MOVIE PIONEER: Ramai Te Miha Hayward, wife of fellow trailblazing New Zealand film-maker, the late Rudall Hayward, died this month aged 98.
Martinborough-born New Zealand film pioneer Ramai Te Miha Hayward MNZM has died aged 98.
Mrs Hayward, of Ngai Tahu and Ngati Kahungunu, died in Auckland on July 3. There was a private funeral service and a memorial ceremony would soon be held, according to a family spokeswoman.
Mrs Hayward broke ground in several fields during her lifetime, winning acknowledgement as the first Maori cinematographer and professional photographer and the first, with husband Rudall Hayward, to make English-language films in communist China.
In 2006 she was made a Member of the Order of Merit for services to film and television, after being honoured a year earlier with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the inaugural Wairoa Maori Film Festival held in the town.
Mrs Hayward refused a damehood in the early 1990s in defiance of government plans to sell the Cape Palliser lighthouse and land to international buyers.
She was kuia for the New Zealand Film Commission, patron of the international Women in Film and Television organisation, and an actor fondly remembered as Billy T James' screen mother. Mrs Hayward also was a Kingi Ihaka Award recipient and a successful painter.
She had spent most of her adult life in Auckland, where in her later years she lived with a caregiver, although she formerly made regular trips back to Wairarapa to visit family.
Mrs Hayward -- also known as Ramai Te Miha, Patricia Rongomaitara Te Miha and Patricia Miller -- was born the eldest of seven brothers and sisters to Roihi Te Miha and Fred Mawhinney, living mostly with her grandmother, Huria Kinihe Te Kaaho.
In an interview, Mrs Hayward recalled her early Wairarapa childhood enchantment with cinema, and her global travels and world-first enterprises in cinematography alongside her husband.
Her passion for the silver screen - "my destiny" - began when she was aged around 10, she said, and was sparked by a Wairarapa screening of Son of The Sheik, starring silent movie legend Rudolph Valentino.
There also was a family connection to cinema through her father, a projectionist at The Cosy Theatre in Featherston before his death in Belgium, during World War I.
Her mother married Jim Miller in 1920 and moved with the family to the South Island. After the death of her mother in 1935, she took the name Patricia Miller and apprenticed herself as a photographer to Frenchman Henri Harrison, working out of Cuba Studios in Wellington.
She shifted to Auckland within two years and established Patricia Miller Studios on the North Shore. About the same time, she befriended Maewa Kaihau, blind lyricist of the farewell song Haere Ra.
Before his death in 1941, the pair would often attend recitals at the Auckland Institute for the Blind, where she impressed actor Stanley Knight. Knight was acting in the sound remake of Rudall Hayward's 1925 film, Rewi's Last Stand, and suggested the young woman play the singing Maori heroine, Ariana, who falls in love with a soldier during the New Zealand Wars.
Mrs Hayward took the role and also designed publicity posters for the 1940 movie. She was credited as Ramai Te Miha on the poster but continued to run her two photographic studios under the name Patricia Miller. Ramai and Rudall married in 1943 and within three years sold the photographic studios, financing a move to England.
The couple are acknowledged as pioneers of New Zealand film-making, and after shifting to England Mrs Hayward worked as arguably the only cine-camerawoman in the country at the time, as was the case in New Zealand.
The couple worked for the BBC creating newsreels, interviewing among others Pandit Nehru, then Prime Minister of India; Viscount Bernard Montgomery; and past American world champion heavyweight boxer Joe Louis.
She learnt her trade as a camera operator and a writer while filming the dramas Coming Through The Rye and The World Is Turning Towards The Coloured People, also penning screenplays for the latter film and another dramatic film, Goodwin Sands.
"I used to cart the equipment, I mean I was 17 years younger than Rudall and toward the end I also at times had to carry him."
In 1957 the Haywards went to communist China to make Inside Red China and Wonders of China, the first English-language films shot there since the Kuomintang government was overthrown in 1949.
Mrs Hayward made a gift to Mao Tse Tung of a Maori feather cloak, met Chou En Lai and befriended writer Han Suyin before returning home to make Song of Jerusalem beside the Whanganui River.
In 1972 the Haywards made New Zealand's first colour feature film, the dramatic documentary To Love A Maori, highlighting the problems and successes of Maori urban migration, and portraying social problems of the day.
During a promotional tour for the film in 1974, Rudall died of a heart attack in Dunedin.