As his debut film Once Were Warriors showed, Lee Tamahori was a director of guts and flair

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Tamahori was the outstanding director of Along Came a Spider and Die Another Day – but his first film was his greatest work In 1994, the New Zealand film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class Maori family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison is the boozing, brawling, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. One son gets gang tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and s...
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Actor Bel Powley: ‘I’d shied away from second world war stories – it’s always all about men’

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The Morning Show star on playing the woman who hid Anne Frank, ​revitalising period dramas and working with her teenage heroes Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon

Isobel “Bel” Powley, 31, was born in west London. In 2016 she was Bafta-nominated for The Diary of a Teenage Girl and shortlisted for a British independent film award for playing Princess Margaret in A Royal Night Out. Subsequent film roles include The King of Staten Island and Mary Shelley, where she met her fiance, actor Douglas Booth. On TV, she’s starred in The Morning Show and Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love. She now plays Hermine “Miep” Gies in miniseries A Small Light, based on the true story of the young woman who hid the Frank family during the second world war and preserved Anne’s diary.

Were you familiar with Miep Gies’s story?
I’d read Anne Frank’s diary as a kid, and I’m Jewish myself, so you grow up with this weight of history running through your family, but I knew nothing about Miep Gies. I was offered the role on Holocaust Memorial Day, which felt kind of special, but was genuinely like: Who is that? Nor did I know about the occupation of the Netherlands and the Dutch resistance. The first thing I did was get my butt over to Amsterdam. It’s a city that operates in a very specific way – everyone cycles everywhere, it’s built on waterways – so I immersed myself in how it feels to live there. I visited the Anne Frank museum, obviously, but also went to Miep’s old apartment and cycled the same routes as her. That was my springboard for working on this.

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