Terence Donovan, who spent more than 550 episodes as Neighbours patriarch Doug Willis and four decades before that in some of Australian television's defining police dramas, has died in Melbourne at 90. His sons Jason and Paul announced the death on Sunday, saying their father died peacefully on Saturday night after being cared for at Cabrini Hospital.

"It is with great sadness but also a sense of celebration of a long, full life that myself and my brother Paul announce our father Terence died peacefully last night here in Melbourne," Jason Donovan wrote on Instagram. "Our dad was a huge character. Larger than life. He was our best friend... Our world."

Born in London in 1935, Donovan moved to Australia as a teenager and drove trucks and painted houses before acting found him. He became a fixture of the Crawford police dramas, playing Senior Detective Mick Peters across six years of Division 4 from 1969, then Cop Shop's Vic Cameron. On film he led the 1978 heist thriller Money Movers, played Captain Simon Hunt in Breaker Morant after originating the stage lead two years earlier, and turned up in The Man from Snowy River.

It was Neighbours that made him a household face twice over. Donovan joined in 1990 as Doug Willis, the builder married to Pam and father to Adam, Gaby, Brad and Cody, and returned in 2014 for a storyline in which Doug developed Alzheimer's disease, a role that led Donovan to become an ambassador for Alzheimer's Australia before the character's on-screen death in 2016. He was back once more for the show's 2022 finale. By then the program was a family affair three times over: Jason had been its breakout star as Scott Robinson in the 1980s, and granddaughter Jemma Donovan played Harlow Robinson from 2019 to 2022.

Donovan's other legacy sits behind the camera. In the early 1970s he campaigned in the Make it Australian movement that pushed for local content quotas, the settings that later gave shows like Neighbours their run. In a second post, Jason paid tribute to "his passion and purpose as a believer in an Australian identity and as a trailblazer for Australian stories".

Tributes arrived through Sunday, Dannii Minogue and Jackie O among those responding to the family's announcement. Neighbours itself finished before its patriarch, airing its final episode in December 2025 after Amazon ended the revival. The family has asked for privacy.