From Metro Magazine (New Zealand)

From Mary D's Website.  To pictures that go along with article, go to: March 2003 Lucy A Go-Go Ms Lawless And The Lure of Hollywood Transcribed by MaryD - Scans by Richard K Typos are probably mine <g> Our only internationally famous female TV star spent the summer kicking around pubs with Dave Dobbyn and his band. Warrior self-promoter? Or a wild search for direction? Greg Dixon talks to Lucy Lawless about kick starting her brilliant career. He turns leering, reddened eyes back to the stage and chugs from his fast-emptying bottle of pre-mix. "Good on her though, mate," comes the slurred after-thought. "Go hard, I reckon." On the stage, actress Lucy Lawless, in tiny blue shorts and white singlet, is indeed going hard on her Chrissie Hynde impersonation: Got brass in picket, bottle, I'm gonna use, intention, I feel invention; gonna make you, make you, make you notice A throaty roar meets Lawless' husky vocals. Over 800 punters, mostly locals like Brian, have crammed into "Buck's Backyard Bar", the garden slop shop at Silverdale's Wade Hotel, to hear Dave Dobbyn and band and - it appears - to see "special guest vocalist" Lucy Lawless Inside the Wade, Margaret, a neatly-pressed, restrained mid-50's mother who came with her daughter from nearby Whangaparaoa, is hiding from the noise. But she can't keep her eyes off the stage. "She's fabulous, she really seems to have adapted to this," Margaret says. "It must be nice to have so much talent and be good looking and have a nice figure." Cause I gonna make you see, there's nobody else here, no one like me, I'm special, so special, I'm gonna have some of your attention - give it to me... Lucy Lawless is fascinating, if you give her some attention. The famous face with it's perfectly white teeth, cobalt-blue eyes and ever-arching eyebrows is an actor's face, constantly on the move, shaping and reshaping to fit the scene: doting mother, cautious interviewee, newly-minted rock chick. It's a face that even manages, as it did one morning when I arrived at her front door, to look fresh and winning more or less straight out of bed, framed by wild hair and atop a blokish dressing gown. But you'd be mistaken, if you've seen Xena, Warrior Princess, to expect the ass-kickin' presence suggested by Lawless' most famous - her only famous - role. She's tall enough. Nearly 5 foot 11. But whether tapping a tambourine - as she did a lot during Dobby's Summer Holiday Tour - or curled on her white, designer sofa at her Mission Bay home, she exudes more a contented, cat-like mien. There is nothing rock 'n' roll about this 34 year old mother of three, no had-one-too-many-late-night eyes. Though it wasn't as if she'd fallen in with a bad crowd with our Dave. Backstage before the Silverdale gig - the fifth on the Summer's Tour three-week blat around the North Island - I suspected rock 'n' roll to be having the night off. When Lawless, her husband Rob Tapert and I arrived at the Wade in his chunky Japanese 4WD, we found the band out back watching Father Ted tea, vicar? Rock 'n' roll or some more attention was not why Lawless was here. The thousands who turned up at over a dozen venues from Kaitaia to Wellington were, in large part, incidental to her. "The more I thought about it, the more I realised I'd just be a complete fool to turn the tour down, just for my own satisfaction, not for anybody's else's." She believes Dobbyn was looking for a point of difference for the tour, though he told her an angel came to him -- "I don't know whether he was taking the piss or not," Dobbyn says it was his manager's inspiration. "I thought it was a wacky idea too. I thought it would be a good for Lucy to get in touch with good New Zealand people on their summer holidays." Even her husband thought it a capital notion. And could she sing? Well yes. A Manawatu Eventing Standard reviewer though she showed an "impressive range". In fact, recasting herself as a rock chick hardly seemed a gamble. She'd performed in stage musicals at school and fancied, during her teens, being an opera singer. In 1997, she appeared as Rizzo in a Broadway production of Grease and sang The Star Spangled Banner at an ice hockey game, inadvertently exposing a breast when she waved to the crowed. Sadly Brian wasn't there. She said yes to the unlikely pairing with Dobbyn because it sounded scary and fun. "The fact that people are applauding was neither here nor there in a way. I wasn't doing it for that. I was doing it for selfish reasons because it's about the process. I wasn't making any money out of it - it was just an awesome challenge. They pushed me off the cliff, taught me to sing, really."