ADAPTATION
A HAPPY CHILDHOOD IN A MUSICAL FAMILY LED ONE YOUNG WOMAN TO PICK UP AN INSTRUMENT, WHISK UP LIFE WITH A WOODEN SPOON, AND ULTIMATELY, TO FILM STORIES OF HUMAN COMPASSION
Film director Felicity MorganRhind is a chameleon of creativity
FILM DIRECTOR MAY be the occupation on Felicity MorganRhind’s bio but even she would struggle to shape and edit the movie of her life. The dilemma? What to focus on and what to relegate to the cutting-room floor. And, like all good stories, there is a twist in the tale.
Felicity is a sixth-generation New Zealander – her greatgreat-great grandparents on her maternal side emigrated from London to farm at Te Wera, Taranaki, in 1842, while her great-great-great grandparents on her paternal side went from Glasgow to Papakura, Auckland, in 1864.
A century later, her parents were the first generation in the family to move away from farming and into the city. Felicity and her two sisters enjoyed a richly interesting childhood. “There was so much love, connection and kindness, and we were expected to follow our dreams. Dad was a timber merchant and a sailor, mum was a scientist, teacher and wannabe architect. They were both also fabulous musicians who could play anything by ear.” Looking back, she mostly remembers a home filled with melody: her grandfather, in his 90s, seated at the piano – “he went blind but he could still play” – her father’s cheerful tunes on the harmonica and mandolin, and her mother accompanying them on the piano. Her mum was so committed to the musical cause she started the Papakura Music School to give her daughters and their contemporaries a better chance to learn. “Music was everything,” says Felicity.
Well, not quite. Food took a starring role too. By the time she was six, this young protégé was helping an uncle, a chef, to make moussaka from aubergines grown from seeds he had specially imported. “It was the early 1970s so I guess we were ahead of our time.” When that same uncle married a Parisienne, Felicity learnt how to roll out croissants to bake in the coal range and drank coffee from bowls. The emerging gourmand was also introduced to escargot. A month before Christmas, garden snails were fed a diet of garlic and parsley, then plucked ignominiously from their herbaceous table and covered with salt to secrete the grit. “They were so delicious,” says Felicity. A great-aunt who married a German ensured another tier of European sophistication made it to the festive feast, with over-sized gingerbread houses that were a young girl’s dream.
When the time came for tertiary study, Felicity chose social anthropology at Otago. “I was and still am really curious about what makes our lives meaningful.” Back then, she couldn’t know that, 30 years on, telling people’s stories would be her life calling.
University did nothing to focus this interest – in fact it sent her completely off track. “I was on a ski holiday with some friends, including [singer/songwriter] Jan Hellriegel, when we heard about the Dunedin Women’s Festival and thought, ‘Why not form an all-girl band?’”
In a little more than two weeks, the five-piece Cassandra’s Ears was live on stage. Although Felicity ‘Flick’ had studied the flute, piano and oboe, she had never played the bass. “I picked it up and it came easily. I played entirely on instinct so, in some ways, it was a rejection of all the rules. We all believed we were going to be famous musicians and Jan was very driven.”
The group received funding from the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, released two EPs and toured with band Straitjacket Fits. After five years, it was hard to accept the end when Jan signed a contract and left to pursue a solo career. But there was a silver lining: it was the catalyst for Felicity to head off with her then-girlfriend on their OE.
She remembers the bitter cold on her first day in London. “It was the late 1980s, I was 22 and had never had a real job in my life. But we were young and free and it was so exciting. We lived in a squat in Bonnington Square where the houses were earmarked for demolition and icicles hung from the ceilings. I had no clue what I was going to do.”
Lunch at a vegetarian café changed all that. “I looked at what I was eating and thought, ‘I could make this.’ So I bowled up to the counter and asked if they needed a chef and they gave me a trial for the following Tuesday.” As luck would have it, Felicity was invited for a weekend in the country where she met Jonathan Rutherfurd Best, a fellow New Zealander (and now co-owner of Waiheke Island’s Oyster Inn) who worked in the food industry. She spent the entire time devouring his collection of cookbooks and, when her knowledge was tested by the café proprietor, her curry with olives dish was a hit. “I felt my way into the food business,” says Felicity who didn’t stop reading cookbooks for a year after that auspicious start. She went on to run a café in Bonnington Square where the modus operandi was for her and her team to go dumpster diving for “spoilt” food in the bins of Covent Garden market and then create a menu from it. “We charged one pound per course.”
Soon, she was dividing her time between the café and Jonathan’s Urban Party Culture – a top-shelf catering/events company favoured by the film industry. She didn’t absorb her knowledge all by osmosis though. Peter Gordon turned up one day in the kitchen. “He walked in, said ‘let me show you how to use a knife’, and changed my life.”
After a week of practise, she was “chopping like a bastard” – just as well because her first solo gig three years later was for a sit-down meal for 400. “I remember looking out the window with 400 racks of lamb in the oven. It was snowing and I was thinking, ‘Where are you, Pete?’” The evening went off without a hitch and when Vogue Entertaining named her a young Antipodean chef to watch, she thought she’d found her path.