Dame Fran Walsh

Dame Fran Walsh is a New Zealand screenwriter, film producer and lyricist, and one of the wealthiest people in the country. The creative partner of Sir Peter Jackson, she co-wrote and produced the films that built their Wellington filmmaking empire and placed the pair among the country's richest people.

The writing partnership with Peter Jackson

Born in Wellington in 1959, Walsh met Jackson in the late 1980s and has worked with him on every one of their films since, first as a co-writer and later as a producer. Their early collaborations included the puppet comedy Meet the Feebles and the horror comedy Braindead, before the 1994 drama Heavenly Creatures, which the pair wrote together, earned them their first Academy Award nomination for its screenplay.

On the big adaptations she wrote alongside Jackson and Philippa Boyens, a screenwriting trio that would go on to shape a decade of blockbuster fantasy made in Wellington.

Oscar night for The Return of the King

Walsh, Jackson and Boyens wrote the screenplays for The Lord of the Rings, filmed entirely in New Zealand and released between 2001 and 2003. Walsh also produced the films and co-wrote music for them. When The Return of the King swept the 2004 Academy Awards, she took home three Oscars in a single night, for Best Picture as a producer, for Best Adapted Screenplay and for the Best Original Song "Into the West", which she wrote with Howard Shore and Annie Lennox.

She went on to co-write King Kong, The Lovely Bones, The Hobbit trilogy and Mortal Engines, keeping the work rooted in New Zealand rather than moving offshore.

One of few women on the rich list

Walsh was made a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2019 for services to film. Rarely interviewed and famously private, she is one of the most decorated figures in New Zealand cinema, and one of a small number of New Zealand women to appear on the national rich list in their own right, her fortune tied to the visual-effects business she and Jackson sold in 2021.