HildaHayward
- Film pioneer
One of the earliest New Zealand women to work in movies, the late Hilda Hayward collaborated with her husband Rudall on four silent feature films in the 1920s. Author Deborah Shepard argues that her coverage of the 1932 Auckland riots make her New Zealand’s first known camerawoman. Hilda Hayward passed away on 3 January 1970.
Screenography
Biography
Hilda Hayward was born in Takapuna on 26 September 1898, the daughter of an affluent engineer father and a music teacher mother. Her father drowned while Hilda was still a child.
Later she spoke of having been “intensely interested” in movies as a youngster — imagining herself not as an actor, but working behind-the-scenes.
“When I was quite a little girl I was intensely interested in pictures, and in a childish way used to imagine how they were made and think of all kinds of crazy things that I’d like to make.”