Horse power
Kiwi, the farm-trained New Zealand racehorse which won the Melbourne Cup, is the focus of this week’s Sunday Theatre. Sarah Nealon reports.
KIWI – THE STORY OF A CHAMPION RACEHORSE
They played a married couple in Hillary and now Nick Blake and Alison Bruce are back on screen as husband and wife for another local drama.
In TVNZ 1’s Kiwi, Blake and Bruce play Waverley farmer Ewen ‘Snowy’ Lupton and his wife Anne, owners of the 1983 Melbourne Cup winner Kiwi.
The chestnut gelding, which Anne picked out of a catalogue for $1000, was trained by Snowy and ridden by Jimmy Cassidy. The horse was by no means the favourite to win at Flemington. But
at the 2200m mark and with just 1000m to go, Kiwi, urged on by New Zealand jockey Jimmy Cassidy, began a breathtaking burst to go from the back of the field to win by just over a length. “It is a classic story of the underdog against the odds,” says Bruce, who had a horse when she was a teenager. Bruce says it was Anne’s idea to buy Kiwi. “She clearly loved horses but she was also really frightened of them. She didn’t want to be too close to them. Nobody knew why. “When I talked to her daughters they said she was really terrified of them, so there are a couple of moments in the film when she gets close to a couple of the horses and it’s quite significant for her.” Bruce (Top Of The Lake, The Almighty Johnsons and Mercy Peak) says Anne and Snowy, who had three children, were good companions. “It seemed like a harmonious relationship,” she says. “He’s a man of few words. He gets on with it. From what I see in this, and also from talking with her family, she (Anne) was quite vivacious and involved in the community. I think they both were, but he more quietly. I think he was quite gentle and matter of fact. “I think he probably had an
“It is a classic story of the underdog against the odds.” – Alison Bruce pictured with Nick Blake
innate connection with his horses. I think he understood them.”
Tanzanian-born Bruce, who is the partner of The Brokenwood Mysteries actor Neill Rea, says she feels an enormous responsibility to honour Anne, who died in 2008.
“I’ve naturally got quite a posh voice because I’m from the colonies,” she says. “I’m from East Africa originally. I’ve had to really consciously try to change my voice for this.
“If I’m not conscious of it, I’ll go, ‘Oh **** , that really wasn’t her’.”
Wellington actor Nick Blake, who plays Anne’s husband Snowy (who died in 2004), also wanted to do his character justice.
“I had a long talk with Snowy’s daughters, Nicola and Gillian, on the phone and then they turned up on set when we were having a scene where I was farewelling the family to Melbourne. They went ahead of him,” he says.
“Snowy was such a taciturn and inexpressive character in a lot of ways and I couldn’t work out how to say goodbye. Do I touch or hug or kiss anyone?
“They were sitting there watching and I thought, ‘Oh God, I’ve got to get this right, so I’ll go and ask them’. I said, ‘On the hug-o-meter where would Snowy sit?’ And they said a zero. Pieces of information like that are absolute gold.”
Blake managed to glean further insightful information about Snowy.
“I asked his daughters, ‘Would it have mattered to him if he’d won the Melbourne Cup?’ and they said, ‘No, it was a thrill to be there’.
“That’s why I think Snowy’s such a unique person. He’s not like everyone else who was hungry for a win and wanted to win at all costs.”
Patrick Carroll, who plays jockey Jimmy Cassidy, says the production of Kiwi is, in a way, a marriage of three very different personalities – the horse, the jockey and the trainer.
“Snowy is very much – even though he’s not from the south – he’s very much a southern man,” says Carroll.
“He has very old values. In some ways he is very old school and Jimmy is very new school. But they are both tied to Kiwi the horse. It’s nice.
“In the course of the story you see the three threads come together in a way that I think is surprisingly tender.”
Interestingly, the makers of Kiwi enlisted three horses to play the star thoroughbred.
“Basically,” says producer Carmen Leonard, “no one horse could have done everything we needed.”