Acting has been my passion since I saw Shakespeare's The Tempest when I was seven. I'm so fortunate I've been able to make it my profession. But along the twisty path of life, I've also done many other jobs. During school and university holidays in my homeland New Zealand, I worked in a bookshop, a plant nursery and a pub, waited tables in restaurants, cleaned hotel rooms and wheeled a tea-trolley serving government employees. Between roles as a young actor in the capital Wellington, I was a casting assistant and a substitute teacher at a boys' college. Later I co-wrote plays for young people, directed theatre, produced radio drama and readings (including producing Keri Hulme reading from her Booker Prize winning novel The Bone People). And assessed scripts for the New Zealand Film Commission (including screenplays by Jane Campion and Vincent Ward).

I established myself as a leading stage actor – playing a wide variety of roles in theatre ensembles, as well as acting for film, TV and radio. I worked with many of New Zealand's top directors and actors.

An Arts Council supported trip to the UK shook my yearning for more and better roles for women into activism. In 1984 I gathered actress friends around my kitchen table and together we founded the Equity Women's Caucus, and spent a year intensively lobbying.

I helped set up and run a theatre dedicated to local playwrighting and co-wrote - with Maori artist Roma Potiki - a successful funding proposal to the QEII Arts Council which enabled the theatre to become bi-cultural: Taki Rua / The Depot.

Moving to Germany in 1991 proved a major shock, as I struggled to redefine myself in a new culture and language. I taught New Zealand literature (plays and film) as a junior lecturer at Kiel University. I wrote articles and short stories which were broadcast on Radio New Zealand and BBC World. I scripted two screenplays: one won a New Writers' Award from the EU's MEDIA Programme European Script Fund, both were optioned (which meant I got paid!). Neither got made.

And I joined masterclasses, learning from brilliant teachers like Earle Gister from the Yale School of Drama, Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski, and acting coach Ivana Chubbuck.

I began working as an actor again, in Germany's best-beloved soap Lindenstrasse, in international and German films, and on stage. I set up Whitecloud Productions and produced plays and readings in Berlin. A highlight was the solo-show Blonde Poison in 2018-19 which I starred in and co-produced.

Voice acting has proved lots of fun - I specialise in characters for animated films, as well as documentary and audio guide narration. You can hear me in museums and historic places not only in Germany, also in France, Switzerland, Austria, the UK and Turkey.

What began as a casual job as an off-air announcer for Germany's international broadcaster DW evolved into a second career strand. I did a 3 year degree in advanced journalism at Berlin's Free University – and for many years freelanced for DW TV as a live news producer, reporter and culture correspondent (check out the clips below.)  

Recently I've spent more time back in the Southern Hemisphere: In Australia where I regularly stretch my acting muscles in masterclasses at 16^th Street Actors Studio (with teachers including Iain Sinclair, Ian Rickson and Miranda Harcourt) and in New Zealand, where I'm caretaker of a small swamp - a coastal wetland which I'm restoring with the help of the QEII National Trust and the Taranaki Regional Council. In 2024 and 2025 I had marvellous acting work in both countries – winning Outstanding Performance at the Wellington Theatre Awards for The Sound Inside.

For more background, listen to a Podcast Interview with Dulcie Smart for the NZ Embassy in Berlin, September 2021: Ohrsome - Kiwi Stories from Berlin