Lisa Harrow

As a child in Auckland, Lisa Harrow dreamt of performing Shakespeare.In 1966 Lisa won an Arts Council grant to study at England’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and she was based in England for at least another two decades. A year after joining the Royal Shakespeare Company at age 25, she was starring as Olivia in Twelfth Night — the first time the RSC had offered a leading part to an actress fresh from drama school.

Initially Lisa was devoting more energy to theatre, but in 1976 she won a Variety Club most promising artist award, thanks to an “exceedingly boring” part as partner to vet James Herriot in the first screen adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small. From then on, Lisa was doing a lot more screen work, acting alongside Sam Neill twice in 1980 – Omen III: The Final Conflict, and John Paul II biopic The Man From a Far Country. In 1981 Lisa stared as the first woman member of England’s House of Commons in BBC series Nancy Astor. In 1984 Harrow was finally offered a screen role back in New Zealand: starring in Other Halves. She played Liz, a middle aged pākehā who gets romantically involved with a polynesian teenager with a criminal record. Since then Lisa has done much of her screen work for English television, although many of her more notable roles have been in Australia.

In 2000 she wowed New York in Pulitzer-Prize winner Wit, playing a professor fighting cancer. Since then she has joined Sam Neill in Jessica, an award-winning mini-series based on the Bryce Courtenay novel, starred in Kiwi short Snooze Time (2012), and played live-in mother to the solo parent at the centre of 2014 TV dramedy Step Dave.

In the 2015 New Year Honours, she was awarded a New Zealand Order of Merit for services to dramatic arts.

In 2024 Lisa Harrow played Grandma Magsie in Peter Feeney’s original web-series “Blind Bitter Happiness.”