New Zealand Week: Day 1: Star Profiles: Lucy Lawless

Lucy Lawless

I've already kicked off New Zealand Week over on my horror blog, and now we're gonna start things off here with a profile of a star who'll be recognizable to a lot of people outside of  New Zealand. (I'm easing you into things, see?  Aren't I nice blogger?  Say it.  Say that Lela's a nice blogger!  Very good.  Here.  Have an apple.)

Just a note for my U.S. readers (pretty sure that's all three of you), I'll be using international dating conventions in these profiles; for example, rather than writing, say, January 1, 1954, it would be 1 January, 1954.

Lucy Lawless is best known for her roles as Xena on the series Xena: Warrior Princess and D'anna Biers on the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica.  She's also had roles on everything from The X-Files to Veronica Mars and made a small cameos in the first Sam Raimi directed Spider-Man film and Boogeyman.  To the average person (read: not an obsessed fan), it might seem that Lucy's fame just happened overnight.  But it's not as if Lucy just appeared one day, rising from the dust of Aotearoa and taking a small part on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and then bursting into stardom.  No, she's a bit more complicated than that.


Lucille Frances Ryan was born on 29 March, 1968 in the Mount Albert suburb of Auckland, New Zealand.  She's the fifth of seven children and one of only two daughters of Julie, a former teacher, and Frank, a former banker and onetime mayor of Mount Albert.

Young Lucy on horse-
back.

The acting bug bit Lucy hard sometime in secondary school, where she appeared in a number of student productions.  She attended Auckland University for several years, focusing variously on foreign languages, opera, and music.  By 1988 she had moved, along with boyfriend Garth Lawless, to Australia.  There, the two married after Lucy became pregnant.  Daughter Daisy was born in July, 1988.

Lucy in a 1993 episode of The New Ad-
ventures of the Black Stallion.  Can I
just say, if she'd never played Xena and
gotten all the lesbian subtext attention
for that, this shot alone would have done
everything 6 seasons of X:WP did for
the baby dyke in my childhood
soul.

Moving back to New Zealand with her new family, Lucy got back to her acting career, appearing in the final season of the sketch comedy show Funny Business and then moving on to small roles in various small films and television shows.  Many syndicated shows backed by U.S. or Canadian production companies were finding it cheap to shoot in New Zealand at the time, and so Lucy ended up doing episodes of such varied programs as The Ray Bradbury Theater, The New Adventures of the Black Stallion, and High Tide.

In 1993-94, Universal Studios had given backing to producers Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert (the minds behind the Evil Dead/Army of Darkness and Darkman franchises) to produce a series of television films based on the myths of the ancient Greek hero Hercules.  If the films did well, they might be considered as pilots for a series.  Since production needed to be cheap, the films were to be shot in New Zealand, using a lot of local talent, including well known Kiwi actor Michael Hurst as Iolaus, the friend and sidekick of the demi-God Hercules.  The first film, Hercules and the Amazon Women, featured Lucy in a small role as the Amazon Lysia.  Later, when the films did result in a series, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Lucy guested in a first season episode as Lyla, a girl who married a Centaur.  Around this same time she and husband Garth Lawless divorced.

Kevin Sorbo as Hercules and Lucy
Lawless as Xena.

Toward the end of filming on the first season H:TLJ, Lucy was asked back again to replace another actress in a new role.  She was to play a villain, a warrior woman who would, over the course of three episodes, start fighting alongside Hercules for the good of the world, only to be killed off.  The character's name?  Xena.

The first episode of the "Xena Trilogy" originally aired on 13 March, 1995, and something happened.  Somewhere in the process of writing and filming the remaining two episodes of the arc (which ran at the end of the season after two unrelated episodes), the writers, producers, and fans, became intrigued by this new female warrior.  It was decided not to kill her, but to use the final two episodes to ease her into a show of her own.  Those final two episodes aired on 1 May and 8 May, 1995.  On 4 September, Xena: Warrior Princess premiered as a standalone series.  The spin-off quickly became as popular as, and then more popular than, the parent series.

From left: Renee O'Connor as Xena's
"companion" Gabrielle, Lucy as Xena,
Kevin as Hercules, and Michael Hurst
as Iolaus.

Over the next 6 seasons, the character of Xena became a pop culture phenomenon and Lucy Lawless went from a semi-well known character actress in her native New Zealand to a world-wide star.  She was suddenly traveling the world to do publicity and, in one incident, was severely injured while rehearsing for a horseback gag on The Tonight Show.  She also found time to continue appearing in small films back home, as well as appearing on Broadway in a revival of the musical Grease.  Her time on X:WP also led to romance, and in 1998, Lucy wed producer Rob Tapert.  The pair eventually had two sons, Julius and Judah.

When X:WP wrapped filming for good in early 2001, Lucy kept right on working, making a two episode guest appearance as a government engineered super soldier on two final season episodes of The X-Files and jumping back into a regular series role in a short lived updating of Tarzan.  A pair of 2005 TV movies, Locusts and Vampire Bats, in which she played Maddy Rierdon, a Department of Agriculture investigator and later biology professor, brought her into a new realm of action, harking back to the nature-run-amok films of the 1950s.

Lucy (right) with Zoë Bell on the
set of Angel of Death

Lucy continued her work in the sci-fi/fantasy/action vein with a recurring role as a humanoid cylon (model number 3) on the Sci-Fi Channel reboot of the classic series Battlestar Galactica.  She's also lent her voice to video games and animated features and shows, and in 2009 she was a supporting player in the web series/television movie Angel of Death which starred her former X:WP stunt double Zoë Bell.  She also reminded everyone that she can really sing during a series of concerts between 2007 and 2009.

Lucy during the Earth Hour
2010 voluntary blackout.

Lucy's most recent acting role has taken her back somewhat to her roots as Xena.  Though she was no warrior, she was a woman living in ancient Rome in the Starz series Spartacus: Blood and Sand.  She will be reprising her role in an upcoming prequel mini-series and, though her character, Lucretia, was killed off in the first season, there is talk of her return, possibly as a ghost (then again, who knows.  Xena was about as hard to kill off for good as Angelique on Dark Shadows, so we'll see what happens with this character.)

Lucy's a genuinely talented actress, besides which she has a great heart.  She supports many charities and causes, not in the hypocritical "yay, charity!" way that some celebrities do, but whole-heartedly.  Here's hoping that she's around for a good many more years, because in my eyes, she makes the world a rather better (and much more interesting) place.