Art and Culture - Personalities
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is recognised as one of the world’s finest sopranos. Over the years, numerous Maori have made their mark on the international arts scene through the beauty of their voices, but Dame Kiri is the best known. She made her international debut at Covent Garden in 1971 and returned there in March 2001 celebrating an incredible 30-year association with the Royal Opera House. Dame Kiri remains one of the leading sopranos of her generation, whose career highlight was to sing at the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1981 in front of an audience of 750 million worldwide.
Dame Malvina Major
International opera star Dame Malvina Major has won prestigious local and international awards including the Mobil New Zealand Song Quest, the Australian Melbourne-Sun Aria and the Kathleen Ferrier Award in London. She strongly supports the development of rising young opera stars, through the Dame Malvina Major Foundation. Dame Malvina still calls New Zealand home, despite her international success, and up until three years ago lived on the family farm in Opunake (Taranaki area). She is now based in Christchurch with partner Brian Law, music director of the Christchurch City Choir. Her husband Winston Fleming died of cancer in 1990. In 2000 Dame Malvina was asked by the Department of Conservation to be patron of the endangered North Island kokako. ‘I'm really flattered. They told me it is one of the nicest songbirds in New Zealand and probably the prettiest and they said that is why they thought of me, which was lovely,’ she said.
Further information:
Agent
Chris Klaassen
Email chris.klaassen@clear.net.nz
Janet Frame
Janet Frame (1924 - 2004) is New Zealand’s best-known contemporary novelist and short story writer and was been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Her best-known works are three award-winning volumes of autobiography: ‘To the Is-Land’ (1982), ‘An Angel at My Table’ (1984) and ‘The Envoy from Mirror City’ (1985). The trilogy was made into a film, ‘An Angel at My Table’, by star New Zealand director Jane Campion, and starring Kiwi Kerry Fox.
An excellent biographical summary from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998) can be found at the Victoria University of Wellington site (below).
Nyree Dawn Porter
Nyree Dawn Porter, who died on April 10, 2001 was a New Zealander who shot to fame as the first romantic sex symbol on British television. She starred as Irene Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga in 1967, before moving into film, ‘From Beyond the Grave’ (1973), a horror movie with Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence, and ‘The Martian Chronicles’ (1979), with Rock Hudson. She appeared in numerous theatrical productions in London over the years including Great Expectations. Nyree Dawn Porter was awarded an OBE in 1971.
Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) is still New Zealand's best-known literary figure. Her poetic short stories focus on psychological conflicts and define her as a genius of observation. Her work had a huge influence on the growth of the short story as a form of literature. Mansfield left New Zealand when she was 19, moving to England to write. She married critic and essayist John Middleton Murry in 1918, after divorcing George Bowden. Prelude (1918) is a series of short stories recalling memories of her New Zealand childhood, for which she is most famous. Another collection, Bliss, came in 1920 and the noted short story The Garden Party and collection in 1922. Virginia Woolf once declared that Mansfield's writing was: ‘The only writing I have ever been jealous of’. Mansfield died from tuberculosis, aged 34. Visitors can see the home where Mansfield was born, which is open to the public, in Wellington.
Further information:
Katherine Mansfield House
25 Tinakori Road
Wellington
Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society
President Oroya Day
Phone +64 4 388 7806 (Hm)
Phone +64 4 473 7268 (Society)
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