The Life and Times of Xena

Lucy Lawless - Xena

Lucy Lawless stars as Xena, the beautiful, brave, and fiercely independent hero of the one-hour syndicated series "Xena: Warrior Princess". A native of Mt. Albert, Auckland, New Zealand, Lawless first captivated American audiences with her portrayal of Xena in a three-episode arc of the hit series "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" during it's first season. Praised recently by Newsweek as a "formidable natural resource" in "Hercules", she elicited such strong viewer response that the decision was made to create a spin-off series for her in the fall of the following year. "Hercules" fans may also recognize Lawless from her work in the series as Lyla, the lovely and courageous young bride of Deric the Centaur. In addition, she appeared as the menacing Amazon enforcer Lysia in "Hercules and the Amazon Women," the first of the five successful two-hour "Action Pack" movies made-for-television which launched the top-rated weekly hour.Almost six feet tall, with black hair and intense blue eyes, Lawless is the fifth of seven children and the oldest girl in her family. Her father, who became mayor of Mt. Albert the year Lucy was born, is currently Chairman of Finance for Auckland City. Her mother, always a strong supporter of the community, was forever extending the hospitality of their home to people who had nowhere else to go. Until the age of eight, Lucy was very much a tomboy, following in the footsteps of her four older brothers. Apart from a two-year public school stint, she attended convent schools. Pursuing an early interest in acting, she appeared in numerous musicals and plays throughout her high school years. Following graduation at 17, she attended Auckland University for a short time before wanderlust set in. she left for Europe "to go grape-picking on the Rhine." When she ran out of money, she took off for Australia and signed on with a gold-mining company operating in Kalgoorlie, a small town in the-outback about 500 miles from Perth. She was subsequently relocated to a tiny mining camp two hours further away from civilization. One of the very few women miners, Lucy did the same grueling work as the men - digging, mapping the ground, driving trucks, and pushing huge core samples of earth through a diamond saw. Lucy married in Australia and returned to Auckland shortly thereafter, where her daughter Daisy was born. With renewed determination to pursue a career in acting, she began doing television commercials before landing her first real acting job at age 20 with a comedy troupe on television called "Funny Business". After a variety of guest-starring roles in episodic TV, she moved to Vancouver, Canada, for eight months to study drama at the William Davis Center for Actors Study. Blessed with a natural aptitude for the kinds of physical challenges the role demands, Lucy is now working closely with a personal trainer in Auckland. During a brief visit to Los Angeles this summer, she also trained with martial arts master Douglas Wong ("Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story") to learn basic kung fu moves, as well as fighting techniques with swords and staffs. Lawless also has an aptitude for languages and accents. She speaks English, German, French and some Italian, and has often worked on U.S. co-productions requiring a mid- American accent. Despite having studied opera for several years, Lucy's passion is for jazz.

Renee O'Conner - Gabrielle

Renee O'Connor stars as Gabrielle, a spirited young woman who idolizes Xena and recklessly follows the warrior princess in search of a more exciting life, in the new one- hour syndicated series "Xena: Warrior Princess." O'Connor first came to the attention of executive producers Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi when an audition won her the role of the young Deianeira in their two-hour "Action Pack" adventure "Hercules and the Lost Kingdom. " They were so impressed by her performance opposite "Hercules" star Kevin Sorbo, they signed her for a starring role in "Darkman II: The Return of Durant," a feature released on home video in July 1995. Prior to "Darkman II," she co-starred with Ellen Burstyn and Sheryl Lee in the ABC-TV movie "Follow the River," portraying a young woman captured by Shawnee Indians. Set in the year 1755, the drama was based on a true story. In her next role, she starred opposite James Garner as a self-obsessed actress who hires Rockford as her bodyguard in "The Rockford Files: A Blessing in Disguise," the second of Garner's two recent "Rockford" reunion movies for CBS-TV which was broadcast in May 1995. Born in Katy, Texas, O'Connor began studying acting at the age of twelve at Houston's Alley Theatre, and later attended Houston's High School of the Performing and Visual Arts. She made her professional acting debut in 1989 starring in the "Teen Angel" serial, which was featured on the Disney Channel's "Mickey Mouse Club," and went on to star in "Match Point," another serial for the popular children's show. That same year, O'Connor moved to Los Angeles and soon landed a featured role in the episode of "Tales from the Crypt" that marked Arnold Schwarzenegger's directing debut. O'Connor went on to portray Cheryl Ladd's daughter in Danielle Steel's "Changes," and starred as one of a group of students whose lives are suddenly endangered in the NBC movie "The Flood. " Her most recent theatrical film role was that of Julia Wilkes in Disney's "The Adventures of Huck Finn," starring Elijah Wood. She also guest - starred as the daughter of a murdered couple in an episode of the acclaimed television series "NYPD Blue." Renee is single and enjoys jazz dancing, horseback riding and many other sports. When not in Auckland, New Zealand, where the series is filmed, she makes her home in Los Angeles.

Ted Raimi - Joxer

Theodore Raimi, a native of Detroit, is the youngest of the three Raimi brothers. The eldest is Ivan Raimi, a doctor, whose writing credits include Army of Darkness and Darkman and who had co-creator credit for the recent TV series Spy Game. The middle brother is the famous Sam Raimi; producer, director, actor, screenwriter, and co-founder of Renaissance Pictures. Ted Raimi was born December 14, 1965. Young Ted had a choice between a successful fashion or furniture career because his mother owned a chain of lingerie shops and his father had his own home furnishings stores. He made a career decision not to follow the family business but choose acting instead. "I could have been the 'Bra King of Michigan'", he muses. "But I couldn't find a matching girdle." Ted got the acting bug as a child when he would appear as an extra in Sam's early films (including Sam's first hit The Evil Dead). A deejay in high school, he also spent time entertaining a succession of fawning aunts and uncles at home with his impressions. Ted briefly attended Michigan State University, then went to the University of New York and finally to the University of Detroit. Ted's unique acting ability has landed him in a variety of roles playing both good guys and villains in television and in movies. He has played everything from a paranoid lunatic to a CIA analyst. He has gone from a role as a sweet, shy communications officer with a rather dry sense of humor on board a futuristic submarine, to an innocent-looking but viciously brutal killer who enjoys skinning people. His acting skill has been shown in his ability to adapt to these and other roles. He enjoys playing villains or out of the ordinary roles because of the challenge. He started his career by appearing in a series of industrial films in the Motor City. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1988 to lodge with Sam. He landed in his first role outside of his brother's movies in a feature film called Shocker in 1989. He then had a role in Darkman as a bad goon under Durant. A year later he had his first film to receive much commercial success was the Tom Clancy thriller Patriot Games starring Harrison Ford in which Ted he played a satellite analyst in the CIA, a minor role he later reprised in Clear and Present Danger. His other motion picture credits include Hard Target, Candyman, Born Yesterday, Forced Exposure, and Stuart Saves His Family. Many of these roles are of the blink-and-you'll-miss-him variety, but Ted-spotting is considered an art form among the fans. The ultimate Ted-spotting flick is Army of Darkness (a.k.a. Evil Dead III) in which Ted takes on multiple minor roles. Ted's second starring role was in the horror thriller Skinner made in 1995. He plays the title character, Dennis Skinner, a disturbingly nice serial killer. (You'd have to watch the film to understand how a character can be both nice and nauseatingly evil at the same time, but believe me, Ted pulls it off. Ted has also had a number of television appearances. He has had guest starring roles on series such as Baywatch, Twin Peaks, and Alf. He had a small but very memorable scene in Alien Nation as a chatty alien in the episode "Chains of Love". (This series still reruns on the Sci-Fi Channel, so you still have a chance to catch this one if you try.) He also had a major guest-starring role in one American Gothic episode. He is probably best know for his recurring roles on seaQuest DSV (later seaQuest 2032) and Xena: Warrior Princess. In seaQuest, a science fiction show about a futuristic submarine, which ran from 1993 to 1995, Ted played the shy, but intelligent, multi-lingual communications officer, Lieutenant (junior grade) Timothy O'Neill. Fans had the opportunity to hear him speak several different languages including Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Vietnamese and Japanese. (Many who know say his accents were fairly passable.) Ted felt that his background as a ham-radio operator and, a former high school deejay, and his interest in practicing dialects made him suitable for this role. Ted also has an interest in science. He says "I'm a huge science nut, although I wouldn't know how to fix a circuit or wire anything." seaQuest has been re-running on the Sci-Fi Channel nightly from Monday through Thursday. In Xena: Warrior Princess, which is currently airing in syndication, Ted plays Joxer, a totally incompetent warrior wannabe who has a heart of gold and tags along after Xena and Gabrielle whenever possible. Joxer is one of many recurring characters on the show and has also crossed over to Hercules: The Legendary Journeys on occassion. The role of Joxer has led to several convention appearances. Many fans who have had the opportunity to see Ted in person describe him as extremely charming and ingratiating. He's considered to be a bit of a stand-up comedian because of his sense of humor and cheerfulness. He is willing to talk with almost anyone and comes off as quite humble with his fans. Ted writes screenplays along with his acting. Ted co-wrote the script for a second-season episode of seaQuest titled "Lostland." Ted especially likes to write screenplays for horror movies. This is a hobby of his. He also enjoys playing piano and trumpet (which he has played since he was akid.) He also likes to invent board games for his friends. He is a huge Detroit Tigers and Detroit Red Wings fan, even though he said he "hates sports." In an interview he said "I did not excel in sports at all." He says that he had wanted to get into acting as a way "to explore all these fantasy elements (like science fiction) in a real way."

Bruce Cambell - Autolycus

Bruce was born on June 22, 1958 in Royal Oak, Mi. (a suburb to Detroit). He has been married for 6 years (Damn!) to Ida Gearon, and has two kids (Rebecca and Andy) and three cats named Carpenter, Edison, and Marina. He attended Western Michigan University (for 6 months...) and each weekend he would go to MSU (Michigan State University) where Sam Raimi attended and shot a bunch of Super 8 films with him, which you can still find bootlegged here and there. In 1979, with his Detroit friends, Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, Bruce raised $350,000 for a low-budget film, Evil Dead, in which he starred and Executive Produced. Completed slowly over four years, the film first gained notoriety in England where it became the best-selling video of 1983, beating out The Shining. After its appearance at Cannes, where Stephen King dubbed it "the most ferociously original horror film of the year," New Line Cinema decided to release Evil Dead in the U.S. After filming Crime Wave, a cross-genre picture, co-produced by Bruce and written by Sam Raimi with his newfound partners Ethan and Joel Coen, Dino DeLaurentiis agreed to take on the sequel to Evil Dead. Blessed with a budget ten times the original, Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn was released in 1987 with Campbell again starring in and co-producing this "less gory, more funny" sequel. Bruce then moved to Los Angeles and quickly gained a foothold in a series of independent genre films such as Maniac Cop, Moontrap, and Sundown. He then met his wife, costume designer Ida Gearon, on the set of Mindwarp, a "post-apocalyptic Jeremiah Johnson." Bruce then jumped back into producing as co-executive producer of the biker yarn Easy Wheels and also produced Lunatics: A Love Story, for RCA/Columbia. In 1992, Bruce rejoined his old Detroit colleagues and made the third of the popular Evil Dead trilogy, Army of Darkness, which Bruce starred in and co-produced for Universal Studios (the crew members were reportedly paid so little that they also received for their efforts a t-shirt saying "I Worked On Armyof Darkness and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt"). Immediately following that, Bruce's Coen Brothers friends invited him to join them for a featured role in their "big business comedy" The Hudsucker Proxy for Warner Bros. Bruce then made his foray into television, first starring in the highly touted, but unfortuneately short-lived Fox series "The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.," then as a recurring Guest-Star on the hit show "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman." With these under his belt, Bruce easily made the transition to director, helming several episodes and guest-starring in the number one syndicated series "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys." Bruce has since reprised his "King of Thieves" character in the new "Hercules" companion series "Xena: Warrior Princess." Since then, Bruce expanded his range on television, with appearances on Sam Raimi's cryptic "American Gothic,"Disney's TV movie update of "The Love Bug," and a more dramatic turn on the acclaimed show "Homicide." But Bruce hasn't abandoned movies, though. During this time, he's had featured roles in the poorly received "Congo," and John Carpenter's bizarrely fabulous "Escape From L.A." as the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills. Recently, he has been in the Fox made for TV movie "Tornado! which was Fox's highest rated TV movie. More recently, Bruce has made the leap into the multi-media industry by supplying the voice of the hero in an upcoming CD-ROM adventure game called "Cold-Blooded" for 7th Level. Bruce also remains interested in television development. He has recently signed on to play the lead in a sitcom Pilot called "Missing Links" for ABC, where he will play a suspended pro-golfer named "Ray" ("basically a sitcom version of the movie 'Tin Cup'", per Bruce). If it is picked up, it will show next fall. Also, he will soon be filming another episode of Hercules, reprising the role of Autolycus. And of course, Bruce has become quite a regular on Ellen. We all look forward to seeing (lots!) more of him!