Lani Tupu

Lani John Tupu
Lani Tupu at DragonCon 2009
Born	(1955-11-04) November 4, 1955 (age 61) Auckland, New Zealand
Other names	John Tupu; Larney Tupu

Lani Tupu (born 4 November 1955 in Auckland, New Zealand), billed variously as Larney Tupu, John Tupu and Lani John Tupu, is a New Zealand-born classically trained actor of Samoan descent. He was educated at Rongotai College and Wellington Teacher's Training College. He was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council Bursary in 1977 to enter New Zealand Drama School, where he graduated in 1978. Lani left New Zealand for Australia in 1985 to "branch out across the big pond."

Lani Tupu has been nominated for several awards throughout his career. These include the Best New Talent at the 1984 Feltex Television Awards, several awards from the New Zealand Film and TV Awards (1993) for Best Dramatic Performance and a Best Actor award for Talk of the Town, which he also directed, at the Dream Maker Festival in Ontario, Canada. He was also finalist for the Male Performance Supporting Role at the 1986 Listener Film Television Awards for his work in the film Send a Gorilla, and was nominated for Best Actor in 1985.

Tupu participated in the foundation of an Australian theatre group called The Walkers and Talkers, which is no longer running, and has also served as an acting coach and taught "Acting for the Camera" in Australia and New Zealand. He also runs weekly workshops on "Screen Acting" at the Actors Centre in Sydney, Australia. He is active in stage production, both as a director and actor, and spends considerable time behind the camera. He directed Going Home for the stage as well as the critically acclaimed and award-winning short film Talk of the Town (1996).

Tupu's TV appearances include: Country GP, Impossible (1988), Time Trax (1993), The Feds (1993), High Tide (1994), The New Adventures of Flipper (1996), House Gang (1998), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1999/2000), Farscape (1999–2003), Green Sails (2000), The Finder (2001), Grass Roots (2003), Stingers (2002/2004), Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars (2004).