Martyn Sanderson was a New Zealand actor, filmmaker and poet. Sanderson was one of the founders of Downstage Theatre in 1964 in Wellington, with a vision of a small professional company performing challenging works in an intimate venue. In the 1970s, Sanderson toured with multi-media group Blerta, and worked on films with Blerta members Bruno Lawrence and director Geoff Murphy. That decade he won a New Zealand Feltex Award for playing aviator Richard Pearse in a television film of the same title, and was nominated again for playing a British general in the historical miniseries The Governor, the most expensive TV drama made in New Zealand in that decade. Sanderson's work as a screen director included a number of shorts featuring New Zealand poets, plus the 1989 feature Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree. Based on a work by Albert Wendt, Flying Fox is about a young Samoan caught between the values of his homeland and European colonisers. He wrote a documentary One of those Blighters on Ronald Hugh Morrieson and the screenplay for the 1986 film of Morrieson's last novel Pallet on the Floor. [More at Wikipedia]

February 24th, 1938 in New Zealand  /  Died:   Oct 14th, 2009 - aged 71