Actor Craig McLachlan charged with indecent assault and other offences

Craig McLachlan in 2015. Photo / Getty Images

Actor Craig McLachlan has been charged with indecent assault and other offences.

Victoria Police said a 53-year-old NSW man had been charged on one count of common law assault, eight counts of indecent assault and one count of attempted indecent assault.

He was charged on summons to appear at Melbourne Magistrates' Court on February 8.

McLachlan sued the ABC and Fairfax Media last year after they published allegations of harassment from female performers who worked with him during the theatre production of the Rocky Horror Show. A trial was due to start on February 4.

McLachlan, who won the Gold Logie in 1990 for being the most popular personality on Australian TV, become a household name after playing the loveable larrikin Henry Ramsay in the TV show Neighbours alongside pop icon Kylie Minogue.

He also released the song Mona (I Need You Baby) and toured the UK and Europe with his band Check 1-2.

The song rose to number three on the Australian charts and McLachlan got an ARIA award for the biggest selling song of the year in 1990.

McLachlan went on to star in Home and Away, Packed to the Rafters and the BBC One spy drama Bugs. He appeared alongside Hollywood star Catherine Zeta-Jones and Omar Sharif in the 1996 TV movie Catherine the Great.

Along the way he forged a successful career in musical theatre, appearing in productions of Grease, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Chicago and the Australian production of the Rocky Horror Show as Frank-N-Furter, for which he won the Helpmann Award for Best Male Actor in a Musical.

More recently he has appeared on the ABC TV show The Doctor Blake Mysteries in the lead role of Dr Lucien Blake, who returns home to Ballarat in the 1950s to take over his father's GP practice.

The show returned to air last year without McLachlan in the lead role and was retitled The Blake Mysteries. It has since been reported that Seven will drop the series.