Peter Kaa

Following small parts on television, Peter Kaa won a trio of choice screen roles: an episode of breakthrough Māori drama series E Tipu e Rea (1989), sketch comedy show Away Laughing, and a central role in Barry Barclay's second feature, Te Rua. Kaa played a poet and activist fighting to return Māori carvings from a German museum. Four years later he got another big role in mini-series Savage Play, as a member of the New Zealand Natives rugby team which toured Great Britain in 1988. Kaa went on to direct plays for Māori theatre company Taki Rua, and act in Shortland Street and anthology series Mataku.

If you grow up on a marae you perform. It goes part and parcel with life there. I grew up on the Hinepare marae on New Zealand's East Coast and started orating when I was five-years-old. Peter Kaa, in NZ Film, issue 43, May 1991