Maisie Carte

Maisie Carte 1880–1956 was born in Auckland.

Her mother was an avid amateur performer and after they moved to Eastbourne in Wellington, Maisie followed. She won a dramatic recital and went to Sydney to study acting in 1912.

Over the next few years she had a successful stage career in Australia, with visits home to New Zealand. Then in 1915 her first movie, The Loyal Rebel, produced  by Australasian Films Ltd and released on 27 September 1915. Maisie had a major role, playing Violet Howard.

She was a celebrity now, as actor and as artist, drawing caricatures of the famous and making patriotic postcards for the war effort. She married fellow actor Thomas Lloyd.

Maisie, now pregnant, came back to New Zealand with the JC Williamson Company’s record breaking The Thirteenth Chair. The 1918 flu pandemic prevented her return to Australia, fortuitously perhaps, for in 1921 she accepted a a major role in the New Zealand film The Birth of New Zealand, filmed by Frank Stewart and Edwin (Ted) Coubray, directed by Englishman Harrington Reynolds with his wife Australian actress Stella Southern as leading lady.

She was repeatedly involved in entertainments, concerts and local events in Wellington, moved to Auckland where she was involved with various concert items and general entertaining—and from 1928 she produced monologues and plays for radio station 1YA.