Bob Ellis spent a lifetime writing just about everything from prize-winning film scripts to savage political blogs.
He was a shambolic wild man of the left, vitriolic in his writing and unpredictable in his judgments. He praised Tony Abbott and was cruel to Julia Gillard.
Broadcaster George Negus called him "a wise old romantic fool".
Ellis died on Sunday surrounded by his family at his Palm Beach home in Sydney after a battle with liver cancer.
He was born in Lismore in the far north of NSW in 1942, raised a Seventh-Day Adventist and educated at Lismore High and Sydney University.
Most of his time at university appears to have been taken up with writing and lusting.
Many years later he recalled: "You got sex by either marrying very young or falsely proposing marriage in order to get it.
"Back then I saw a tremendous generosity in women. They were all quite wonderful when you consider what they had to put up with: French letters and lack of orgasm and serial infidelity, which was what blokes like us were doing to them ... Dogs are much better people than men are."
Yet since 1969 he remained married, despite one lurid episode, to writer Anne Brooksbank. They had three children.
After university Ellis wrote for several Sydney newspapers and, ingloriously, worked for an advertising agency. When given a laundry-powder account he proposed filling Sydney Harbour with suds.
But it was as a theatre and film writer that he made his most important and enduring mark - starting with, in collaboration with the late Michael Boddy, The Legend Of King O'Malley in 1970.
Ellis has said the play marked the birth of an Australian style of theatre which mixed music, dance and satire. It also looked in a ferociously satirical way at Australian politics.
He went on to write, usually with a collaborator, 10 more plays - most with musical and political elements.
He was even more prolific as a film and television script writer.
His first, Newsfront (1978), written with several others, including his wife, was the most important. It certainly boosted the careers of director Philip Noyce and actors Bryan Brown, Bill Hunter and Wendy Hughes.
Ellis, who didn't suffer from an excess of modesty, has said it was the great Australian breakthrough film that did very well overseas and won critical acclaim all over the world.
"It ran for a year in Australia and changed everything," he said.
"So for the second time, perhaps, I was not exactly pivotal, but instrumental, in the ignition of a new Australian revolution in the arts."
Other film scripts included Fatty Finn, Goodbye Paradise, Man Of Flowers and Cactus. From the mid-80s, he wrote, and sometimes also directed, for television as well.
His television work included True Believers (1988) and Infamous Victory: Ben Chifley's Battle for Coal (2008).
Returning to film, he wrote and directed the semi-autobiographical The Nostradamus Kid (1993).
He wrote six novels, most of them reworkings of films, and 13 volumes of non-fictions.
Some of these were collections of his writings and all were political. Much of it was influenced by the new journalism of Americans such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson. He also called his writing half Norman Mailer and half Evelyn Waugh.
One, the 1997 Goodbye Jerusalem, made a huge splash for all the wrong reasons. It was pulped after Tony Abbott and Peter Costello and their wives took defamation action and were awarded $277,000 damages. The damage to Ellis's reputation was also great.
More damage followed in 1999 when adultery and paternity claims turned into a media circus. Ellis said, with characteristic hyperbole, that it ruined his life.
For much of his life Ellis was close to the Labor Party - an insider without being part of its power structures, more a fly on the wall of the corridors of power. He wrote speeches for several leaders, including Bob Carr and Kim Beazley.
In 1994 he ran, as an independent, against Bronwyn Bishop - who was trying to move to the lower house - in a by-election for the seat of Mackellar.
Ellis won more than 23 per cent of the vote in the safe Liberal seat, an achievement that he said derailed Bishop's leadership ambitions and therefore "caused the Howard era" and, in turn, Abbott's.
These big claims were based on a very respectable vote, but one made possible by Labor not fielding a candidate.
Ellis kept writing compulsively, much of it in the early hours of the morning, in meticulous longhand. He despised computer writing - "more great works have been written with a feather than a word processor".
Some of his views were surprising, except nothing he said or did should have been surprising.
Gillard was not well-informed and had a "kindergarten sandpit response to things". On the other hand, Abbott was well-mannered and had a first-class mind. His favourite human being was the eccentric independent Bob Katter.
In July 2015 Ellis announced he was suffering from liver cancer and may have had only weeks to live.
But his torrent of blogs scarcely paused.
A sample of post-diagnosis character assessments included: "the yapping hydrophobic innumerate (Scott) Morrison"; and, on disgraced union whistleblower Kathy Jackson, a "fertile avaricious temptress" and "Nile serpent".
Or a double header: "Malcolm Turnbull has joined the Dark Side. He also favours torturing rape victims now, like his colleague `Darth' Dutton, the Galaxy's ruling sadist."
It's way over the top, but vintage Ellis.
Noyce, who says that without Ellis there'd have been no Newsfront, paid a recent tribute: "He writes from the heart and speaks fom the heart and thinks from his heart, not anyone else's heart.
"You could say he's jaundiced but it's always illuminating. That's a very rare quality.
"...So much journalism and writing is safe. Bob was never safe and he has often paid for that."
