Photo by Zade Rosenthal – © ILM/Revolution Studios
New Zealand-born director Lee Tamahori has died at the age of 75 after struggling with Parkinson’s disease.
In a statement to RNZ, New Zealand’s public-service broadcaster, his family declared: “His legacy endures with his whānau, his mokopuna, every filmmaker he inspired, every boundary he broke and every story he told with his genius eye and honest heart.” (Whānau and mokopuna are indigenous words relating to the Maori people’s extended family.) They added that Tamahori was both “a charismatic leader and fierce creative spirit” who “championed Maori talent both on- and offscreen.”
Born in Wellington in 1950 to a father with Maori roots and a mother with British ones, Warren Lee Tamahori told interviewers that movies had been in his blood from his earliest years, when he would skip school to watch action films and American Westerns. “That’s what I did in my youth, sneaked into every movie I wasn’t allowed to see, and that’s how I became a filmmaker,” he recalled. Tamahori turned to directing in the 1980s after beginning his career as a commercial artist and photographer. He established Flying Fish as his production company and directed a short film Thunderbox in 1989.
Lee Tamahori first came to international prominence in 1994 when he directed Once Were Warriors, a film that debuted at Cannes and that cast a critical lens on gangs and domestic violence within the Maori community.
After the success of that film, he directed several hard-hitting films in Hollywood, including The Edge (1997), Die Another Day (2002), xXx: State of the Union, and Next (2007). The Edge was a survival drama written by David Mamet and that starred Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. Die Another Day was a James Bond film with Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry. xXx: State of the Union was a political thriller starring William Dafoe, Samuel L Jackson, and Ice Cube, while Next was a sci-fi thriller with Nicholas Cage in the lead role. Other of his film credits include Mulholland Falls (1996), Along Came a Spider (2001) and The Devil’s Double (2011). He also directed episodes of The Sopranos and Billions
Some of Tamahori’s recent films marked a return to his Maori roots, such as The Patriarch (2016) and The Convert (2023). Set in the nineteenth century, The Convert starred Guy Pearce as a British missionary who gets embroiled in violence between warring Maori tribes.
Tamahori is survived by his second wife Justine, children Sam, Max, Meka and Tané, as well as daughter-in-laws Casey and Meri and his grandchild Cora Lee.
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