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MichaelHaigh

  • Actor
Michael-Haigh-Key-Profile.jpg

Michael Haigh gave up teaching to become a professional actor. A founding member of Wellington’s Circa Theatre, his TV legacy is gruff office worker Jim in Roger Hall’s Gliding On — one of Kiwi television’s great comic characters, and a role that won him a Feltex Award. He played Jim for five years, and appeared in a number of other TV shows and films (often playing a policeman). Michael Haigh died in October 1993.

Screenography

Absent Without Leave
1992 As: Policeman Film
Neighbourhood Watch
1990 As: Charles Television
Send a Gorilla
1988 As: Mr Tack (opera teacher) Film
Mr Wrong
1986 As: Mr Whitehorn Film

Biography

Michael Haigh grew up in Wellington. His parents separated when he was 10 and he didn’t really know his actor father, describing him to  The Listener in 1983 as "a wonderful, entertaining, vastly amusing alcoholic, who later became a very respectable boring Mormon with all these millions of kids I didn’t know."

“Michael was enormously entertaining and charming, a slightly old world character who couldn't stand cant or hypocrisy.”

— John Reid, in the December 1993 issue of Onfilm

Related images

Gliding-On---Gallery-1.jpg
Cast and creator share a farewell toast to comedy series Gliding On in 1985. From left, Michael Haigh (who played Jim), Jane Waddell (Irene), Gliding On creator Roger Hall, Ray Henwood (Hugh), Katy Beasley (then Katy Platt, as Raewyn) and Susan Wilson (Beryl).
Kindly supplied by TVNZ
Gliding-On-4.jpg
Michael Haigh as Jim in Roger Hall's hit office comedy Gliding On.
Kindly supplied by TVNZ.