FOX, KERRY (1966– ). Kerry Fox is one of New Zealand’s foremost actors with an international career. After completing drama school, she starred as Janet Frame in the Jane Campion film Angel at My Table (1990). Fox won the 1990 award for best female performance at the New Zealand Film and Television Awards for this film. Angel at My Table is a drama based on the true story of the author Janet Frame, and also stars Martyn Sanderson and Alexia Keogh. She later moved to Australia to play the emotionally needy young sister Vicki in *Gillian Armstrong’s The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992). Returning to New Zealand, she played Andrea Joyce in The Rainbow Warrior (1992). She subsequently appeared as the radical white South African in Friends (1993), a film about three women and the effects of apartheid in South Africa. She followed this with the lead role as a greedy medical student in Danny Boyle’s British-produced drama/thriller Shallow Grave (1994), which had unanticipated international success.
Back in New Zealand, Fox’s next role was Kelly Towne in John Reid’s The Last Tattoo (1994), which told the story of American servicemen and their relationship with New Zealand women in World War II. She was nominated for the *Australian Film Institute (AFI) award for best leading actress for her role of sheep farmer Sally Voysey in Michael Blackmore’s Country Life (1994) with Sam Neill, a version of Anton Chekhov’s Country Life set in the Australian outback. In David Attwood’s unnoticed—perhaps because the subject is almost taboo—Saigon Baby (1995), she played Kate Cooper, an infertile British woman who was prepared to buy a baby in Southeast Asia, with John Hurt as the middleman in the deal. Moving to Canada, Fox was nominated for the Genie Award for best supporting actress for her role as the bride-to-be awaiting the return of her gay brother, in the film The Hanging Garden (1997). Fox returned to Australia to play the lead role of Sonja Buloh in Richard Flanagan’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1998), a story of a postwar migrant father and, predominantly, his daughter, and their struggles in a work camp on the rugged west coast of Tasmania.
In the Canadian production of the documentary-style To Walk with Lions (1999), Fox played Lucy Jackson. She has never neglected the New Zealand film industry, and returned to play the policewoman in Brita McVeigh’s little-known short drama, Thinking about Sleep (1999). In the same year, she played in the British *comedy Fanny and Elvis (1999), as a woman in her thirties desperate to conceive a child. Still on a sexuality theme, she played in the much more significant Intimacy (2000)—directed by Patrice Chereau—as an actress who engages in a sexual relationship with a stranger, and they find common ground only through making love. In 2001, Fox won the best actress award at the Berlin International Film Festival for this role, and the film was acclaimed at the Sundance Festival. In the Australian production of Craig Lahiff’s Black and White (2002), she plays Helen Devaney, one of two legal aid lawyers—Robert Carlyle is the other—who try to represent the case for a half-Aboriginal fair worker who is accused, and found guilty of, murder. The film is based on a true story from South Australia in the 1950s. Fox was less successful as the lead in the thriller in the mould of The Sixth Sense, The Gathering (2002). Again in Australia, in the short film directed by Jessica Hobbs, So Close to Home (2003), she plays Maggie, a woman who meets a mysterious teenage girl on a train, and the story then develops into an investigation into the lives of refugees and critiques their treatment in Australia.
Other films include Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), The Wisdom of Crocodiles (1998), The Darkest Light (1999), and The Point Men (2001).