Miranda Harcourt

Dame Miranda Catherine Millais Harcourt (born 1962) is a New Zealand actress and acting coach.Harcourt's acting career began playing boy characters on Radio New Zealand in the early 1970s. She is best known for her role as Gemma in the 1980s TV drama series Gloss. Harcourt spent three years acting on the show, and her character was so despicable that people spat at and insulted Harcourt in public. Harcourt received a nomination in the 1989 Film and TV Awards for best actress for the role. Harcourt graduated from Toi Whakaari, New Zealand Drama School, in 1984. Harcourt was part of a PEP scheme under Darcy Nicholas at the Willis Street Wellington Arts Centre directed by Colin McColl in a play.In 1990, a sponsored year at London's Central School of Speech and Drama led to an exploration of drama therapy in psychiatric institutions, with the deaf, and in prisons – the latter inspiring her collaboration with writer William Brandt for the solo play Verbatim, where Harcourt acted, solo, portraying nine characters, inmates' relatives, and victims' families.Harcourt was also a pioneer of verbatim theatre in New Zealand, in creating Verbatim (1993), in collaboration with William Brandt and Portraits (1997) in collaboration with Stuart McKenzie. Performed in front of people convicted of violent crimes, Harcourt says Verbatim "was a reflection back at the people on the inside; what their mothers, their sisters and their children had said about them". The show was well received in New Zealand theatres, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and from the inmates themselves. Harcourt recollected one inmate, a year after the show, asking her where the other actresses were who had starred, having remembered the distinct characters that Harcourt portrayed solo so distinctly that he remembered them as separate, individual women. The Sunday Star-Times described Verbatim as "a small miracle of dramatic theatre". The NZ Times said Harcourt's performance was "frightening in its stamina and emotional range". In The Guardian, reviewer Michael Billington praised Verbatim as "a remarkable solo show about violence.”

Harcourt and her mother, Kate, appeared together in Flowers From My Mother's Garden, a collection of shared anecdotes, reminiscences and stories centered on their relationship and family, and co-written by Harcourt and her husband, Stuart McKenzie. The play was commissioned by the 1998 International Festival of the Arts and has been staged in Auckland, Dunedin and Christchurch.