Just one of the many immortal lines delivered by the menacing, softly-spoken, entirely evil Toecutter, leader of the outlaw gang in the original Mad Max film of 1979.

Hugh Keays Byrne, the Anglo-Indian-born actor who created the unforgettable character and helped script some of those memorable lines ("Kundalini wants his hand back"), has died at the age of 73.

Keays Byrne came to Australia as a Shakespearean actor, touring with director Peter Brooks's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1970s.

He fell in love with Australia, and with an Australian woman ("Christina Ferguson, the love of my life"), and never left. Tall, imposing and with an impressive, terrifying vocal range, he was soon picked up in the local film industry, which was booming with Whitlam Government subsidies in the 1970s.

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Among the films he made were the classics Stone, Strikebound and Mad Dog Morgan - and the less-than classic Barry Humphries vehicle Les Paterson Saves The World.

"Stone should never be underestimated in its importance, especially in starting all this exploitation stuff," Keays Byrne said.

"It's interesting for me, going from Stone to Mad Max, and of course Mad Max has been a huge part of my life, now for 40 years.

Mad Max director George Miller chose Keays Byrne after seeing him in Stone. Miller directed him and the other actors to give outrageously huge performances while pulling young star Mel Gibson right back, giving the film a schizoid timbre.

In Mad Max, partly shot in and around Clunes, a town is famously terrorised by the Toecutter's gang. The gang's cast members had gathered in Sydney and in true 1970s' fashion, decided to stay in character and costume while riding their motorcycles to Victoria, in a fit of method madness.

Scenes shot in the main street and on the train station platform are now icons of Australian cinema.

"We - the gang - talked about a few things before we went (on set), but as a whole I think everybody got it from George, from the script, from the art director Jon Dowding - all these things coalesced very well and luckily so," he told The Courier in 2019.

It paid off. There has scarcely been a more urbanely-menacing villain in an Australian film than the leather-clad Toecutter. So loved and feared was Keays Byrne in the role that George Miller brought him back as Immortan Joe in the sequel Fury Road.

Offscreen, Keays Byrne was not a villain, but a gentle, intellectually-gifted, environmentally-aware artist, who had a keen sense of social justice.