Angry Anderson, who at 5-foot-1 stood tall as the snarling lead singer of the Australian hard rock band Rose Tattoo and as a villainous henchman in the 1985 film “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” died on Sept. 21 in Sydney, Australia. He was 79.
His death was announced on social media by the band, which also noted a cardiac arrest he had suffered weeks earlier.
Mr. Anderson, swathed in tattoos, with a cue-ball pate, was the last surviving member of Rose Tattoo, after the deaths of several other members who cycled through the band over the decades. The group, formed in Sydney in the mid-1970s, was an institution among Aussie headbangers, specializing in the down-and-dirty hard rock of their friends in AC/DC, which is considered a national treasure.
The Rose Tattoo sound was “totally aggressive, take no prisoners, spare no one, ‘have no mercy’ type music,” Mr. Anderson said in a 2001 interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “The more out of control we became,” he added, “the bigger crowds we’d pull, and that feeds the beast.”
The Tatts, as the band was known, had multiple Top 40 hits in Australia, including “Bad Boy for Love” (1977) and “We Can’t Be Beaten” (1982).
Although Rose Tattoo never attracted a major following in the United States, the band was frequently hailed as an influence by plenty of groups that did.
“The James Brown of heavy metal rock ’n’ roll,” Sebastian Bach, Skid Row’s frontman, called Mr. Anderson in a social media post after his death. “you were a poet & you didn’t even know it.”
Members of Guns N’ Roses also cited Mr. Anderson and Rose Tattoo as inspirations over the years.
“One of the best shows I ever saw was an Aerosmith show, but it wasn’t Aerosmith that was the most exciting part,” Axl Rose, the band’s frontman, said in 1987. “Rose Tattoo opened the show, and Rose Tattoo was great.”
“I watched people,” he added. “People went psycho.”
In 1993, Guns N’ Roses invited the Tatts to reunite as an opening act on the Australian leg of the band’s “Use Your Illusion” tour. Three years later the group covered Rose Tattoo’s “Nice Boys” on its “Live ?!*@ Like A Suicide” EP.
Mr. Anderson’s biggest flirtation with the American mainstream might have come in his memorably menacing role in “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” the third installment of the action-packed “Mad Max” series, set in the Australian outback after a nuclear war and starring Mel Gibson and Tina Turner.
In what was originally intended as a small role, Mr. Anderson stood out as Ironbar, an enforcer for Ms. Turner’s Aunty Entity, the ruthless ruler of a lawless bazaar called Bartertown.
Throughout the film, Ironbar, whose character veers into slapstick, seems to take as much punishment as he doles out. “Seriously, this guy is like an Australian, postapocalyptic Wile E. Coyote,” one review site noted.
On a podcast called “Still Rockin’ It,” Mr. Anderson recalled that the director George Miller was initially concerned about his reputation as “uncontrollable,” only to be reassured by a mutual colleague who told Mr. Miller, “If you can keep him away from the alcohol, he’s fine.”
Gary Stephen Anderson was born on Aug. 5, 1947, in Melbourne.
His childhood was harrowing. “I was constantly belittled and beaten by my father, and also a victim of pedophilia by another family member,” he said in a 2018 interview with the site Classic Rock. “On top of being a little guy, it was a lot to deal with.”
His diminutive height made him a target for bullies at school, and he developed a combustible personality that earned him the nickname Angry Ant. He began to think of himself as a “bad seed” and wondered if he would end up a criminal, he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Instead, he turned to music, eventually singing with two other bands before joining Rose Tattoo, formed by the guitarist Peter Wells from the heavy metal band Buffalo.
Initially, “we were a blues band,” Mr. Anderson said. “We just liked to play some things really, really fast and very loud.”
Rose Tattoo, in its various forms, continued to release albums for decades. In 1986, Mr. Anderson released the first of two solo albums, “Beats From a Single Drum,” featuring the hit single “Suddenly” (1987). The song was a bombastic power ballad in the vein of John Waite or Meat Loaf. The Huffington Post in 2016 said it had “those that know it lip syncing and air-grabbing for their lives.”
Mr. Anderson was widely recognized in his home country for his extensive charity work, but also drew fire for his failed Australian Senate run in 2016 with the right-wing Australian Liberty Alliance, which opposed the “Islamization” of the West.
His survivors include three children — Roxanne, Galen and Blaine — from a marriage to his former wife, Lindy Michael. His son Liam was killed in 2018.
While he appeared in many Australian film and television productions over the years, he never considered acting as a full-time career.
In an interview in July with the Japanese music publication Roppongi Rocks, Mr. Anderson recalled his time on the “Thunderdome” set, when Mr. Gibson and Mr. Miller had encouraged him to enroll in acting programs to hone his craft.
“That sounds, like, too hard to me,” he recalled thinking. “I’m a rock ’n’ roll singer. I like to get up late and drink a lot.”
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