Toni Okkerse - ‘Nursie’ to the stars

Toni, as nurse, at the ready on set during a battle scene for the 1980s movie, Willow, shot locally

The daughter of an illegal Dutch wartime immigrant, Toni Okkerse grew up in Wellington where her grandfather was a well-known importer of cars and classic motorcycles.

After meeting Toni’s mother while in a NZ World War II conditioning camp, she helped smuggle him back in with the RAF, her father’s business status earning him fast-tracked residency with the Immigration Minister.

They were married in six weeks, Toni arriving in 1947, the eldest of three.

Despite her Samuel Marsden College headmistress’s urgings to study at Victoria, Toni did nursing at Wellington Hospital, specialising in ophthalmology.

In the early 70s Europe beckoned on the first of two long OEs with Kiwi nurse friends, first working in London, buying a Ford Transit van with only two front seats and no windows for ‘sightseeing’.

“We all private nursed and three of us worked nights at St Mary’s Hospital.” Toni nannied for an extremely wealthy British family’s baby, spending time at their fully staffed country house with her own nursery. Expected to dine with the family at night, she had to sit at the table silently.

Travel also included a stint as an au pair to six children in New York.

Back eye nursing in Wellington a film producer friend offered her a job in 1980 as nurse on the film set for Race for the Yankee Zephyr in Queenstown, directed by English star David Hemmings. “I stepped off the plane and said, ‘Oh, my gosh! I want to live here for the rest of my life!”

It was the start of a rollercoaster adventure, but unfortunately two people died on set, including a local jetboat driver who flipped during a stunt and the set hairdresser who suffered a severe asthma attack in freezing temperatures on the Crown Range, despite Toni’s desperate efforts. She was left to find a campervan and deliver the deceased man to the local morgue – a ‘shed’ behind the old Frankton Hospital.

On a Milford shoot two local helicopter deer recovery boys gave her a hair-raising live demonstration high in the mountains in thick cloud.

David Hemmings then invited her to a Cairns shoot where Toni had to learn fast about “bitey things” at a snake farm and have ‘Scarlett’ the tarantula nestle in her hand. “(Actress) Olivia Hussey had to run into swampy water in one sequence and I asked the local guy with the rifle why he was there. He said, ‘We dynamited the area for crocs this morning...just in case!’”

Back in Queenstown Toni had to tend Robert De Niro after he was wired to rocks in the Kawarau River during filming, before several Auckland shoots starring Tatum O’Neal, then 18, and Jodie Foster.

After a season as Coronet Peak nurse for manager ‘Sugar’ Robinson, Toni nursed for a Disney film, The Rescue, on duty while 54 young men built the huge temporary Korean Fort set atop Frank Mee’s Deer Park Heights. No OSH or ACC in the 1980s and, amazingly, no incidents.

“STDs and AIDs were a concern then and the stories I’d hear after weekends had me thinking I should be running a sexual health clinic,” says Toni. “So, I went down to the pharmacy and bought two huge boxes of condoms one Friday, handing them out to the men. A friend phoned me after and said, ‘I went to buy condoms and the pharmacist said Toni Okkerse bought them all!’ That really tarnished my reputation,” she grins.

During filming of ‘Willow’ a stunt man who turned out to be an ex-prisoner had his hand crushed by a horse hoof. “It needed dressing so he came to my house each evening. I thought nothing of it. Afterward he turned up with a present and said, ‘Thanks Nursie.’ It was the hugest bag of cannabis I’d ever seen. He was shocked I didn’t smoke and said, ‘Does the doctor then?’”

In between film work she shared overnights and shifts at Queenstown Maternity Home (Bungy Backpackers) as obstetrics nurse in the wonderful days when mothers were nurtured for a week, also working as a practice nurse.

10,000 BC was Toni’s last film job – “hard yakka in the snow”, doing 10 more years as maternity nurse before retiring at 68.
In 1990 she and ex-husband, rafting guide Ged Hay, had hastily married on Toni’s Park Street verandah in preparation to adopt first daughter Georgia, then son Christian eight months later.

“One day I thought, ‘I’m 39 and I haven’t had children!’” Film connections matched her with beautiful redheaded Georgia, while soon after Ged’s rafting friends connected them with baby Christian. “I rang the man from Social Welfare to say I have another baby. ‘He said, ’Don’t tell me it’s in your bedroom already too’, which it was,” laughs Toni.