Pioneering stalwart of stage, screen and TV

Pat Evison became a national figure. Photo / Supplied

Dame Pat Evison, New Zealand actor.
Died aged 85.

Dame Pat Evison was a much-loved stalwart of New Zealand radio, television and theatre.

Described as one of the country's "most well-known and well-loved actresses", she had suffered from declining health for several years. She was diabetic, and her eyesight was failing.

She is well known for her roles in Australian television shows Prisoner and as Violet Carnegie in The Flying Doctors. She spent four years in that series, commuting across the Tasman between work there and home and family here.

In New Zealand she played storekeeper Phyllis Telford in the 1970s drama series Pukemanu - a role that made her well known nationally. She also featured in Close to Home, a popular series in the late 1970s and early 80s.

In 1978 she was cast in Tim, a film based on a book by Australian author Colleen McCullough. The part of Tim was taken by a then little-known actor, Mel Gibson. Evison won an Australian Film Industry award for her role as Tim's mother.

The actress, who was made an OBE in 1980 for her services to the theatre and a dame in 1993 - the first New Zealand actor to be made a dame or knight - has been described by those in the industry as a pioneer.

Born Helen June Patricia Blamires in Dunedin in 1924, and educated in Masterton, Pat Evison trained as a teacher before indulging her interest in theatre.

She was one of the first New Zealand drama students to receive a scholarship to study at the Old Vic Theatre School in London, training as a director. Returning to New Zealand, she found the technical side of the business to be still very much a male preserve, so she turned to acting.

One of her fondest memories was appearing at Downstage in Wellington in its first year, 1964, in a play by Samuel Beckett called Happy Days. She spent two and a quarter hours on stage every night waist-deep in a box of sand.

Her lack of conventional good looks she used to her advantage. "I think if you want to be remembered, you're better not to be beautiful," she said in a Herald interview in 1998.

According to one newspaper critic, "Evison's mobile face looks more lived-in than a multi-storey complex of home units."

And the late playwright Bruce Mason compared her visage to the back of a bus. None of this worried Evison one bit.

In 1987, she retired from The Flying Doctors at the age of 63. Even then, she was determined to keep working.

"Life goes past very fast when you are over 60," she said in an interview. "I feel that while I can still remember my lines and stay on my two feet for 12 hours a day, I will keep working if I can."

Friend and broadcaster Hewitt Humphrey said, "She was one person who did so much through all the different media.

She was a "very kind person" who had a "great generosity of spirit. I suppose you could say she was a real lady who had a strong sense of values in how she lived her life."

She is survived by her husband, Roger, three children and nine grandchildren.

- Phoebe Falconer, with Elizabeth Binning