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Harrow: Bio | | Photos

Date: 03/04/00
The Daily Telegraph, London

New Zealand-born actress Lisa Harrow tells Charles Laurence in New York why she left England, shaved off her hair - and fell in love with a whale watcher.

As Lisa Harrow opens the hefty door of her New York apartment - it is a battered old thing weighed down by several huge brass locks - I find myself unable to shout a cheery "Hello". Her appearance leaves me temporarily speechless.

Gone are the dark brown curls I was expecting to see; in their place is a startling, naked dome, not a hair on it. Her handsome, strong-boned face, moreover, is pale and without make-up. I hardly recognise her.

Oh Lord, I think, she is sick and I had no idea. What should I say? Then the panic passes, leaving me feeling rather foolish.

Of course. Harrow's head is shaved because she is appearing off-Broadway in Wit, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson about a woman who is dying of cancer - a demanding part that has garnered her rave reviews from the notoriously difficult-to-please New York critics.

Lately, the New Zealand-born actress seems to have had more than her fair share of roles involving the dreaded c-word. Two years ago she asked to be written out of the British television legal drama Kavanagh QC; her final appearance in the series, which had a loyal audience of 12 million, ended with Harrow announcing to her barrister husband, played by John Thaw, that she was dying of cancer and had to face her death alone.

"Actually, I really wanted that character to die of mad cow disease or something," says Harrow now, laughing. "After two series of being so cool and controlled, it would have been fun to have completely lost my head."

The idea of losing her head has a particular appeal for Harrow. In the Seventies, she made her name playing cool, calm, collected Englishwomen - including Helen Herriot in the film All Creatures Great and Small and Nancy Astor for the BBC. But now, it seems, she would like to put the crisp blouses and tidy skirts behind her once and for all. Hence the shaved head.

In Wit, she plays Vivian Bearing, a steel-willed university professor - an expert on 17th-century English poet John Donne - who is unmarried and largely unloved. As she fights ovarian cancer, she gradually learns that intellectual brilliance is not always more important than human kindness; the audience sees her move through the whole gamut of emotions from pride and disdain through fear to simple love and redemption. A long-running smash hit in New York, a production will open in London next week.

"I have never had such a powerful and immediate response from an audience," says Harrow. "The play transforms people. It releases them by taking them on the journey through death to release."

The pay may be modest compared to her previous salary - she was rumoured to earn $250,000 for Kavanagh QC - and the audience consists of only a few hundred people a night, but Harrow says she has never felt more at ease. "This is the true job of the actor, to illuminate the human condition. It is not just about being a star, or making a lot of money."

Harrow doesn't want to sound ungrateful for the fame her roles on British television brought, but she never meant to settle in London. After studying at RADA she stayed only because she landed a job at the Royal Shakespeare Company and needed to earn a decent living to bring up her son, Timothy, 16, on her own.

Now, though, she has finally escaped to America - and not just for the duration of her off-Broadway role. Gone is the house in south London; in its stead is a wooden deck in the wild woods of Vermont, and a berth on a whale-watching ship called Odyssey. The catalyst for this dramatic move was love.

One day in 1992, Bill Oddie, the birdwatcher, environmental campaigner and former Goodie, asked Harrow if she would come to a Greenpeace rally and speak against the prospect of the Government issuing oil-exploration licences in Antarctica, a development sure to wreak havoc on one of the world's last true maritime wildernesses. Harrow is not quite sure why she agreed - "All I knew about whales was seeing dead ones washed up on the beaches at home in New Zealand" - but she did.

And as she clambered down from the make-shift stage after making her speech, she fell in love.

Standing at the bottom of them was Roger Payne, founder of the Whale Watch Institute and the biologist famous for recording the proof that whales communicate by singing.

"There was this tall, slightly shambolic figure, coming up to ask me something or other," says Harrow. "I just knew, right away, that I had found my man. No one can explain it, can they? We talked. I didn't want to let him go, so we talked for three hours, right there."

Payne has just joined us for lunch at a local restaurant. Still in his body-warmer, he has come straight off the plane from the South Atlantic, and is full of terrific tales of old whaling stations and shelves of ice breaking loose in fearful warning of global climate change. But he is now quite lost in his wife's recounting of their story. As he watches her face he looks completely enraptured.

"What I was asking her," he muses, as if it were yesterday, "was if she would mind lending her beautiful voice to a film I was making."

They were married six weeks later. Payne, with formidable sensitivity, had the foresight to ask little Tim, then nine, for his mother's hand. He then took the boy on his own "honeymoon" trip to Alaska, another whale-watching location, while Harrow hurried home from Boston, where her new husband was based, to meet studio schedules.

"Remarkable child, Tim," says Payne. "Brilliant, imaginative."

It is Harrow's turn to beam. It is clear that Payne would never have landed her if he had not won her son's approval first.

Tim's father is Hollywood star Sam Neill, a fellow New Zealander, with whom Harrow had a five-year relationship. Shortly after she became pregnant, he left her for another woman.

She would never, she thought, trust a man again. So she hired the first in a long line of nannies, and resolved to run her household single-handed.

"And then," Harrow says, "when I saw Roger, I was just so relieved that I had never married."

Since her work was in London and his was on the high seas, the practicalities of marriage were tricky at first. They saw each other when they could. Harrow agrees that this probably suited her; she remained sole captain of her ship, with plenty of romance when scripts allowed trips over the oceans to his side. "Marriage," she says, "is a great adventure, like life."

But then, a little more than two years ago, she pocketed her savings from Kavanagh QC, sold her house in Clapham, moved Tim to a New England boarding school where he is spoilt thanks to his Queen's English, and bought the house in the Vermont woods.

"To be honest, it has been a relief to leave London," she says. "There is the wild in my blood, and I wanted my boy to know it. New Zealand, you know, is still a pretty wild place, and even if you live in the city, nature is just around the corner. You can't say that for London.

"When Roger and I get up to our house together, we can sit on the deck and everything we can see is wild. There is not a single man-made sound to be heard. At last, with him, I feel at home again."

But Harrow's happiness was not quite yet complete. First there was a long and difficult relationship to resolve with her mother, and a coming to terms with her death. "My mother was my greatest ally, and my guiding force," she says, speaking slowly and choosing her words with care. "But nothing less than excellence could ever satisfy her. She was a formidable creature."

"She was similar to the creature I married," says Payne, reaching for Harrow. "Only mine is the benign version."

Harrow's mother was dying just as her daughter was rehearsing for Wit. "She had been very critical of my moving to America, fearing I would do trivial work," says Harrow. "She was thrilled when I got interested in this play, and two days before she died, I read it to her.

"She was in pain, and calling for morphine. As I got to the end, the doctor arrived with the drugs and she was able to drift off into sleep. The next day, when she woke up, she whispered the message that she was going to do a play with me, in New York, that it was very exciting but a secret. Then she said that she would be needing her sleep, and drifted off again.

"Those were her last words. Now, every night in the last act of the play when my visitor reads me a child's story as I am dying, I am totally transferred to my mother."

Perhaps this is why critics and audiences alike have been so stunned by her performance. She routinely receives letters describing the deaths of loved ones and the release of grief afforded by the play, and has had audience members fall weeping and "ecstatic" into her arms at the stage door.

For Harrow, the experience of performing in Wit has allowed her to enjoy a kind of rebirth. She has been making a film in Ireland, and is talking to the BBC about a role in a new dramatisation of an Iris Murdoch novel.

"But it is this role that I feel is the pinnacle of my career so far," she says, "and my ambition now is for another part in another really good play."

She has even come to like her strange bald head, no longer hiding it under scarves or hats. Her beloved Tim has shaved his head too - "in solidarity" - and kids on the street stop and stare and say: "Hey! Cool hair cut, lady!"

And as she rubs her hand over her head, she finds she can only agree with them.

Stage Preview: Public Theater takes on powerful Pulitzer Prize-winning drama 'Wit'

Friday, November 10, 2000
By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Editor

First came the director. Or maybe the play. Then the actress. Then came hard work, linking hot young director Ethan McSweeny and accomplished classical actress Lisa Harrow at the Pittsburgh Public Theater to tackle "Wit," the intense drama with which playwright Margaret Edson won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for drama

Lisa Harrow: "As an actor, my job is to change people's hearts and minds and move them in profound as well as pleasurable ways." (Lake Fong, Post-Gazette)

Hard, dogged work is also a key to Edson's hero, the suggestively named Vivian Bearing. A cool, brainy professor of literature, Bearing (think precision ball bearing made of precious metal) specializes in the works of brainy 17th-century poet and divine John Donne. His poetry and his prose ("no man is an island") are distinguished by the brilliant intellectual byplay -- serious, sharply honed, probing, dense -- that is the epitome of what that age called wit.

Sharply honed and probing apply to Bearing, too, the consummate professional intellect. But suddenly her precise world is invaded by the ultimate unwanted guest: cancer. The body that she took for granted inexorably demands its due. What can wit do to engage this witless but shrewd enemy?

Thus the challenge that faced McSweeny and Harrow when they began work several weeks back.

Granted, young men and older women are pairing up more often these days. But it's still unusual to see a high-profile play feature an actress of more than 50, with a resume thick with great names of the English theater, paired with a director still on the junior side of 30.

Of course, not all 29-year-old directors have a Broadway show to their credit. It was the starry revival of Gore Vidal's "The Best Man" that raised McSweeny's name onto a higher level of theatrical consciousness -- although the Public's new artistic director, Ted Pappas, began talking with him last spring, well before his Broadway breakthrough.

And it was McSweeny who attracted Harrow. When Pappas approached him, McSweeny says, "I said I'd love to be part of his inaugural season." So they discussed titles. Pappas had already decided to open with "You Can't Take It With You" and also to alternate happy and somber plays. Gradually, "Wit" rose to the top.

"It's certainly different from 'You Can't Take It With You,' " McSweeny says dryly. More to the point, at a regional theater, "you can tailor the production to the community, do education and outreach." And most to the point, he already had a Vivian Bearing in mind. "It was in the back of my mind that Lisa might want to do it."

Interviewed separately, Harrow says, "I wanted to work with Ethan." The connection between the wunderkind from Washington, D.C., and the classical actress from New Zealand, via England and Vermont, came about through improbable means: whales.

Harrow's husband since 1991 has been famed whale biologist Roger Payne, who discovered the song of the humpbacked whale (you've probably seen him on TV). McSweeny's father, formerly deputy chief of staff for Lyndon Johnson, sits on lots of artistic boards and is an active supporter of environmental concerns. Payne and McSweeny senior were good friends.

"Ethan very much intrigued me as a member of that family," says Harrow. So she went to see "Never the Sinner," the play that took McSweeny from Washington to New York. He, meanwhile, had come to know Harrow as many students have through the influential "Playing Shakespeare" videotapes featuring the Royal Shakespeare Company guru, John Barton. Then he saw her do "Wit" in New York, where she had replaced Judith Light, who was taking it on tour after having replaced the original Vivian Bearing, Kathleen Chalfant. So the ground was laid.

But for Harrow, "Wit" has a more compelling connection. She learned she'd gotten the role when she was home in New Zealand -- "watching my mother die."

Her mother was 85, asthmatic, "but completely feisty to the end. . . . She felt betrayed by my marrying an American, then leaving England and living in America." If Americans wonder at that, Harrow says we have no idea how much the rest of the world fears the force of America, especially its popular culture, "the greatest colonizing force in the modern world."

"When I told my mother about 'Wit,' I read it to her, to reassure her it was a play worthy of my talents and of her view of the world -- her standards, her backbone." The next day, while Harrow was out of the house, her mother woke briefly to tell a friend, "Excuse me, I need my sleep; I'm going to New York to rehearse a play." She went back to sleep and never woke up.

"It was tremendous that this play came at that point," says Harrow, her eyes glistening.

No wonder, then, that she did "Wit" in New York, or that she did it again, near her home in Vermont. But why is she doing it yet again, here, beyond the desire to work with McSweeny?

"As an actor, my job is to change people's hearts and minds and move them in profound as well as pleasurable ways," she says, conviction radiating from her like solar rays. "This play does that in spades. And it's the only play I've done when you're held up for over an hour when you leave the stage door, so many people want to talk. It's a gift to be reconnected with why I act.

"Also, very few women's roles give you a right not to be feminine and to have enormous will and power. Guys get to do it a lot. Here, I can be as bold and aggressive and as frail and violent as I want."

The classical actress

This is Harrow's American regional theater debut, says McSweeny, and we're lucky to have her.

She's spent this whole calendar year on "Wit" in New York and Vermont, with a summer stint in a new Simon Gray play at Williamstown, Mass. Coming up may be a play that Patrick Stewart hopes she'll do with him -- but enough said about that, because there's many a slip. . . .

Harrow's bio is thick with names like Stewart, mainly colleagues from her Royal Shakespeare Company days in the 1970s, when she played Olivia, Desdemona and others of the Shakespearean canon. Recently, when planning to do an independent film, "Sunday," she asked the young director whom he dreamt of for the male lead. "Michael Gambon, David Suchet, Bob Hoskins," he said -- three of England's biggest. "I know them all," she said, "which do you want?"

It turned out to be Suchet, although (being an independent film) it was only over his agent's dead body. The film turned out to be 1997 Grand Jury winner at Sundance. She also recommends "The Last Days of Chez Nous," a Gillian Armstrong movie for which she won an Australian Oscar.

Harrow first left New Zealand for drama school in London and stayed. She and her son, Timothy (by actor Sam Neill) continued to live there even after her marriage to Payne. But their wedding was at a friend's in Vermont, and in 1997, they decided to move there (since Payne's whales are worldwide, he can live anywhere).

Compared to theater, Harrow says movie acting is "a doddle -- the easiest! You're surrounded by this cocoon, with everything done for you. You're in control. It's much more dangerous to be on stage naked with a bald head."

But she comes prepared: "I played King Lear when I was 16. I think that's why I have no fear as an actor."

Lisa Harrow takes on John Donne, medical drama, and Off-Broadway audiences in Wit.

By: Melissa Rose Bernardo
Feb 11, 2000

If being mistaken for Judith Light is the worst thing that happens to Lisa Harrow in New York, then she's got it made. The day after she went into rehearsals for Wit, the actress attended the premiere of The Green Mile-sporting a freshly-shaven head. "People thought I was Judith, who had just been on The Rosie O'Donnell Show," says Harrow, who was "flattered" by the comparison. "Or they thought I was having chemotherapy, so they were very supportive. It's not a problem at all. It's something to do with the power of that woman, Vivian Bearing."

Harrow is now the third actress to experience firsthand the power of Wit's indomitable leading character, Dr. Vivian Bearing, the college professor whose struggle with ovarian cancer has won the hearts and sympathies of off-Broadway audiences-not to mention a heap of awards, including the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for playwright Margaret Edson. Harrow recently replaced Light, who departed to take Wit on a national tour. The original leading lady, Kathleen Chalfant, currently headlines a Los Angeles production at the Geffen Playhouse. Wit is going global-and not just with the casting of Harrow, a New Zealand-born, Royal Shakespeare Company-bred performer.

When Harrow first heard about the hit play she was in Vermont, where she has lived for two years with husband Roger Payne, one of the world's leading whale biologists. "I was in my kitchen, and I heard Kathleen talking about it on NPR," Harrow recalls. "I thought it sounded like the most fascinating play, and I'd love to have a go at that part." It's a formidable role, she concedes, "But then-not to boast-I've always played pretty formidable roles." (Eliza in Pygmalion, Viola in Twelfth Night, Anne Boleyn in Henry VIII, to name just a few.) "To be at the center of a play, driving the play, is not common for actresses. Yet it's what male leading actors experience all the time. So much writing for women doesn't really give them a chance to strut their stuff. I was completely stoked from the beginning."

After a couple of auditions-one with her own English accent, the second with the requisite American accent-Harrow was welcomed into what is known as "the Wit family". She and her predecessor discussed topics like sleep (Light told her to get a lot of it) and eyebrow bleaching, says Harrow. Playwright Edson "could not have been more helpful. I could talk to her about anything. I didn't feel I was doing anything but carrying on a tradition, taking something and making if my own." And the actress was fortunate enough to work a little with director Derek Anson Jones before he passed away. "I did my first day of rehearsal with him, then he came to a technical dress that we did and gave some extraordinary notes. We talked on the telephone several times," Harrow says. "I just wish I'd been able to have the whole three weeks with him. He was so tuned into language and clearly such an extraordinary intelligence. But I think Derek's work is in place."

And that work is appreciated again and again by audiences at the Union Square Theatre. "Every night you think, 'This is going to be a tricky one.' And they just go with you! They laugh and cry and at the end they give you a standing ovation. I think what they're responding to is the sheer humanity in this play. The journey that woman takes is such an extraordinary one. It's not an easy night in the theater, but it's a rewarding one."

There are some easy things about Wit-like the whole head-shaving business. "I did it the day after I started rehearsals," Harrow says. "My husband keeps telling me how beautiful I am. My son, who was at boarding school, arrived home with his head cropped almost to a shave in solidarity. And it's certainly an interesting way to save on shampoo."