Fran Walsh

At 65 years old, Fran Walsh has this physical status:

Dame Frances Rosemary Walsh (born 10 January 1959) is a New Zealand screenwriter, film director, and lyricist.

She has received BAFTA and Oscar recognition for her music, filmmaking, and script writing.

Since 1989, filmmaker Peter Jackson, Walsh has appeared in all of his films, beginning as co-writer since Meet the Feebles and as producer since The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

Early life

In Wellington, New Zealand, Walsh was born into a family of Irish descent. She set out to be a fashion designer at Wellington Girls' College but then discovered she was drawn to music instead. She attended Victoria University of Wellington majoring in English literature and graduating in 1981. She took time off to perform in The Wallsockets, a punk band.

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Career

Walsh got her screen break writing material for New Zealand producer Grahame McLean on 1983 television film A Woman of Good Character (It's Lizzie to those Close). Later she wrote scripts for his TV show Worzel Gummidge Down Under.

Walsh met Peter Jackson in the mid-1980s during the final stages of production on his low-budget movie Bad Taste, in which aliens serve humans as fast food. Walsh has collaborated with Jackson on the scripts of all his subsequent films, after joining the writing quartet on his next film, the dark comedy Meet the Feebles (1989). The couple then reteamed with writer Stephen Sinclair on the horror-comedy film that they had begun writing before Feebles, the zombie movie Braindead (retitled Dead Alive in the United States, 1992).

Walsh and Jackson have not married (2015). They explored new ground with the drama Heavenly Creatures (1994). The film was Walsh's idea and was based on the friendship of the Parker-Hulme teenagers, who infamously later killed one of their mothers. The film earned the duo an Oscar nomination for the screenplay. Walsh gave birth to Billy in 1995 and Katie in 1996. Walsh and Jackson returned to a more familiar genre with Universal Studios horror-comedy The Frighteners (1996), their first film funded by an American studio. They were in talks with Universal to remake King Kong until 1998's Godzilla and Mighty Joe Young were first announced, and Universal decided against the film. Universal feared it would be thrown aside by the two higher budget movies. Wanting to try his hand at fantasy, Jackson turned to Miramax to make a film based on the works of writer J.R.R. Tolkien. In 1998, New Line Cinema provided the necessary financial backing to make a three-part adaptation of Tolkien's classic The Lord of the Rings.

Walsh, with Jackson and Philippa Boyens, is credited for writing the screenplays for The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) (Stephen Sinclair has a writing credit on the second film: The Two Towers). They shared many awards, including an Oscar for their adapted screenplay for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. She also was one of the film's producers and co-composer of two songs for Return of the King, namely "Into the West" and "A Shadow Lies Between Us", earning her one more Oscar that night.

Walsh, Jackson, and Boyens continued their screenplay work together for the 2005 remake of King Kong, which was given the green light by Universal after the Rings trilogy's success. The couple collaborated on the adaptation of the novel The Lovely Bones and on the three-film adaptation of The Hobbit.

Walsh prefers to remain more private than Jackson or Boyens; she did not contribute an interview to the bonus features on The Lord of the Rings movie DVDs; however, she did feature on the director/writers' commentary (where she and Jackson discussed that they felt one of them should remain a private figure for the good of their family). Her vocals were used as a significant part of the screech of the Nazgûl in the films.

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