John Duigan’s first success, Mouth to Mouth, won the Jury Prize at the 1979 Australian Film Awards, and for the multi-award winning mini-series Vietnam, in which he cast Nicole Kidman in her first dramatic role, he won Best Director at the Penguin Television Awards. Other Australian-based films included Winter of Our Dreams, with Bryan Brown and Judy Davis, for which he won the Australian Writers Guild award for Best Original Screenplay, and was nominated for Best Screenplay at the Australian Film Institute Awards;

The Year My Voice Broke, which won AFIs for Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay, the Australian Writer’s Guild award for Best Screenplay, Australian Critics Circle award for Best Film and Jury Prize at Rio De Janeiro; Flirting, for which he cast a young Naomi Watts in her first screen role, also an AFI Best Film and Critics Circle Best Film winner, and Sirens with Hugh Grant, Best Film winner at St. Petersburg. In 1991 he received the Byron Kennedy Award for ‘an impressive and original body of work both as writer and director’. From 1994, he was based mainly in the UK, working there and in the United States over the following twelve years. Between 2005 and 2010, he returned to his studies in Philosophy to work on a book of secular ethics, after which he resumed work on film in Australia with Careless Love in 2011-12, and on a new novel.