STAR POWER
She’s all about the ensemble, but Jennifer Ward-Lealand is acting’s queen bee, writes Kim Knight
Is Jennifer Ward-Lealand our very own Meryl Streep?
Afew weeks before this interview, Jennifer Ward-Lealand did some other interviews.
“I had some press,” the actor announces. It described her thus: A matriarch. A veteran. And, like a well-salted steak or a cast-iron frying pan that has stopped sticking: Seasoned.
“Let’s be clear,” says Ward-Lealand. “She’s getting old!”
Which, actually, is fine by her. “Seasoning is good. Seasoning brings ... oh, it brings a confidence.”
Ward-Lealand first appeared on New Zealand television in 1978. The year Maori land protesters were evicted from Bastion Point and National’s Robert Muldoon got his second term as Prime Minister (even though Labour had more votes) Ward-Lealand was a teenager from Wellington making her debut on the country’s first soap, Close to Home.
“I don’t think I was very good. I played Gail’s bad influence. If you look at it now, it’s so slow. You watch a clip and it is literally like watching paint dry, because that’s the rhythm everything moved at then.”
Today: “Everything is cut, cut, cut! Snazzy music. Cut! Cut!”
Ward-Lealand, 53, is sitting in the swivelly chair in her home office. It’s a nice house. A villa, with a groomed garden path, and sturdy steps to the front door. She lives here with her husband and fellow actor Michael Hurst, and their children, Jack, 19, and Cameron, 16. She keeps dark chocolate in the refrigerator and can tell you which bus stop will get you back to the city. Stable. Suburban. Sometimes, at night, she engages in ritual dances with a fake giant penis, and people pay to watch. Sometimes, at night, she howls with such anguish, that complete strangers reach out to comfort her because they have forgotten they are in the front row of a play and she is just doing her job.
“I like going there,” says Ward-Lealand. “I don’t mind being snotty and messy and ugly. That’s the joy of theatre. I like, yeah, I like being able to delve into my feelings, or to be taken there by a great director.”
Her resumé runs to 108 professional theatre productions (that phallus scene was one of the more recent — an Auckland Theatre Company staging of the 411BC Greek classic Lysistrata; the howling was from Silo Theatre’s The Goat, where she played the wife and Hurst played the husband who was having sex with the goat). She has television, film and musical theatre credits and a work ethic that goes back to the days of Auckland’s Theatre Corporate, where she first trained: class in the morning, rehearsal in the afternoon, a show in the evening — and a late show after that. It built, she says, discipline, fortitude and a love of the ensemble.
“All of you together, creating one singular event and experience. I find that immensely satisfying.”
It’s easy to get an audience’s attention, she says. “You just turn the lights out. And then the lights come up and the audience is in the palm of your hand. But how do you keep them there? That’s what I’m very, very interested in. And that’s where the craft comes into play for six, seven, eight, nine shows a week.
“I’m interested in actors learning how to keep the energy alive. It’s a communion ... I just think there is an exquisite beauty between what goes on between an audience and performers. When you’re reflecting humanity back at them.”
Later this month, Ward-Lealand makes a substantial return to television. She had a role recently in Auckland Daze and narrated Find
me a Maori Bride, but in TV One’s upcoming drama Dirty Laundry, she plays the lead: moneylaundering matriarch Donna Rafferty, who is under arrest before the end of episode one.
“Yes,” says the woman who likes to frock up, “I spend a lot of my time in some fetching orange overalls. My fellow actors would be going off and having wardrobe changes between scenes, and I’d be ‘oh, I’ll just hang around here in my orange overalls, talking to the crew’.”
She didn’t mind. She’d known some of them for more than 30 years.
WARD-LEALAND was 7 years old when she decided to be an actor (though she prefers to call herself an actress, because “I quite like the oldness of the word”). Her father was in a Unity Theatre production of Oedipus and they needed child extras.
I don’t mind being snotty and messy and ugly. That’s the joy of theatre. I like, yeah, I like being able to delve into my feelings, or to be taken there by a great director. JENNIFER WARD- LEALAND