It\u2019s a legendary story \u2013 Harrow has quite a few of them \u2013 and I suspect she likes what it reveals about the Kiwi ingenue who flew to London with single-minded ambition and a sense of her own possibilities.<\/p>\n
Snapped up by the Royal Shakespeare Company, she was cast as Olivia opposite Judi Dench in Twelfth Night, the first time a major leading role had been offered to an actress straight from drama school. <\/p>\n
John Hurt was once her Romeo. Patrick Stewart played Shylock to her Portia in The Merchant of Venice. They remained such close friends that he spoke at her wedding in 1991 to renowned US marine biologist Roger Payne, the co-discoverer of whale song, whom she married in a stone circle in Vermont. <\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to be an actress of Shakespeare,\u201d she says, of the path she had mapped out for herself as a 10-year-old, sitting in the \u201cgiant\u2019s chair\u201d around the rocks from Milford Beach as a full moon streaked light across the water.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never wanted to go to Hollywood. I grew up with a mother who believed American culture was going to ruin the world. And I think she\u2019s probably right.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arguably the finest actress New Zealand has ever produced and unquestionably the most internationally acclaimed, Harrow did eventually turn to the dark side. <\/p>\n
It was while filming Omen III: The Final Conflict in 1980 that she fell for the devil (well, the son of Satan), played by Sam Neill. <\/p>\n
Sam Neill and Lisa Harrow on location in the English countryside for Omen III: The Final Conflict, with producer Harvey Bernhard.<\/p>\n
What drew her back to New Zealand after Payne\u2019s death in 2023 was in part to be close to Tim, the son she had with Neill, and their three grandchildren. The two youngest are identical twin girls.<\/p>\n
\u201cNew Zealand has always been home,\u201d she says, looking across the harbour from her apartment on Auckland\u2019s North Shore, her feet tucked up on the couch. \u201cI feel rooted here.\u201d<\/p>\n
At 82, Harrow retains both a girlish quality and a presence that could be intimidating in someone less warm and engaged.<\/p>\n
Hanging above the downstairs landing is a beautiful portrait of her as Nancy Astor, the first woman to serve as a Member of Parliament in the UK, modelled on a 1908 portrait by John Singer Sargent. <\/p>\n
John Leonard, a critic for New York magazine, described Harrow\u2019s performance in a 1982 BBC drama series on Astor\u2019s life as \u201cdynamite\u201d, noting he had never \u201cadmired an actress and disliked a character so much\u201d. <\/p>\n
The same year, she starred opposite Peter O\u2019Toole in George Bernard Shaw\u2019s Man and Superman on the West End. She still has a framed Punch cartoon of them in that one.<\/p>\n
A cartoon in Punch magazine depicting Peter O’Toole and Lisa Harrow in George Bernard Shaw’s play Man and Superman. Photo \/ Michael Craig<\/p>\n
Despite her long and glittering international career, opportunities have been much sparser here. Four decades have passed since she appeared in her last two New Zealand films, Other Halves and Shaker Run. <\/p>\n
So, it was an overdue return to the limelight when she walked the red carpet in Wellington this week at the premiere of Chelsie Preston Crayford\u2019s first feature, Caterpillar. <\/p>\n
Harrow plays Huia, a woman who has lived her life in service to others. In the early stages of dementia, a diagnosis she hasn\u2019t disclosed, she is the relational glue in a leaky house inhabited by three generations of women whose emotional bonds are fracturing.<\/p>\n
Huia\u2019s daughter, Maxine (played by Marta Dusseldorp), is a film-maker on the cusp of a hard-fought career breakthrough. A single mother, she has a fraught relationship with her own teenage daughter Cassie (Anais Shand). Both are so self-absorbed they can\u2019t see that Huia is slipping away from them.<\/p>\n
Anais Shand as Cassie (left) and Lisa Harrow as Cassie’s grandmother, Huia, in the feature film Caterpillar, written and directed by Chelsie Preston Crayford.<\/p>\n
Although Caterpillar is fictional, there are obvious parallels with Crayford\u2019s childhood. Her mother, acclaimed film-maker Dame Gaylene Preston<\/a>, was a single parent with a driving passion for her work. <\/p>\n When Crayford was 7, her newly widowed grandmother, Tui, moved in, becoming her \u201cother mother\u201d before dissolving into dementia, as Huia does. She died in 2006.<\/p>\n An actor and award-winning director of short films, Crayford spent six years writing the script for Caterpillar. She says her family was a portal into the story.<\/p>\n \u201cI was raised under one roof by two very different women: a Depression-era housewife with a devotion to the home that was tinged with resentment, and a trailblazing feminist filmmaker with little interest in domesticity,\u201d she notes in her writer\/director\u2019s statement.<\/p>\n \u201cI ate over-steamed veggies with gluggy cheese sauce at 4.30 with one, and pasta al dente at 8 with the other. I loved both my dinners.\u201d<\/p>\n Harrow\u2019s portrayal of Huia captures some of the fragility she herself felt returning to New Zealand as a widow, untethered and grieving \u201cthe absence of a force\u201d.<\/p>\n She and Payne met in London at a Greenpeace rally in Trafalgar Square; Harrow had been invited as a celebrity speaker. Ten weeks later, they were married.<\/p>\n \u201cSuddenly, I met a mind \u2013 not an ego,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd somebody whose view of the world was gargantuan.\u201d <\/p>\n A few years later, Harrow showed the depth of her love for Payne by setting aside her disdain for United States culture and moving with him to rural Vermont, where they became known for their environmental activism. <\/p>\n While that largely ended a career in the UK, some of her best theatre work was still ahead of her, including an off-Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit, and a 2001 staging of Medea in Pittsburgh that won her Performer of the Year.<\/p>\n Her last big acting job in the US before Covid was understudying Glenda Jackson in the gender-switched lead role of King Lear on Broadway. <\/p>\n Then, on a trip back home to New Zealand, she found herself trapped during the pandemic when our borders closed. <\/p>\n A type 1 diabetic, she was advised to delay her second Covid vaccination. By the time she was cleared to travel, her Green Card had expired, causing further delays. <\/p>\n In the end, it was almost two years before she was finally reunited with Payne. By then, he was already ill with cancer. He died 18 months later. <\/p>\n Suddenly, Harrow found herself living alone in Auckland and \u201cmissing him terribly\u201d. <\/p>\n She and Payne had always run her lines together \u2013 on late-night phone calls, sometimes, when she was on the other side of the world \u2013 and he attended her shows in the US so religiously that some theatre companies gave him an office. <\/p>\n It\u2019s not something Harrow talked about on set, not even to Crayford, but she felt his loss sharply while working on Caterpillar. Her first acting project since his death, it also gave her a sense of purpose.<\/p>\n \u201cThe wonderful thing about this film was that it allowed me to explore those private dark corners Huia has, because she\u2019s living in her own mind,\u201d she says. \u201cI just opened myself to Chelsie, and my imagination was completely fed by her story. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd thank God there isn\u2019t a savage man in it beating up the world or killing pirates. It\u2019s a beautifully expressed, heartbreakingly loving and honest film.\u201d <\/p>\n Set in Wellington in 1983, Caterpillar was filmed in just five weeks. Crayford\u2019s father, Jonathan, composed the original score and her mother, Gaylene, appears fleetingly as a \u201cstunt driver\u201d, doubling for Huia in one scene. <\/p>\n Harrow describes the shoot as a \u201creal kick, bollock and scramble\u201d to get done. She also spent much of it walking on a broken foot, after an injury in the first week caused more damage than anyone realised at the time.<\/p>\n The title Caterpillar refers in part to Huia\u2019s dream of seeing the monarch butterflies that arrive in Mexico in their millions to escape the northern winter, an extraordinary 4800km migration spanning multiple generations.<\/p>\n Many don\u2019t make it across the Gulf of Mexico. \u201cThe Gulf of Trump,\u201d says Harrow, archly. \u201cBut they lay an egg, the caterpillar hatches and it becomes a butterfly, which continues the journey of the mother. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve never really understood why human beings aren\u2019t canny enough to see that\u2019s the miracle of life, not a big guy in the sky, and that\u2019s what we need to protect.\u201d<\/p>\n The monarch population is declining, but in summer, where Harrow lived in Vermont, fields of flowering milkweed thrummed with them. Watching Caterpillar for the first time left her undone.<\/p>\n \u201cThe last scene with the butterflies was the first time I cried for my dead husband,\u201d she says, \u201cbecause I knew he would have adored that shot.\u201d<\/p>\n Harrow has never had anyone close to her suffer from dementia. However, her brother, who was a farmer, experienced a similar decline before his death from multiple system atrophy, a neurodegenerative disorder associated with exposure to the herbicide paraquat. <\/p>\nFellow filmmakers: Chelsie Preston Crayford, left, and her mother, Dame Gaylene Preston. Photos \/ Hagen Hopkins; NZ Woman’s Weekly<\/p>\n
Lisa Harrow in the long-running off-Broadway production of Wit, the 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson.<\/p>\n
Lisa Harrow as Huia, who hides her dementia diagnosis from the family.<\/p>\n