Peter Jackson's voyage from Bad Taste

By ANGELA GREGORY

After his first feature film, Bad Taste, director Peter Jackson was caught on camera in 1988 as a clean-cut guy with shortish hair and cheeks as clear as a baby's bottom.

But he grew his hair, got some real good jobs, and by The Lord of the Rings commission had transformed himself into a bespectacled, bearded and wild-haired maestro. An image makeover gone wrong? Possibly not.

The man who appeared at the Oscars in a sloppy suit missing its top button was perhaps seeking what all those "modest" moviemakers really want - to be talked about. And they did.

Said the Financial Times of London: " ... the endearing Jackson had spent his usual four hours in hair, makeup and wardrobe, perfecting the 'dragged-through-a-hedge look'."

On a Washington Post site Robin Williams (surely not THE Robin Williams) wrote of Jackson: "I find him annoying, his dress sense even more so."

Suzy Menkes of the International Herald Tribune wrote: "Inevitably Peter Jackson's string tie and crumpled suit looked like it had travelled to New Zealand and back in coach class."

But perhaps pointedly he failed to make the top 10 worst-dressed Oscar men listed in the internet newspaper The Spoof. But his partner Fran Walsh headed the top 10 worst-dressed women.

"Peter Jackson's 'better half' looked like a hippie, dippie flower child. Now we see where he gets his incredible fashion sense from."

And her "style" didn't pass unnoticed by the London Times, which wrote about the "woman on The Lord who turns up everywhere next to Peter Jackson looking as if she's on a lunch break from selling healing crystals."

Maybe it explains the hide-a-way with lifts and a giant home cinema the pair are building deep in the Wairarapa - not that befitting for a pair of humble hobbits, we'd have thought.