Jennifer Ward-Lealand

Jennifer Ward-Lealand is an acclaimed actor whose extensive resume includes drama, comedy and singing, sometimes within the same production.

Aged seven, while at a theatre rehearsal with her father, "it hit me like a bolt of lighting that I wanted to act". Ward-Lealand went on to appear in a small role in the play, which was directed by Paul Maunder. Her screen debut followed a few years later, in Maunder's docu-drama Gone up North for a While.

Ward-Lealand's first ongoing television role was as Jan in Close to Home (1978 - 1980). After leaving school she spent a year touring New Zealand in a community theatre group, performing clown shows and Chekhov.

In 1982 she completed a year-long diploma in acting from Auckland's then influential Theatre Corporate. Inbetween the theatre work that followed, Ward-Lealand appeared alongside Temuera Morrison in television drama Seekers, winning praise from the Evening Post for her "strong" performance.

But arguably Ward-Lealand's breakthrough TV role was in 1985's Danny and Raewyn, an episode from the About Face series. Filmed largely in an Auckland flat so cramped the cameraman sometimes had to sit on the stove, this tale of working class relationship breakdown would win Ward-Lealand a GOFTA Best Actress Award. 

The same year Ward-Lealand made her big screen debut as the nightclub singer Costello - and sang three songs - in Wellington crime thriller Dangerous Orphans.

Then she joined Harry Sinclair and Don McGlashan in multi-media group The Front Lawn, touring with them across New Zealand in a V8 Pontiac Laurentian covered in fake grass. Ward-Lealand also appears in the final Front Lawn film Linda's Body, which won Best Short Film in the 1990 Film and TV Awards.

1992 saw Ward-Lealand starring opposite her real-life partner Michael Hurst, in The Footstep Man. She played Mireille, the prostitute lover of French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the object of the main character's obsession. "We needed her presence, her stature, her eyes, her voice," said the film's director Leon Narbey. "I'm not interested in an actor's delivery of dialogue, that's a stage technique. I'm after subtext and subtlety and body language and she's got all that."

She followed it by playing the glamorous draper caught up in romantic complications, in Peter Wells and Stewart Main melodrama Desperate Remedies (1993). The film earned back most of its budget at the Cannes Film Festival after selling to 25 countries, put Ward-Lealand on the cover of magazine Screen International, and had NZ Herald critic Peter Calder calling her New Zealand's "most accomplished and versatile actress".

Desperate Remedies also earned her a Best Actress award at the International Festival of Fantasy Films in Sitges, Spain. Ward-Lealand missed out on picking up the award in person, because she had to fly back to rejoin the cast of the high-rating Australian sketch show Full Frontal.

Ward-Lealand's other big-screen appearances include playing the domineering mother of a murderer in the stylish horror piece The Ugly, and being part of the ensemble casts of  low-budget romp I'll Make You Happy and Maurice Gee adaptation Fracture. For the latter film, she was nominated as Best Supporting Actress in the NZ Film and TV Awards.

On television, Ward-Lealand played Isobel Kearney for a two year stint on soap opera Shortland Street. She has also guest-starred on New Zealand programmes The Billy T James Show, Duggan and Interrogation, and three episodes of McPhail and Gadsby comedy Letter to Blanchy. She played several different characters in NZ-filmed American shows Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. 

As an actress, singer and director of theatre, Ward-Lealand has amassed an impressive number of credits and accolades, and acted in New Zealand plays The Bach, Via Satellite, and The Sex Fiend. in 2007, she toured her acclaimed Marlene Dietrich cabaret show, Falling in Love Again (also the name of her first solo CD) in New Zealand and Australia.

She was a founding board member of Auckland's late lamented Watershed theatre in 1989, became president of New Zealand Actors Equity in 2007, and serves as a trust board member of Silo Theatre and as an honorary board member of WIFT (Women in Film and Television). In 2007 Barbara Cairns wrote a chapter about her for the book New Zealand Filmmakers (Wayen State University Press).

On the 2006 New Year's Honours List, she was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the theatre and the community. Jennifer Ward-Lealand lives in Auckland with her husband Michael Hurst, and their two sons. 



Sources include
Pamela Stirling, 'Star Turn' (Interview) - Listener, 12 September 1992, Page 16