In his early 20s, his dream of becoming an artist was scuppered when he fell in love and rapidly found himself married with a young family to support.
Requiring a more financially secure career, he abandoned plans for art school and began training as a teacher in Wellington, where he joined the college’s drama club.
A second critical fork in the road came when Downstage, New Zealand’s first professional theatre company, opened in 1964 and invited Mune to become a permanent member.
“It paid £1 a week more than I was getting at training college [where students were then paid a salary], so I became an actor,” he says.
“There was every reason not to be confident about the theatre world sustaining life, but it still looked a better choice than painting.”
More than 60 years after his dream of going to art school was abandoned, Ian Mune is now painting fulltime. Photo / Michael Craig
Mune, who was knighted in 2024, doesn’t regret where those twists of fate have taken him.
He’s loved acting, playing everyone from Winston Churchill to Rob Muldoon, and still lands the odd job here and there – including a cameo role in the new sci-fi body horror Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant.
Last year, he reunited with longtime friend Sam Neill in the TV courtroom drama The Twelve, their first on-screen appearance together since Sleeping Dogs in 1977 (Mune also co-wrote the screenplay for that one).
His passion for art, however, remained a constant presence, from designing sets to regularly attending life-drawing classes.
“I’d be drawing and sketching things all the time, and have spells where I’d get into painting,” says Mune, who reckons it kept him sane during the inevitable downtime between gigs.
“The phone doesn’t ring and you get this feeling you’ve been dumped.”
Ian Mune combined his two passions, painting and acting, when he played an artist in a 2017 production of Carl Bland and Ben Crowder’s Spirit House with Mia Blake.
In 2017, Mune’s world was upended when his wife, Josie, died. They’d been married for more than 50 years.
“Once I came to, I suddenly realised I didn’t want to have any more of the bullshit involved in trying to get movies off the ground. So I picked up my brushes and began painting fulltime.”
In Mune’s cottage on the outskirts of Kumeū, the walls are covered in his artworks. So is most of the floor.
For the past few weeks, he’s been preparing for his first solo art exhibition, sorting through hundreds of paintings and sketches. On the dining-room table, stacks of his life drawings are piled precariously high.
“I discovered I’ve got something like 600 pages of naked people,” he says, with a chuckle.
At 85, Mune still has a flair for the dramatic. Photo / Michael Craig
Scene from the Road+ opens at Studio One Toi Tū in Ponsonby next Friday and is split into four sections: Dream World (imaginary places), Beauty or the Beast (portraits), Tributes to the Garden Warrior (a nod to Josie) and WTF, for pieces that defy definition.
The show was organised by one of Mune’s friends, Auckland artist Jane McGill, and he’s nervous about it.
“It’s worse than any opening night [for a play],” he says. “There’s nobody else to blame.”
Some 30 years ago, he exhibited at Toi Tū with composer Stephen McCurdy, who scored Came a Hot Friday, the hit 1985 comedy Mune directed and co-wrote, casting Billy T. James as the Tainuia Kid, a loony Mexican-Māori cowboy.
Mune in director mode during filming of the documentary Billy T: Te Movie, released in 2011.
A great-grandfather now, he sits on his deck each morning, looking over green fields and a waterway frequented by geese and paradise ducks. On Fridays, he paints with a portrait group in town.
You’d never know it from his vibrant artworks, but Mune is colour blind. Often working from photographs, he relies on a labelling system to differentiate between tones of green, brown and red.
“It’s not that I can’t see them, it’s that I see them differently from you,” he explains, describing each painting as an ongoing dialogue between himself and the canvas.
“I rough it out, put on some paint, and then sit and stare at it. If it talks to me, then it wants to keep going.”
At the premiere of Billy T: Te Movie in Hamilton. Photo / Christine Cornege
A few years ago, he went on a research trip to Europe, the United States and Mexico, taking hundreds of photographs he thought would keep him in paintings for years.
Back home, he started on his first piece, a beautiful Spanish landscape, then paused to see what the painting had to say to him.
“I looked at it, and it laughed in my face. And I realised that the hills in the background I’d painted were Kiwi hills.
“So, I put all those photographs aside and I’ve been shooting and painting New Zealand landscapes ever since.”
As a film-maker, he felt exactly the same way.
“I had no ambition to go and make American movies,” he says. “I wanted to make Kiwi movies. And that’s what I did.”
Scene from the Road+ is on at Auckland’s Studio One Toi Tū from September 11 to 18.
Joanna Wane is a senior lifestyle writer with a focus on social issues and the arts.