The prime minister's son who found a home in Hollywood

Sydney Morning Herald

05-07-2025

From a fairly modest start – a turgid Australian take on American daytime soaps titled The Power, The Passion, and later the nation's leading actor starter school, weeknight soap Home and Away – McMahon ultimately created a richly textured American career for himself.
A small role in American daytime soap Another World allowed him to bounce into American primetime network TV, with roles on ′90s crime thriller Profiler, supernatural drama Charmed and, finally, the co-lead role in Nip/Tuck, which gave McMahon genuine legitimacy in Hollywood.
Created by Ryan Murphy, one of Hollywood's auteurs, Nip/Tuck was a critical and commercial success.
On the cinema screen, McMahon played Victor von Doom – alias Doctor Doom – in the 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four films. With the announcement of McMahon's death following a private battle with cancer, it is a sadly serendipitous footnote that the reboot of that franchise, in which Robert Downey jnr plays McMahon's character, premieres globally in the next few weeks.
Later, McMahon was one of the faces of Law & Order producer Dick Wolf's FBI franchise, starring in FBI: Most Wanted and appearing in its two sister programs, FBI and FBI: International. In Hollywood's eyes, McMahon was unequivocally a leading man.
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Despite his success, however, McMahon never really lost his Australian-ness. How could anyone whose first role was Speedo-clad Mick Dooley in a film titled Wet and Wild Summer?
Curiously nonmaterialistic, McMahon spent most of his working life living in the same house in Los Angeles.
He chose the house, he once told me, because it had a backyard view of LA's Hollywood sign. That sign, which cast a long shadow, had talismanic properties in McMahon's mind: a daily visual reminder of his ambition in moving to LA.
Marrying for the third time in 2014, to the former model and author Kelly Paniagua, McMahon finally sold the house in Hollywood a year later, a decision that, in hindsight, is more revealing than it might have seemed at the time.
Perhaps in his third act, McMahon, the little boy who grew up in the shadow of Kirribilli House, with a prime ministerial father and a truly formidable mother, no longer needed the talisman that had been his silent charm for decades. He had finally conquered his ambitions on his own terms.