Award-winning artist and former television newsreader Rodney Milgate drew inspiration from the Bible for his paintings. But his wife, actress Dinah Shearing, says he was agnostic and once told her: "I'll come back and haunt you if you have a funeral service for me".
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Milgate has died from a heart attack at the age of 80.
A polymath, Milgate's talents ranged across art, literature, broadcasting and academia. He also had a fondness for boxing, once saying that "two naked men getting up and fighting for supremacy was something to be admired".
Milgate's talent as a painter was recognised early, with The Sun describing him in 1963 as one of the city's most important artists.
He was a three-time winner of the Blake Prize for religious art as well as the 1987 Sydney Morning Herald Art Prize for his painting, Poem-Bridge.
Milgate told the Herald that winning the prize was the nicest thing "since last Friday night, when Jeff Fenech won the WBC World Super Bantamweight Title".
Milgate's play, A Refined Look at Existence, was notable for being in the first wave of the modern resurgence of Australian drama, according to the Herald's Richard Coleman.
Brisbane theatre critic Peter Charlton called it "a disturbing play" that has "something very pertinent to say about twentieth-century life".
Milgate was also a newsreader for Channel Seven in Sydney in the early 1960s and was later a professor of visual arts at the then City Art Institute.
He is survived by Shearing and their two sons, Matthew and Adam.
