Before Muriel's Wedding, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Crocodile Dundee ever reached a screen, Australian commercial broadcasters had to make a promise: that a share of what they aired would be homegrown drama. Terence Donovan was one of the actors who fought to win that promise in the 1970s, according to his family, and he died peacefully in Melbourne on July 18, 2026, his sons Jason and Paul said in a joint statement carried by Hello!. He was 90, and for more than three decades Australian audiences knew him best as Doug Willis, patriarch of the Willis family on Neighbours.

Donovan joined Neighbours in 1990 and went on to appear in more than 550 episodes as Doug Willis, Prism News reported following his death. He left the main cast in 1994 but kept returning to the role, for the soap's twentieth anniversary special in 2005, in a 2014 guest arc, in a 2016 storyline that saw Doug Willis die on screen, and for one last cameo in the show's 2022 series finale. That same year, 1990, Donovan also spent six weeks on Home and Away playing Al Simpson, Prism News noted in its report of his death.

His path to Doug Willis ran through decades of Australian television and film. Donovan played Detective Mick Peters on the police procedural Division 4 starting in 1969, then Detective Senior Sergeant Vic Cameron on Cop Shop in the late 1970s and early 1980s. On screen he was Captain Simon Hunt in the 1980 war drama Breaker Morant and Henry Craig in 1982's The Man from Snowy River.

Donovan was born in London on October 28, 1935, and moved to Australia with his family as a teenager. He married actress and presenter Sue McIntosh; the marriage ended in 1972, and Donovan raised their son, Jason, largely as a single parent before marrying Marlene Saunders in 1981. He and Saunders had a second son, Paul, born the following year. Jason Donovan later joined the Neighbours cast himself, and in 2022 Terence made one last appearance in the show's finale, sharing the screen again with his son.

Jason Donovan has said his father's influence on Australian screens reached beyond his own performances. In the 1970s, Terence Donovan took part in a campaign pushing commercial broadcasters to commit to airing local content. "The result of that campaign was an obligation on commercial television broadcasters to broadcast Australian stories," Jason said. He added that "without people like my Dad we might not have seen the growth in the industry during the 70s and 80s," according to AOL.

Donovan spent more than sixty years in Australian entertainment, moving between television police dramas, two of the country's best known soap operas, and film. What persists most visibly is Doug Willis, a character viewers followed for over three decades, killed off, brought back, and finally retired alongside the actor who originated him. What persists less visibly is the broadcasting rule his family says he helped fight for, one that still shapes which stories Australian television tells and who gets to tell them.