[1] He was a student at the University of Sydney at the same time as other notable Australians including Clive James, Germaine Greer, Les Murray, John Bell, Robert Hughes and Mungo McCallum.
[10] Ellis won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Screenplay three times: Newsfront (1978, with Anne Brooksbank and Phillip Noyce),[11] Goodbye Paradise (1982, with Denny Lawrence),[12] and My First Wife (1984, with Paul Cox).
[14][15] Ellis's 2011 book Suddenly, Last Winter – An Election Diary created headlines for its criticism of the Labor Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and praise for the Liberal Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott.
The next day he announced "The news is very bad", and that the tests had revealed he had advanced liver cancer with a prognosis that he had months, if not weeks, to live.
[19] In June 2018, Kate and Rozanna Lilley, daughters of celebrated playwright Dorothy Hewett, alleged that they had engaged in consensual sex at the ages of 15 and 14 with Ellis.
The first edition of Goodbye Jerusalem was pulped following a successful defamation case brought by two Liberal cabinet ministers, Tony Abbott and Peter Costello, and their wives.
At issue was the single sentence where Ellis quoted politician Rodney Cavalier as having said, "Abbott and Costello...they're both in the Right wing of the Labour [sic] Party till the one woman fucked both of them and married one of them and inducted them into the Young Liberals".