For Miranda Harcourt, being a Dame won’t change her life too much. Photo / Woman's Weekly
It’s not something many of us will experience in our lifetime, but being made a Dame hasn’t changed acting coach Miranda Harcourt one iota.
Life continues as normal, but the Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit says the lead-up to her award was an interesting six weeks.
Firstly, she couldn’t tell anybody that it was going to happen in the New Year’s Honours list and secondly, she had a skeleton in the closet which she thought might get in the way.
“They send you an email saying that you have been recommended, but stress that it still has to be approved by King Charles and his team, who sign off these awards,” says Dame Miranda, 60.
“They run checks on you and they might find you’ve got a conviction or something.”
Harcourt pauses, then confesses: “Well, I do have a conviction for disturbing the peace at the Miss New Zealand show in Dunedin in 1987”.
It seems that in her student days, Harcourt was quite the activist and, along with some friends, decided to disrupt the beauty pageant.
“We went to the show at the Regent Theatre, which was being presented by Pete Sinclair and Kerry Smith, who I was to work with in Gloss, not too far into the future,” recalls Harcourt.
“We clearly looked like protesters, but they let us in and even sat us in one of the front rows.”
The group waited in the audience throughout the show, while one of Harcourt’s pals cradled a bag of chopped ox heart.
“In those days, beauty pageants were exactly that – competitive beauty parades, and the competitors still wore togs and high heels in the swimwear section,” she explains.
“Along with feminists around the world, we felt that in the modern world, the time had come for this to change and this was our way of making that point.
“When the swimming costume section came and the contestants were wearing their togs, Miranda and her friends leapt into action.
“We stormed the stage, my friend pelted them all with the chopped ox heart and the rest of us stood on the stage interrupting the live TV broadcast by shouting ‘Shame! Shame! Shame!’.”
They were all wearing masks to hide their identity and Harcourt’s was a papier mâché penis.
“I’ve still got it somewhere,” she says.
“The police arrived, and we were bundled into a van and taken off to the police station.
Then we pleaded guilty.”
At home, Harcourt’s parents Kate and Peter Harcourt were watching the show on television and wondered who the disruptors were, little realising it was their daughter.
The conviction for disturbing the peace was also a source of anxiety for Harcourt when she was preparing to work in America.
“It was when I had to go on one of my first acting coaching jobs on the film The Lovely Bones, which was shooting in Philadelphia. I had never worked in the States and I needed a working visa. I went to the United States visa department in Auckland and I suddenly realised, ‘Oh, no, they might find my conviction!’.”
But she got her visa and just weeks ago received her Damehood too.
To be fair, the 1980s was a decade of protests with the Springbok tour, homosexual law reform and the Rainbow Warrior sinking. And Harcourt has never been ashamed of her involvement.
“When I got the part of Gemma on Gloss, all the cast got together to meet each other and when I met Kerry Smith [who played Magda], she was all smiles until I said I had met her before when I protested at the Miss New Zealand show. Her face dropped very quickly.”
More recently, one person Harcourt knew she had to keep her new title secret from was Dame Kate, her mother.
“I knew she would blab it to someone, so I waited until we got the confirmation letter and showed it to her, but not before getting ready to take photos of her. Her reaction was a complete delight.”
Harcourt’s husband Stuart McKenzie knew about the honour before she did, as the letter was sent to an old email address.
“I was downstairs with Kate when he rang me on my phone and with a great deal of excitement in his voice asked if I’d seen the email. He sent it to me immediately and I had to disguise my reaction from Kate.”
Stuart is now living with two Dames – Harcourt’s mother received her honour in 1996, but Harcourt feels that her recognition is also her husband’s.
“Stuart and I are a creative practice that is completely a partnership. So, from my perspective, this is Stuart and Miranda bound up together. This recognition is his as well.”
The citation for the honour is for services to the screen industry and theatre, but back in 2002, Miranda was also appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to theatre and the community.
“To me, these are community awards. You have to achieve a high level within your chosen field, whether it’s adventure tourism or the wine-making industry. But then it also has to have some kind of strong community benefit. You have to be feeding back into the community, and into the uplifting and development of New Zealand.”
Harcourt says in her work, she is very committed to young people, and helping them into the world of theatre and screen.
“One minute, I’ll be working in Hollywood with somebody horrendously famous, then the next, I’ll be working with somebody who’s just taking their first step into the theatre or the screen industry.
“That’s exciting for me to see new actors from very diverse backgrounds who are trying to take their first shot, but don’t have the benefit of knowing the world of the performing arts. So I’m constantly opening the door and saying, ‘Hey, come on in. The rules aren’t difficult to negotiate. Come and see what it’s like’.”
Harcourt says it also keeps her grounded in a world where it’s easy to lose sight of reality.
“If you’re talking to somebody in a very rarefied environment, then you can go, ‘Well, look, this is what it’s like, down on the ground of the real world. You might have been famous for so long that you no longer know that’.”
While Harcourt talks about coaching actors both famous and not-yet-famous, it’s good to remember that in her own home, she has two daughters going down that same path.
Thomasin McKenzie, 22, is well known as an accomplished actor who has been in many international films and this week is at the Sundance Film Festival to promote her latest movie, Eileen, in which she stars alongside Anne Hathaway.
Davida, 16, worked on two short films last year and an Australian feature film called Speedway, which will be released this year.
“She’s got the acting bug,” tells Harcourt, who alongside Stuart travelled to Australia with her for the five-week shoot.
“Like Thomasin, she started out going, ‘Oh, my God, get me out of here.’ But then slowly she just kind of cleaved to it. She’s very good in a very different way to Thomasin.”
And their eldest child Peter, 24, is in New York on a Fulbright Scholarship doing an MA in journalism at Columbia University.
“He’s the youngest in his class by 10 years, but seems to be enjoying it,” says Harcourt.
“He was very thrilled when I told him I was a Dame, but I think a lot of that emotion was because he’s homesick.”
It’s no surprise the couple has such talented children, especially as the kids descend from the acting dynasty started by Harcourt’s parents, who were active in theatre and film for many years.
Dame Kate turned 95 last year and lives with Harcourt and her family in their Wellington home.
Harcourt says her mother has worked out how to age joyfully.
“She’s still living independently downstairs in her flat, although we do take her meals down to her now,” she shares.
“Kate is still sharp as a tack in her mind and would actually love an acting job. She has daily visitors and reads voraciously.”
For Harcourt, being a Dame won’t change her life too much.
“In my world, you continue completely as normal and you don’t even change your signature,” she says.
“It’s ‘thank you very much, that’s really awesome. I really appreciate the accolade and I hope that that this will be useful in some way for my work with Women’s Refuge or my work with So They Can, an incredible education and accommodation initiative in Kenya, empowering and educating girls and women’.”
There’s also a strong feeling that Harcourt has little time to dwell on her honour as she has so much on her plate. This month alone, Harcourt has 10 television series and films to work on.
“Another few will come in over the next few days and I’ll have to say no,” she says.
This year, she will also be rehearsing via Zoom in London for another series of the show Am I Being Unreasonable?, featuring BAFTA-winner Daisy-May Cooper, which is on TVNZ+ at the moment.
Harcourt is also on online writing platform Substack, where she hosts a page called Notes for Actors, which has 3000 subscribers and is enjoyed not only by thespians, but writers as well.
“I’m about to record my first podcast to go with it, because I’m told people like to listen to things while driving in the car, so that’s my next challenge,” she laughs.
But it’s clear from hearing her talk that it won’t be her last big endeavour.
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