Biography
Simon O'Connor is a New Zealand actor and playwright, born in 1949 in Wellington. He began his stage career in the late 1960s after moving to Dunedin, where he studied theatre for three years. His first short play, Lift, was produced in 1974.
O'Connor has worked extensively in theatre, radio and television. He is known for playing Herbert Rieper in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994), for which he received a nomination for Best Male Performance in a Supporting Role at the 1995 New Zealand Film and Television Awards. Other television credits include roles in Shark in the Park, Close to Home and Country GP, on which he also worked as a writer, and the lead role in the 2015 black comedy How to Murder Your Wife.
In 1992 he became a teaching fellow at the University of Otago's Theatre Studies Department, specialising in playwriting. He was a co-founder of Dunedin's Talking House community arts trust and won the 1984 Bruce Mason Playwriting Award.
