Tandi Wright

Zambian-born Tandi Wright made her Kiwi screen debut while a teenager, with a small role in 1984 tele-movie Iris (not to be confused with the 2001 Judi Dench film, based on another writer named Iris). Wright has gone on to a prolific acting career, displaying her gift for comedy in Willy Nilly, awardwinning teen show Being Eve and satire Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby.

After graduating from acting school Toi Whakaari in 1994, Wright won a role as nurse Caroline Buxton in Shortland Street, a role which would see her character falling in love, and doing jail-time. She can also be spotted among the ensemble cast of 1996 short film Permanent Wave. After four years on Shortland Street, Wright took some time out, before returning afresh to acting.

2001 saw Wright joining the cast of teenage drama series Being Eve, playing the peroxide-blonde stepmother of the main character - letting loose as the woman with "appalling" dress sense and ten centimetre heels.

Eve was followed by roles on two shortlived programmes - Australian backpacker drama Crash Palace and quirky soap send-up Atlantis High - before Wright struck gold in popular Sunday night comedy Willy Nilly. 

The latter show saw Wright playing Joy, an undertaker's assistant who becomes part of a band of social outcasts, after moving in with two forty-something brothers. "She's quite daft  - but lovely," Wright said of the character.

For a number of months while working full-time on Willy Nilly, Wright spent her Sundays before the cameras on the fourth season of Street Legal - playing "little toughie" detective Angela Watson. She also appeared in another longrunning drama, Mercy Peak.

2004's Serial Killers saw Wright reunited with Shortland Street co-stars Oliver Driver and Robyn Malcolm. The acclaimed comedy from Shortland Street scribe James Griffin goes behind the scenes on a hospital soap opera. Wright played a lazy producer, who wishes she could make the show without having to deal with writers.

In 2004 Wright found herself suffering various indignities on politically incorrect comedy Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby. She played the kindhearted teacher who falls for the charms of hypocritical, egotistical counsellor Steve Mudgeway. When Gormsby was broadcast in Australia, Melbourne Age critic Ray Cassin called the show as "resolutely politically incorrect as it is possible for a television series to be".

Wright next found herself wandering through the New Zealand bush trying to find her children, in period series The Lost Children. The same year she was catapulted into the future for Margaret Mahy fantasy Maddigan's Quest, and appeared in the troubled present on the shortlived drama, Doves of War.

Peter Cooke TV-biopic Not Only But Always featured Wright in a cameo role as Sound of Music star Julie Andrews. Wright has also played small parts in a number of feature films, stretching from 1992 road movie Absent Without Leave to a role as a mad scientist, in the popular Black Sheep (2006).

That year Tandi Wright faced the "extraordinary challenge" of playing a mother caught up in the horrors of the Aramoana killings in Out of the Blue, for which she was nominated for best supporting actress in the 2008 NZ Film and TV Awards. Wright described the role as "the most full on experience I think I have ever had in making anything".... "the deepest and darkest and wildest I've been."