Close to Home actor became known as NZ’s ‘second most famous man’ in 1970s
In 1975, Harry Lavington was known as the ‘‘second most famous man in New Zealand’’ after prime minister Rob Muldoon. Such was the power of soap opera Close To Home, in which he starred.
Lavington, who has died aged 91, took up residence in New Zealand living rooms as Ken Paget on the long-running 1970s homegrown soap. It was a long way from his Welsh roots and a far cry from his day job as a policeman.
He joined the cast as baker and family man Ken in the show’s third week on air in 1975. His two-week contract grew to three months, and finally seven years.
The plots and woes endured by the characters made for a memorable epoch for him.
He recalled once persuading scriptwriters that the idea of his on-screen wife Dot, played by Glenis Levestam, having an affair was not worth pursuing; to Lavington’s horror, the plot line was given to his character instead. He returned to Wales once during those
Close to Home years and, along with the director Peter Coates, did a programme in his hometown, and in his old boyhood home.
The episode was made on a shoestring, with Lavington and Coates organising the actors and locations. ‘‘My mother was sitting behind the camera watching a woman play Ken’s mother and said, ‘Ere, why’d you get her to do that, I could’ve done better’,’’ he told a newspaper in 1995.
His acting career had an unusual genesis. It was 1956, a year after emigrating to New Zealand, when Lavington went to the Hutt Repertory Theatre to see Busman’s Holiday.
‘‘I mentioned to my wife that the acting was rather ordinary, and she challenged me to get into it. On the back of the programme was an application form to join the repertory and soon I started getting involved behind the scenes,’’ he recalled in 2015.
Until then, his only stage experience had been rugby singalongs and seeing the odd pantomime. That year he made his acting debut, after Davina Whitehouse cast him aptly as a policeman in Toad of Toad Hall.
Two years later, Richard Campion singled Lavington out for special praise for his role as an Italian immigrant in Arthur Miller’s A
View from the Bridge, and the NZ Drama Council named him actor of the year.
In 1958 he joined The New Zealand Players, the only professional company at the time, and won acclaim for a number of his roles with the troupe.
They were impecunious days, and Lavington later recalled sleeping under railway bridges and in pine woods on tour with fellow thespian Charles Walker to save money while on the road. The travelling troubadours would brew their tea over an open fire in the mornings and fill their pockets with sausage rolls and sandwiches
Harry Lavington Actor b March 14, 1927 d May 1, 2018 The New Zealanders he met during his time in the navy impressed him with ‘‘their free thinking and lack of respect for authority’’.
whenever the local host society put on a function after a performance.
His stage repertoire included myriad performances with the Hutt Repertory Theatre and The New Zealand Players and 13 plays for Downstage Theatre, including the debut seasons of Robert Lord’s Well
Hung and Bruce Mason’s Awatea.
TV and film soon came calling. Pacific Films boss John O’Shea cast him in Think about Tomorrow ,asa goldminer, and later in adventure romp Rangi’s Catch. He channelled his inner policeman in TV Kiwi drama
Pukemanu and played a university lecturer in Buck House.
Unlike many of his fellow actors, he had never had any formal training in the profession and, despite his success, he always had a nagging fear he’d be ‘‘found out’’.
Treading the boards was an unlikely profession for a Welsh bobby, for that is how he started his career. Growing up in Cardiff, the eldest of five children, his mother was a barmaid and his father a carpenter and World War II soldier.
He followed his grandfather into the police as a clerical assistant. But it was wartime and, because of his time in the sea cadets, he was able to join the navy in the final stages of World War II, before he turned 18.
He spent two years at sea as a radar operator, based in Malta on the light cruiser HMS Orion, then mine-sweeping trawler HMS Vallay and HMS Virago, which in 1947 stopped Jewish immigrants from entering Palestine.
The New Zealanders he met during that time in the navy impressed him with ‘‘their free thinking and lack of respect for authority’’ and, after a short spell as a policeman back in Cardiff, Lavington and his first wife, Olga, headed to Aotearoa on an assisted immigration scheme, joining his brother-in-law in the Hutt Valley.
Not long after coming to New Zealand, his first marriage failed. With his second wife, Diana, he had two children, David-Henry and Cerys, but that marriage also ended.
In 1995 he met his third wife, Marilyn, who survives him.
Lavington worked for two years with the New Zealand Police, fulfilling his immigration commitments, before landing work as an environmental health officer, first in the 1960s and later again in the 1970s to augment his budding acting career.
In this capacity he was involved with the planning of numerous food outlets and all the early licensed restaurants, including the French restaurant Le Normandie in Cuba St.
He remembered a close call on the health and safety front one night at Le Normandie. As their dessert was being flamed at the table, a flame suddenly shot out and ignited his wife’s hairspray. ‘‘I grabbed the bottle of bubbles from the ice bucket next to me and poured the water over her head to extinguish the fire,’’ he told The Wellingtonian.
You couldn’t script it better. Lavington’s final stage role was in the 1983 Roger Hall hit Hot Water. On screen, he had a small part in 1991’s acclaimed An Angel at my
Table, borrowing director Jane Campion’s glasses to play a psychologist.
In the end, he never was ‘‘found out’’. Like any actor worth their salt, he had the power to make believe. – By Bess Manson
Sources: Lavington family, Sunday Star-Times (Jane Bowron), The Wellingtonian (Carey Clements), NZ On Screen.