooned with messages from friends and family who weren’t able to be at John’s funeral. Kookaburras often perch on that tree, Delvene reveals. And as she shares stories of their life together, the unmistakable cackle of the Aussie bird interrupts a retelling.
“He’s having a laugh,” she says fondly, John always forefront in both conversation and mind.
“[Making Love of an Icon] has been a journey. It’s been challenging and demanding. There have been tears, there have been meltdowns, there have been obstacles. And I absolutely applaud Victoria because she never lost sight of this incredible opportunity.
“I’m 73. And Victoria is 52. And this is a message to women to not give up. Don’t think that because you’re of a certain age, you can’t do anything anymore. You can. So come on!”
Find out more about Love of an Icon: The Legend of Crocodile Dundee at crocodiledundee.com.
This article originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an issue.
