Hollywood star goes scorched earth on his Aussie hometown: 'Bad energy'

One of Australia's most beloved acting exports has flared tempers in his home state after publicly torching its biggest city.

Anthony LaPaglia, 67, has written a withering takedown of Adelaide in his new memoir, The Life We Choose.

He described the South Australian capital as 'dreary, stifled and boring', adding that, due to its history of bizarre murders and missing persons cases, it offers a 'bad energy'.

The Looking for Alibrandi star, who grew up in Adelaide's north-eastern suburb of Beefacres - now known as New Windsor - suffered a childhood of abuse and domestic violence in the 1960s and 70s.

His potshots against the City of Churches began on the first page of his book, which was released on October 26.

LaPaglia wrote that life has taken him from 'dreary, stifled Adelaide to the grand theatres of New York City'.

A few pages later, he claimed Adelaide was 50 years behind the rest of the world, and that he may as well have grown up on 'the edge of the universe'.

LaPaglia, who has won a Tony and a Golden Globe for his stage and screen prowess, recalled being seven years old when the State was gripped by 'stranger danger' fear when the three Beaumont children vanished on January 26, 1966 from busy beachside Glenelg.

Jane, Arnna, and Grant Beaumont have never been found, and it remains one of Australia's most notorious missing persons cases with a $1 million reward on offer for information leading to a conviction or recovery of their remains.

A decade later, Adelaide began to earn its nickname Murderlaide when the Truro murders - serial killings of seven young women and teenage girls - hit the headlines - another formative moment in then-17-year-old LaPaglia's life.

'The years in between [the Beaumonts and the Truro murders] were riddled with horrors too,' he said. 

'It seemed like a dead body was fished out of Adelaide’s River Torrens every second week.

'A quarter of a century later, when I heard the nation's worst-known serial killings – the Snowtown murders – had taken place in my home state, I wasn't surprised.

'Adelaide. There's a bad energy running through it. Whenever I go back, I feel the same low-frequency unease that used to spook me as a kid.'

The actor appeared on stage in his former hometown for the first time last month, when his play Death of a Salesman rolled into town for a short run.

In an interview with the Adelaide Advertiser before returning for his show, the LA-based star said: 'There's always trepidation coming back'. 

'When I grew up here, I found it suffocating … It worked out fine. I don't know what it's (Adelaide) like now 40 years later. I'm assuming it's changed.' 

In his book, he recalled worrying he may 'never be happy' if he didn't 'flee the monotonous malaise' of a 'boring old city topped with a glass ceiling'.

He moved to Sydney as a young man, describing the Harbour City as 'like a breath of fresh air, three times bigger and ten times more interesting than Adelaide'.

Interestingly, in a 2020 interview with NewsCorp, LaPaglia was singing a different tune about his hometown.

He recalled returning for the first time in 30 years in 2015, to film the movie A Month of Sundays, about a struggling real estate agent suffering a midlife crisis.

He hired a taxi to take him on a tour of his old neighbourhood, marvelling at how much the city had grown.

He described an apparently idyllic childhood spent on bicycles alongside his brother Jonathan - also an actor. 

'I just remember the freedom we had was unbelievable – there was no "what have you been doing?",' he said. 

'It was just "get in here and have dinner". I feel sorry for the kids now that don't have that anymore.'

He said his daughter Bridget, who was raised in LA, would ask her father to compare their childhoods.

'I would [tell her] – and I mean this – in the nicest way, "it was bigger, dumber and easier" and I liked it. It was easy to be a kid.'.

LaPaglia's latest comments have rankled one of his fellow celebrity exports, former Sunrise host David Koch - who is the chair of both the South Australian Tourism Commission, and the Port Adelaide footy club.

'I respect everyone's opinion, but when you look at the data, he's an outlier that not many people would agree with, and the facts show it,' he said in a statement to the Tiser.

Koch directed the publication to the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit's latest global liveability index rating Adelaide eighth in the world, the Wall Street Journal naming it 'Australia’s coolest city' and Architectural Digest magazine listing the SA capital as number one on its list of the 20 most beautiful cities on the planet.

'It always disappoints you when your hometown gets slagged by somebody, and criticism is good – it makes us all be and do better,' said Kochie, who grew up in Adelaide at the same time as LaPaglia.

'But when it’s subjective criticism that seems to be unfounded … by the facts coming from independent sources and comparisons, it can be dangerous because it can give a false impression to a lot of people.'

READ MORE: From Murderlaide to Methelaide: How the City of Churches became the City of Junkies