New Zealand director Lee Tamahori, a director of action films with a lot of style and dryness, died this Friday at his home in Auckland at the age of 75. Tamahori had already made public years ago that he suffered from Parkinson’s.
The announcement was made, via RNZ radio, by the family of the director, born in Wellington, who in a statement declared that he died peacefully at home: “His legacy lives on in his whānau, They mokopuna, every director he inspired, every barrier he broke and every story he told with his brilliant eye and honest heart. “A charismatic leader and fierce creative spirit, Lee championed Māori talent both in front of and behind the screen.”
Tamahori was of Maori descent on his father’s side and British on his mother’s side. He started as a photographer and in television, slowly rising to an assistant director, until he began directing commercials himself. In advertising he achieved enormous success, which is why he only switched to directing in 1994, when he published Warriors of the past, the violent life of a Maori family, which achieved critical and public success both in its country (still in 2025 it is among the five highest-grossing New Zealand films in history) and in the rest of the world, including Spain.
Both Tamahori and its protagonist, Temuera Morrison (who ended up bringing Boba Fett to life in-universe Star Wars), They jumped to Hollywood. The director started with Mulholland Falls (The Hat Brigade) (1996), A thriller set in the 1950s, within a special crime squad of the Los Angeles police, with a powerful cast: Chazz Palminteri, Nick Nolte, the now deceased Chris Penn and Michael Madsen, John Malkovich, Jennifer Connelly and Melanie Griffith.
It didn’t go well, but Tamahori had already become an effective action craftsman, and so he continued in the United States, directing The challenge (a face-off between Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins, with a bear in the middle); an episode of The Sopranos; Him thriller The Hour of the Spider, and direct the wonderful theatrical bond Pierce Brosnan, Die another day (2002), remembered by Halle Berry as the CIA agent Jinx in a Cadiz that served as a fake Havana and with the bad guys of North Korea.
Right between the first of xXx2 (State of Emergency) (2005) with Vin Diesel and Next (2007), starring Nicolas Cage as a wizard who can see the future, then tries to prevent a terrorist attack with nuclear weapons, a freak accident occurred that affected Tamahori’s life and ended his first marriage. On January 8, 2006, dressed in a black dress and wearing a wig, Tamahori, then 55, approached an undercover police officer’s car and proposed sexual intercourse in exchange for money in Santa Monica, California. He was arrested for prostitution and incitement to crime. In February of that year, a Los Angeles court sentenced him to 36 months of probation and ordered him to perform 15 days of community service.
He would only make three more films and direct one episode of the series Billions. The first, in 2011, was the most interesting: in Double the devil, portrayed the suffering of Latif Yahia, forced by the Iraqi regime, due to his resemblance, to be the double of Uday Hassein, Saddam’s brutal son. In 2015 it was repeated with Temuera Morrison Mahana, story that brought him back to his country and revealed a family rivalry in New Zealand in the 1960s. And his filmography ended two years ago with The convert, in which an English preacher, played by Guy Pearce, arrives in a British settlement in 1830. He brings with him a violent past that won’t help him when he finds himself caught in the middle of a bloody war between Maori tribes.
