PeterVere-Jones
- Actor
Peter Vere-Jones, ONZM, co-starred in The Evening Paper (1965), one of New Zealand's earliest TV dramas. Over the next half century, he balanced a busy theatre and radio career with on-screen work: including starring roles in 60s travel caper The Taking Mood, period film Pictures, and teleplays The Good Samaritan and Casualties of Peace. He also lent his distinctive voice to documentaries. Vere-Jones died in early 2021.
Screenography
Biography
The career of actor Peter Vere-Jones encompassed radio, television, theatre and film, in roughly that order. En route, he did everything from Shakespeare to splatter, and played everyone from a deserting soldier to Zeus.
Born in Cheshire in northwest England, Vere-Jones moved to New Zealand with his family as a child. He began acting in 1962, initially for state radio. State television was just a few years old. Vere-Jones would feature in a number of key dramas from that first decade of local television: early teleplay The Evening Paper (1965), the country's first drama series (The Alpha Plan, 1969), the first local TV drama filmed in colour (The Killing of Kane, 1971) and acclaimed small town show Pukemanu (1971-72).
Awards
2002 Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM)
For services to acting and writing
“About two o'clock on Monday morning, we finally came to the end of a not flawless, but not bad take of act three of the play, and the vision mixer punched up the credits out of sequence...She burst into tears, ran out into the night and had to be hauled back ... We all went back to the beginning of this 30-minute scene ... to do it again. I think it was recorded with people almost asleep on their feet.”