Job:Rolf is a successful artist, singer, musician and award-winning television presenter. He is a CBE and a Member of the Order of Australia. His portrait of HM Queen Elizabeth II (commisioned to celebrate her 80th birthday) was the subject of a BBC One programme The Queen, by Rolf.
His television career includes 19 series of the award winning Animal Hospital and five years of Rolf on Art which had the highest TV ratings ever for an arts programme. He was also voted the most popular entertainer at Glastonbury and 2010 marked Rolf’s sixth appearance at the festival with a record breaking 130,000 audience for the first show on the main stage.
Rolf has lived in the UK permanently since 1962 but first came to England in 1952, just before his 22nd birthday, to study art. Keen to become an a portrait painter like his grandfather, he studied under the impressionist Hayward Veal. He met his wife, the Welsh sculptress and jeweller Alwen Hughes while they were both art students and they married in 1958. They have one daughter, Bindi Harris, who is a painter. Rolf has exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and The National Gallery and is an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of British Artists.
Recently, Rolf was filmed painting five women; Lily Cole, Emer Kenny, Dervla Kirwan, Lizzy Jagger and his wife Alwen, as Titania, from Shekespeare's 'A midsummer night's dream' for a BBC documentary called Rolf Paints his Dream.
Hobbies & interests: Rolf plays the didgeridoo and the wobble board, an instrument he invented by accident. He is also a very good swimmer; he won the Junior Backstroke Championship of Australia at the age of 15. As a child he owned a dog called Buster Fleabags.
