Why Andrew O’Keefe needs to learn from his Uncle Johnny’s deadly mistake – before it is too late

Andrew O’Keefe once said that his role model was his father, a prominent and respected figure in the legal world, who was a judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales.

But it is above all the example of his uncle, a rock ‘n’ roll star, that the disgraced ex-TV star most closely follows.

Johnny O’Keefe, known by his nickname ‘the wild one’, while his brother, a lawyer, was called ‘the mild one’, was a pioneering figure in the Australian music industry. Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s he scored almost 30 top 40 hits.

He also had a successful career as a television presenter, hosting the Saturday night Six O’Clock Rock, which later became the eponymous Johnny O’Keefe Show on Channel Seven.

Despite all his success and accolades, he suffered terribly from drug and alcohol addiction, eventually dying of an overdose in 1978 at the age of 43.

It’s a depressing story that’s made all the more compelling when you consider Andrew O’Keefe’s own downfall and how he openly battled drug addiction.

Last week, the 52-year-old former Deal or No Deal host appeared in court three times as he faces a series of complex domestic abuse and drug-related charges.

“It’s a mess, Your Honor,” O’Keefe admitted to the judge on Wednesday.

Outside the courtroom, he displayed his old charm, joking with reporters and insisting he was coming back.

But less than two hours after Wednesday’s hearing, he was arrested on alleged violation of a protective order and brought back before the judge.

It was a sad and familiar scene, one he had subconsciously predicted when he joked on the courthouse steps earlier that week that he “couldn’t stay away from this place.”

In this article, Daily Mail Australia chronicles O’Keefe’s tragic rise from nationally known TV presenter to tragic courtroom figure – and the alarming parallels with his uncle Johnny.

In the footsteps of his uncle

Andrew’s father, Barry O’Keefe, was a giant in the legal world, at one point serving as a commissioner of the Independent Commission Against Corruption in NSW.

O’Keefe initially followed his father’s example and began his career as a lawyer specialising in intellectual property at Allens Arthur Robinson.

He and his wife Eleanor had just bought a house and had their first of three children when he decided to make the move into television, a move his risk-taker father described at the time as “extremely uncertain.”

But it paid off when he gained national fame in 2003 as the host of Deal or No Deal.

His sharp wit and intelligent charm captivated viewers and he quickly became a household name when he was given the role of co-host of Weekend Sunrise in 2005, alongside Monique Wright.

But like his uncle, he was known for his partying nature.

That became clear in 2008, when The Sunday Telegraph published footage of O’Keefe collapsing into a gutter outside a Melbourne nightclub with a mysterious blonde woman.

Channel Seven, then accustomed to protecting its star, is said to have paid $25,000 to a bouncer in an attempt to keep the story secret before it leaked.

The network later released a statement stressing that O’Keefe was a “family man” and that he “never intended to intentionally offend anyone.”

O’Keefe himself promised it would not happen again.

“What happened is deeply unsavory and deeply shameful and I am not at all proud of it,” he told the Herald Sun at the time.

When he returned to Weekend Sunrise, he even made a joke about the incident.

“I got everything I wanted for Christmas: a gift certificate to a rehab center in Miami,” he told viewers.

O’Keefe has been in and out of rehabilitation centers at least ten times since then.

His first run-in with the law came during a family vacation in Cuba in 2015, when he was involved in a car accident with a “minister and his henchmen.”

“(It) meant that no matter how much I argued, it was all our fault!” he recalled of the incident, which led to him spending 14 hours in a Cuban cell.

His uncle Johnny was also involved in a car accident, but in his case the consequences were much more serious.

In the early morning of June 27, 1960, then ‘JOK’ as he was also known, a band member and his wife collided with the back of a gravel truck. All three were seriously injured.

O’Keefe lost four teeth in the crash and suffered fractures to his head and face.

It has been suggested that he suffered an undiagnosed brain injury that exacerbated his addiction and contributed to his multiple breakdowns.

The pressures of his career eventually led to the failure of his first marriage in 1966.

His cousin Andrew would also go through a bitter divorce from his wife Eleanor in 2017, before finally divorcing in 2019.

He told friends at the time that he was being “punished by his wife,” who reportedly did not let him see his children.

In 2022, The Australian reported that he had not had contact with his children for two years, which he described as one of the saddest moments of his life.

Addressing his ‘demons’

O’Keefe appeared on the Sunrise sofa in October 2019 after taking an eight-week absence from presenting The Chase to attend a psychiatric clinic.

A few weeks earlier he gave an interview to the Herald Sun in which he spoke candidly for the first time about the split from his wife Eleanor and the downward spiral he found himself in.

O’Keefe was ostensibly at Sunrise to promote a national “JOK” tribute tour titled Andrew O’Keefe Shouts Johnny O’Keefe, and he called his uncle “an absolute icon.”

“This is the man who single-handedly invented rock ‘n’ roll in Australia,” O’Keefe enthused to Sunrise presenters David ‘Kochie’ Koch and Samantha Armytage.

But the similarities between uncle and nephew were painfully obvious to all onlookers.

‘T“They always called Uncle John the wild one and Dad the gentle one,” O’Keefe laughed.

‘Dad was in court all the time defending Uncle John in all kinds of cases, a traffic violation, a property violation.’

Armytage interrupted his excited conversation to ask whom he most resembled.

“I think I’m a nice synthesis of both,” O’Keefe jokingly replied in a camp voice.

Kochie then took the opportunity to give the interview a more serious tone.

“We’ve been worried about you for the last year or two,” Kochie said.

“You gave an interview not too long ago about how you deal with your own demons.”

O’Keefe said his uncle had “a lot of his own demons,” which made the series extra poignant.

“He’s had multiple breakdowns, he’s had electroshock therapy, they’ve given him all kinds of medications to deal with the stress, the anxiety and the pressure that he experiences as himself,” O’Keefe said.

“I’m starting to understand that more and more. Everyone has a moment in their life when they really wonder what it’s all about, who they really are, whether what they’ve been doing for the last 45 years even means anything anymore.

“I think when I split up with my wife Eleanor, that was my time. And what I always believed in most was the power of love and joining with someone to create something special, and when I lost that, I thought it was all pointless.”

He added: ‘In life we ​​have different choices about how we deal with things, and some people work through their pain, or seek refuge in alcohol, drugs or food.

“And I am fortunate that we have the right institutions and expertise in this country to address and overcome these kinds of issues.”

His candor was brave and disarming.

But his spot on the other side of the bench was undoubtedly a painful reminder of how far he’d fallen since the days he regularly replaced Kochie during his 12 years with the Weeknd Sunrise.

He didn’t know it then, but he could fall much further.