John Cornell, buccaneering Australian entrepreneur who helped launch Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee and Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket – obituary

John Cornell, who has died aged 80, was the Australian business genius behind the career of Paul Hogan, a one-time Sydney Harbour Bridge rigger who became famous worldwide as Crocodile Dundee; he was also responsible for pitching the idea of the World Series Cricket competition to Kerry Packer and ensuring its success.

Cornell was working as a producer for the Australian Channel 9’s nightly A Current Affair when he met Hogan, who had just won a television talent show as “a tap-dancing knife thrower from the outback” and was being interviewed on the programme.

The two hit it off immediately and Cornell hired him as a comic turn on the news show, helping him to develop his larrikin pub philosopher persona, subsequently becoming his manager and business partner.

Together they created The Paul Hogan Show, a comedy sketch show featuring such characters as the inept stuntman Leo Wanker, Perce the Wino, skateboarding teenager Nigel Lovelace, beer-swilling suburbanite Arthur Dunger and magician Luigi The Unbelievable. Cornell, who co-wrote and produced the show, also starred as Hogan’s gormless lifeguard flatmate, Strop.

The series ran for eleven years in Australia, on the Seven Network and later on Channel 9. It became popular in Britain too, when it was peak viewing on the new Channel 4 in 1982.

Cornell and Hogan also dipped a toe into advertising and, with Hogan as frontman, helped to make Winfield cigarettes Australia’s most popular brand and Foster’s the second biggest-selling lager in Britain. Their “throw another shrimp on the barbie” ads doubled the numbers of Americans visiting Australia.

But their biggest coup came in 1986 with Crocodile Dundee. Though Cornell had never produced a feature film and Peter Faiman, director of The Paul Hogan Show, had never directed one, the story of a hotshot New York journalist (Linda Kozlowski) who goes to Australia in pursuit of a story about Mick “Crocodile” Dundee (Hogan), a man reported (erroneously) to have had had his leg bitten off by a crocodile, then ships him to New York for his first visit to a big city, turned out to be a blockbuster.

With a budget of A$8.8 million, much of it put up by Hogan and Cornell themselves, it took more than A$47 million in Australia and more than US$147 million in North America, where it was the second-highest grossing film of the year after Top Gun. It earned an Oscar nomination for Cornell, Hogan and Ken Shadie for Best Original Screenplay.

A decade earlier Cornell, who had been managing the Australian fast bowler Dennis Lillee, pitched the idea of World Series Cricket (WSC), a controversial competition staged between 1977 and 1979, going up against established international cricket, to Kerry Packer, who had just inherited Channel 9. The idea was based on a suggestion by Lillee, primarily with the aim of securing better financial rewards for players.

Cornell worked closely with Packer and Austin Robertson in setting up WSC and was actively involved in scouting talent for the breakaway league, secretly signing cricketers from around the world to become involved and commissioning the competition jingle C’mon Aussie C’mon which became so popular that it reached No 1 in the Australian charts.

John Cornell was born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, on March 2 1941 and grew up in the coastal city of Bunbury, where he attended Bunbury High School, topping his class in English and Economics.

His career began as a journalist with the Daily News in Perth of which he became editor aged 26. After joining Channel 9 he was the founding producer of its A Current Affair.

Cornell also made millions in property deals on Queensland’s Gold Coast and at Byron Bay on the north coast of New South Wales, where he moved with his wife, Delvene Delaney, in 1980.

He was instrumental in turning what had been a small beachside hamlet, infamous at one time for the smells emanating from its abattoir and whaling station, into one of the most upmarket residential areas and holiday spots on the Australian east coast, including building the Beach Hotel which he sold for A$100 million in 2007.

As well as producing Crocodile Dundee, Cornell went on to direct and produce the 1988 sequel, Crocodile Dundee II as well as the 1990 comedy-drama, Also an Angel, also starring Hogan.

From 2004 he and Hogan became embroiled in a long-running and bitter dispute with the Australian Tax Office (Hogan famously invited the taxman to “come and get me, you miserable bastards”) over claims of Aus$150 million in unpaid taxes dating back to 1986, which was eventually settled in 2012.

Cornell was married twice before he married Delvene Delaney, a television personality whom he met when she appeared on The Paul Hogan Show, in 1977. She survives him with their two daughters and a daughter from one of his earlier marriages.

John Cornell, born March 2 1941, died July 23 2021