GinetteMcDonald
- Actor
- Producer
- Director
Although Ginette McDonald is best known as the gormless, vowel-mangling girl-from-the-suburbs Lynn of Tawa, she is a woman of many parts. Alongside an extensive acting and presenting career, her work as producer and director spans three decades, and includes Peppermint Twist, Shark in the Park, and Maurice Gee classic The Fire-Raiser.
Screenography
Biography
Ginette McDonald grew up Irish Catholic, the third child of seven in a family dominated by brothers. The family house in Wellington had holes in the bathroom floor, and a ballroom where her father, a doctor, sometimes played violin. She fell in love with television as a child, after first spying a TV in a radio store.
Awards
2007 Order of New Zealand Merit
For services to entertainment
1987 Listener Gofta Awards (New Zealand)
Best Drama Series: The Fire-Raiser
Best Children’s Programme: The Fire-Raiser, episode one (‘The Red Balaclava’)
“[Comedy] teeters dangerously between poignancy and laughter. It sort of sucks away the sadness. Sometimes the most tragic things make you laugh.”
More information
NZ On Screen's Ginette McDonald Collection
Interview with Ginette McDonald & her daughter Kate McGill, The Australian Women's Weekly, July 2019
Radio interview, Newstalk ZB, July 2019
Interview with newspaper The Wellingtonian, February 2014
Stuff interview, February 2016
Interview on TV series Ground Force, The NZ Herald, June 2001
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