Chelsie Preston Crayford’s new film Caterpillar gifts Lisa Harrow a luminous return to the screen

It’s a legendary story – Harrow has quite a few of them – and I suspect she likes what it reveals about the Kiwi ingenue who flew to London with single-minded ambition and a sense of her own possibilities.

Snapped up by the Royal Shakespeare Company, she was cast as Olivia opposite Judi Dench in Twelfth Night, the first time a major leading role had been offered to an actress straight from drama school.

John Hurt was once her Romeo. Patrick Stewart played Shylock to her Portia in The Merchant of Venice. They remained such close friends that he spoke at her wedding in 1991 to renowned US marine biologist Roger Payne, the co-discoverer of whale song, whom she married in a stone circle in Vermont.

“I wanted to be an actress of Shakespeare,” she says, of the path she had mapped out for herself as a 10-year-old, sitting in the “giant’s chair” around the rocks from Milford Beach as a full moon streaked light across the water.

“I never wanted to go to Hollywood. I grew up with a mother who believed American culture was going to ruin the world. And I think she’s probably right.”

Arguably the finest actress New Zealand has ever produced and unquestionably the most internationally acclaimed, Harrow did eventually turn to the dark side.

It was while filming Omen III: The Final Conflict in 1980 that she fell for the devil (well, the son of Satan), played by Sam Neill.

What drew her back to New Zealand after Payne’s death in 2023 was in part to be close to Tim, the son she had with Neill, and their three grandchildren. The two youngest are identical twin girls.

“New Zealand has always been home,” she says, looking across the harbour from her apartment on Auckland’s North Shore, her feet tucked up on the couch. “I feel rooted here.”

At 82, Harrow retains both a girlish quality and a presence that could be intimidating in someone less warm and engaged.

Hanging above the downstairs landing is a beautiful portrait of her as Nancy Astor, the first woman to serve as a Member of Parliament in the UK, modelled on a 1908 portrait by John Singer Sargent.

John Leonard, a critic for New York magazine, described Harrow’s performance in a 1982 BBC drama series on Astor’s life as “dynamite”, noting he had never “admired an actress and disliked a character so much”.

The same year, she starred opposite Peter O’Toole in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman on the West End. She still has a framed Punch cartoon of them in that one.

Despite her long and glittering international career, opportunities have been much sparser here. Four decades have passed since she appeared in her last two New Zealand films, Other Halves and Shaker Run.

So, it was an overdue return to the limelight when she walked the red carpet in Wellington this week at the premiere of Chelsie Preston Crayford’s first feature, Caterpillar.

Harrow plays Huia, a woman who has lived her life in service to others. In the early stages of dementia, a diagnosis she hasn’t disclosed, she is the relational glue in a leaky house inhabited by three generations of women whose emotional bonds are fracturing.

Huia’s daughter, Maxine (played by Marta Dusseldorp), is a film-maker on the cusp of a hard-fought career breakthrough. A single mother, she has a fraught relationship with her own teenage daughter Cassie (Anais Shand). Both are so self-absorbed they can’t see that Huia is slipping away from them.

Although Caterpillar is fictional, there are obvious parallels with Crayford’s childhood. Her mother, acclaimed film-maker Dame Gaylene Preston, was a single parent with a driving passion for her work.

When Crayford was 7, her newly widowed grandmother, Tui, moved in, becoming her “other mother” before dissolving into dementia, as Huia does. She died in 2006.

An actor and award-winning director of short films, Crayford spent six years writing the script for Caterpillar. She says her family was a portal into the story.

“I was raised under one roof by two very different women: a Depression-era housewife with a devotion to the home that was tinged with resentment, and a trailblazing feminist filmmaker with little interest in domesticity,” she notes in her writer/director’s statement.

“I ate over-steamed veggies with gluggy cheese sauce at 4.30 with one, and pasta al dente at 8 with the other. I loved both my dinners.”

Harrow’s portrayal of Huia captures some of the fragility she herself felt returning to New Zealand as a widow, untethered and grieving “the absence of a force”.

She and Payne met in London at a Greenpeace rally in Trafalgar Square; Harrow had been invited as a celebrity speaker. Ten weeks later, they were married.

“Suddenly, I met a mind – not an ego,” she says. “And somebody whose view of the world was gargantuan.”

A few years later, Harrow showed the depth of her love for Payne by setting aside her disdain for United States culture and moving with him to rural Vermont, where they became known for their environmental activism.

While that largely ended a career in the UK, some of her best theatre work was still ahead of her, including an off-Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit,and a 2001 staging of Medea in Pittsburgh that won her Performer of the Year.

Her last big acting job in the US before Covid was understudying Glenda Jackson in the gender-switched lead role of King Lear on Broadway.

Then, on a trip back home to New Zealand, she found herself trapped during the pandemic when our borders closed.

A type 1 diabetic, she was advised to delay her second Covid vaccination. By the time she was cleared to travel, her Green Card had expired, causing further delays.

In the end, it was almost two years before she was finally reunited with Payne. By then, he was already ill with cancer. He died 18 months later.

Suddenly, Harrow found herself living alone in Auckland and “missing him terribly”.

She and Payne had always run her lines together – on late-night phone calls, sometimes, when she was on the other side of the world – and he attended her shows in the US so religiously that some theatre companies gave him an office.

It’s not something Harrow talked about on set, not even to Crayford, but she felt his loss sharply while working on Caterpillar. Her first acting project since his death, it also gave her a sense of purpose.

“The wonderful thing about this film was that it allowed me to explore those private dark corners Huia has, because she’s living in her own mind,” she says. “I just opened myself to Chelsie, and my imagination was completely fed by her story.

“And thank God there isn’t a savage man in it beating up the world or killing pirates. It’s a beautifully expressed, heartbreakingly loving and honest film.”

Set in Wellington in 1983, Caterpillar was filmed in just five weeks. Crayford’s father, Jonathan, composed the original score and her mother, Gaylene, appears fleetingly as a “stunt driver”, doubling for Huia in one scene.

Harrow describes the shoot as a “real kick, bollock and scramble” to get done. She also spent much of it walking on a broken foot, after an injury in the first week caused more damage than anyone realised at the time.

The title Caterpillar refers in part to Huia’s dream of seeing the monarch butterflies that arrive in Mexico in their millions to escape the northern winter, an extraordinary 4800km migration spanning multiple generations.

Many don’t make it across the Gulf of Mexico. “The Gulf of Trump,” says Harrow, archly. “But they lay an egg, the caterpillar hatches and it becomes a butterfly, which continues the journey of the mother.

“I’ve never really understood why human beings aren’t canny enough to see that’s the miracle of life, not a big guy in the sky, and that’s what we need to protect.”

The monarch population is declining, but in summer, where Harrow lived in Vermont, fields of flowering milkweed thrummed with them. Watching Caterpillar for the first time left her undone.

“The last scene with the butterflies was the first time I cried for my dead husband,” she says, “because I knew he would have adored that shot.”

Harrow has never had anyone close to her suffer from dementia. However, her brother, who was a farmer, experienced a similar decline before his death from multiple system atrophy, a neurodegenerative disorder associated with exposure to the herbicide paraquat.

Concern for the environment is something she still shares with Sam Neill, who’s been outspoken in his opposition to a proposed open-cast gold mine in Central Otago. Apparently, he and Payne got on like a house on fire.

She nearly drowned filming Omen III when Neill’s character, Damien, pushes her into the water. It was a freezing cold day and her wetsuit had been weighted down with too much lead.

“I couldn’t get back up again,” she says. “But they thought I was still acting and didn’t say cut.”

If Harrow ever does get around to writing her memoir, which is something she’s contemplating, it’ll be filled with stories like that.

She was just 22 when she arrived in England on an Arts Council grant to study at Rada. It was the mid-60s and an exciting time to be in London. At one stage, she dated John Cleese after meeting him at a recording of his radio show, I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again.

“We used to lie in bed together and he’d talk to me about how he was going to learn Arabic, because he wanted to be in the Foreign Service,” she says. “You hear these alarming stories about him now, but it was a very interesting dalliance for a while.”

The release of Caterpillar won’t be the last you see of Harrow. She’s in the cast of Evil Dead Wrath, the latest film in the American horror film franchise, which began production in Auckland a couple of months ago.

You can also catch her in the upcoming second season of A Remarkable Place to Die, the Queenstown-based TV crime drama that stars Chelsie Preston Crayford in the lead role.

Before shooting Caterpillar, Harrow had never worked with a director who was also an experienced actor. “She understood the process so deeply; it was wonderful,” she says.

“I wanted to be an actress of Shakespeare because to me, language is what it’s all about. The key to everything lies in the words.

“When I read Chelsie’s script, it talked to me about the truth of those relationships and the heart of the human experience – living together, surviving, fighting your own fight, but at the same time with tough love. And also forgiveness.”

Joanna Wane is a senior lifestyle writer with an interest in social issues and the arts.