My Account
Born in the UK in the midst of WWII, losing her father to the Luftwaffe and schooled in Switzerland as Europe tried to rebuild, Warkworth actress Ilona Rodgers’ life has had no shortage of drama. While TV was still in its infancy, Ilona starring in live-to-air broadcasts, including Dr Who and The Avengers. Since moving to New Zealand, she has forged a career as a distinguished actress, starring in iconic Kiwi roles in hit 1980s soap Gloss, cult classic film Utu, and in The Billy T James Show. Set on encouraging the arts in Mahurangi, Ilona now chairs the Warkworth Town Hall Restoration Trust. In between being on the set of new TV1 drama Dirty Laundry and looking after grandchildren in Sydney, Ilona sat down with Mahurangi Matters editor George Driver…
Actors must be observers of life. Your job is to draw on your emotions and study the things that drive people’s behaviour. You have to be fit. If you are acting every night in a play, conjuring that level of emotion, it’s exhausting. You are really experiencing the emotions of your character. It can be highly explosive – you have to be in control. It can be gruelling work, on set for 12-hour days at all hours, but it is magical and I love it.
My father died in 1945, when I was three. He was in the Fleet Air Arm and his plane was shot down over the south of France. He crashed into the train station of a small town called Villeneuve-les-Beziers. It had just been liberated from the Germans and people rushed to the wreckage. They buried him in the town cemetery – they even sent his wedding ring back to my mother. I first visited the town eight years ago – the town council invited me to go as they had named a street after my father. One day when I was walking down the main street, two old ladies started talking to me and asked me why I was staying there. I told them why and after an excited conversation in very fast French they informed me that they remembered playing in that very street on the hot August day that my father’s plane crashed.
After the war, my mother went to Switzerland to study at the Swiss Hotel School in Lausanne. At the time, Switzerland was used for rehabilitating refugees and concentration camp victims – I was staying at a boarding school with Dutch children who had been in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Because of acute malnutrition, they would be fed 12 small meals a day to help them recover – there was a lot of screaming at night-time. By the time I was five I could speak French and Dutch better than English.
My mother met my future stepfather at the hotel school. He had just come back from the Nuremburg trials where he had been an interrogator. We returned to England where they married and I was sent off to boarding school. Within a few years, the school realised I had a talent for ballet, so I was moved to a ballet school in Surrey. We would train for three hours a day, getting blisters on blisters – half of us were physically deformed by the time we left! There was a strong focus on being very thin and some of the girls developed anorexia. But it taught me discipline and endurance – to keep going through the pain. I’m grateful for that. It was there that I discovered drama and I went on to study at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School – one of the top drama schools in Britain. It was an exciting period. Bristol Old Vic is one of the oldest theatres in England and Harold Pinter used the school to put on some of his early productions – the playwright Tom Stoppard was the local drama critic.
My first job was at Pitlochry, a repertory theatre in Scotland, and from there I went on to get roles in television. In the early 60s, television was so new and the BBC reigned. Everything was filmed live – your programme would go out live to 40 million people. Of course there were a lot of disasters! One of my first roles was in Emergency Ward 10 and I went on to be in Dr Who, The Avengers, The Saint, and even in a series of The Beverly Hillbillies. It’s a completely different technique, acting onscreen, but no-one was teaching that in those days – you just had to learn on the job. One of my highlights was playing a role opposite Spike Milligan in the West End play, Son of Oblimov. I did that for over a year. He was truly unique – such an inventive man. Most of what he did was improvised – you never knew what he was going to do next.
In the late 60s, I went for a holiday to visit friends on the Faroe Islands – a Danish archipelago between Scotland and Iceland. I was there during the whaling season and locals were killing pilot whales in the bay. As a member of World Wildlife, I was horrified. I got talking to a local woman and she said to me, ‘I’m pregnant and I need someone to work in the tourist office’. So I said yes and lived in Torshavn, the capital – I couldn’t even speak the local language. There are no trees and in winter there were only four hours of sunlight, but the aurora would light up the night sky.
My mother and stepfather were living in Noumea in New Caledonia at the time, and she was diagnosed with cancer. Eventually she had to move to Auckland to get treatment and I came here in 1973 and got a job acting at the Mercury Theatre. Great days and some wonderful plays. I met my husband, David, when the company was on tour in Kerikeri and we were married nine weeks later. I then got a job on one of the country’s first soap operas, Close to Home, and he started studying horticulture at Lincoln University in Christchurch, so I would fly home for weekends.
Later, we bought a farm in Tuakau. It was hard going and we desperately needed a new tractor. I was eight months pregnant and my mother had just died, when I was offered a job in Australia on The Sullivans. We needed the money, so after giving birth to our son, I went to work in Australia and eventually we all moved over to Melbourne for a few years.
I came back to NZ to act in Utu, performing alongside Bruno Lawrence, and I got the role in Gloss a few years later. It was a big success. It had such amazing scripts – we were all hooked and rushed to read what would happen next. Afterwards, I played Billy T James’ wife in The Billy T James Show. He was such a gracious man and it was a privilege to be in his show. I’m still friends with his wife, Lynn. He was very quiet – he wasn’t someone who took over conversations – but he would often say something so spot on and funny. He also had the most wonderful singing voice.
I started coming to Warkworth in the early 1990s when I was acting in the drama Marlin Bay, which was filmed at the Old Cement Works, and I moved here in 2000. Warkworth has always been a popular place for filming. It’s close enough to Henderson, where the studios are based, and it has a variety of scenery. It’s also a quirky village – it’s not just suburbia – that’s its charm. We need to make sure we keep that feel as the area grows.
I became involved with the Warkworth Town Hall restoration because I think it is important this town has a place to foster the arts. I was on the board of the Auckland Arts Festival for seven years and that made me aware of how important the arts are for an area. It all starts at a community level – you’ve got to have the grass roots and foster it. There are also so many talented people in the area. There needs to be a place where they can perform. I’m just yearning for the day the doors open and people can look inside.
I’ve recently been playing a role in the new drama Dirty Laundry. It will start on television at the end of September. It’s been my first full series in about five years. After playing glamorous characters in Gloss and Marlin Bay, it’s a joy just to be able to turn up for work looking ordinary, walk on the set and be a grumpy grandma all day, and then go home. Bliss!
