biography

Kiwi Born Actress Lucy Lawless was born Lucille Frances Ryan on March 29, 1968 in Auckland, New Zealand. She was the fifth of seven children and the first born daughter to Frank and Julie Ryan. She was a tomboy as a child and grew up in a rough and tumble household, where she learned to hold her own against her four older brothers.

Lawless was educated primarily in convent schools and studied opera for several years, but gave it up when she realized that she didn’t have a passion for opera that serious study required. However, she did realize that she enjoyed acting and appeared in numerous plays while in high school. She later attended Auckland University where she studied Italian, German and French for one year. She dropped out and headed for Europe where she traveled around Switzerland and Germany with boyfriend, Garth Lawless, until they ran out of money. The couple returned to Australia where they planned to make enough money to continue their travels.

Lucy and Guarth were married while in Australia and returned to New Zealand where Lucy gave birth to their daughter, Daisy. In 1989 Lucy was chosen as Mrs. New Zealand, but she was determined to pursue an acting career. She landed a role in a TV commercial. She described her first acting job as a “really bad, cheesy commercial for travel, and I wore a bathing suit. And I am not a bathing suit girl!” That commercial led to others and shortly after landed her first real acting job in a New Zealand comedy troupe show called “Funny Business”. She moved with her family to Vancouver, Canada where she enrolled in the William Davis Center for Actors Study where she studied for eighteen months.

Lucy worked in a number of TV and film productions. Her first real exposure to American audiences came when she landed the role of Lysia in “Hercules and the Amazon Women”, an episode of “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” which was being filmed in her native New Zealand. That appearance led to another one, this time as Lyla in another Hercules episode titled “As Darkness Falls.”

Her big break came in another Hercules episode when actress Vanessa Angel became sick and couldn’t appear in the episode. Lucy was cast because producers couldn’t find a replacement for Angel. She was thus cast as Xena in a three episode arc, that ultimately spun off into her own series, “Xena: Warrior Princess” in 1995.

Lucy makes her home in Auckland, New Zealand. She divorced from Garth Lawless but they share custody of Daisy. Lucy became engaged to “Xena: Warrior Princess” executive producer Rob Tapert while in New York City in 1997, and the couple were married in Santa Monica, California on March 28th, 1998.