"What? Wait a second," I say, "isn't it supposed to be the other way around?"

I meant that she is the star and the subject of this piece; I'm just another reporter appearing on the set to research it, to listen to her story a story she's told a thousand times (okay, 50 times) since she became Xena, the Warrior Princess who doesn't take shit from anybody. Give her any lip and she'll give you the "Xena touch", that two-fingered pinch on the neck, Dracula-esque, that seems to have the power of a hypnotic spell.

Do I remember her?

Lucy Lawless is one of People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People In The World and ranks third only to Chelsea Clinton and Tiger Woods as the person American kids would most like to have come over to their house to play. She's appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night With David Letterman and The Rosie O'Donnell Show. The only ones missing are Oprah and Howard Stern.

Do I remember her?

What she was referring to was the Crummer Road days, a time we shared, however brief, at a flat in Grey Lynn nearly 10 years ago. It should have been me asking her: do you remember me? I was, after all, only an extra in that scene. The key roles were played by her and Garth Lawless, her husband at the time and the father of her daughter and only child, Daisy, who turned nine last month.

Supporting roles were played by Garth's sister Debbie (now in Wanganui), former New Zealand basketball star Warwick Meehl and his wife, Denise, and national trampoline coach and trainer John Docherty.

"Doc" owned the house. He lived in one room; Lucy, Garth and Daisy in another. Debbie slept in a room at the back. The place was kept warm that winter, a winter of discontent, by an open fire and Van Morrison. Some of us, not Lucy as I recall, smoked "green".

For me, Crummer Road was a stopover in my own journey through time and Grey Lynn in the 80s. We were all restless and uncertain and so was Lucy, despite the fact that in later years she emerged as more certain than others. She wanted to pursue an acting career at whatever cost; she was certain that being married-with-children didn't have to stop that and it didn't. She was talking about those days when she told me: "I'm not motivated by money; never was, even when we were on the bones of our arse."

In that way she hasn't changed. It has been speculated that she earns $US 28,000 a week playing Xena. That may sound extreme but think about it: Jerry Seinfeld, whose half-hour show hovers around number five in the national US ratings, gets $US I,000,000 a week. Lawless, as all Xenaphiles know works a one-hour weekly show that hovers around number nine. If Seinfeld is worth a million, Lucy Lawless must certainly be worth whatever she's getting. "Like Star Trek and The X Files," wrote Mike Flaherty in Entertainment Weekly, "Xena is speeding toward that most oxymoronic of distinctions, mainstream cultdom.

"Evidence includes the first official convention (in Burbank), numerous Xena-fests (organised by fans), Xena-themed apparel, trading cards, fanzines, action figures, CD-ROMS and a Web presence of more than 60 sites and counting. Perhaps more indicative of Xena's popculture infiltration are the increasing homages on network television: Both Roseanne and Something So Right have featured Xena doppelgangers."

Yet for Lucy, money is not the aim of the exercise. For all her fame, at least in the United States where the Hollywood public relations machine has made her into an icon, she doesn't play the celebrity game. She doesn't have the time; but even when she does, she doesn't ask for money, for example, when approached by a glossy magazine for an interview. There are times when she is on the set six days a week, 12 hours a day. Sunday is strictly offlimits; it's her time to be with Daisy. Her time for interviews is extremely limited, but if she consents to an interview it's understood to be part of her job and it's the work that matters most, not the money.

Right now, she is Xena, but when that show runs its course, expect her to appear in feature films, perhaps with Susan Sarandon, one of her most admired actors and someone she'd like to emulate. The attraction to Sarandon? Lawless describes it as "hot energy".

During the Crummer Road days she was crowned Mrs New Zealand. The local contest was held at the Tamaki Yacht Club. Winning meant flying off to a world final in where else? Las Vegas. Lucy would have been an odds-on favourite. She and Garth stayed at the Flamingo Hotel where they met Baron Hilton. Of course, the Baron met as many contestants as he could. Mrs Peru won.

It's not a memory she wants to dwell on today but she remembers: "My mother was busily sewing something together as we drove out to the airport. I wore this sparkly blue number that I later made into a Super Daisy cape." Today, when she's not in Xena gear, Lawless is more likely to be found in sweat pants, a Tshirt and a comfortable pair of slippers borrowed from... where was it? The Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago? The Hilton in New York? The South Coast Plaza in LA?

Lucy and Garth were on holiday, camping, when she received the offer of the part of Xena. It sounds romantic enough, from bush to Broadway, from the Hollyford to Hollywood, but in fact it wasn't a happy time for her. Her marriage was failing. She had met Garth Lawless at Club Mirage where they both worked. He was the bartender, she looked after tables. They were only 18. Lucy went to Europe and he followed soon after. They travelled together briefly before running out of money and decided to head back this way and work in the Australian goldfields. The American media make quite a big deal of that.

"They have seized on it," Lucy acknowledges. Ms magazine, Entertainment Weekly and Playboy all mention this fact because it paints a picture of Xena as a warrior woman in real life, taking on a man's world. Some stories project an image of the two of them on the wild Australian frontier, panning for gold.

It's an image which suits a romantic American narrative and feminism, but it's overstated. "There was no pan," she says, "only a caravan. We lived in a caravan for two weeks at a time taking measurements and doing surveys." If anything, she came away from that experience sensitised to the brutality of land stripped bare.

The couple were married in 1988 in the Australian outback in a registry office and only after they discovered Lucy was pregnant. Reality would catch up and finally overtake their youthful naivete. Her early success landing work as a host of Air New Zealand Holiday didn't help either. As a "television star" she was the target of some resentment by her old friends, but more than that, the work took her away from home which put stress on the marriage: "I'd come home from doing one of those shows and walk back in and they'd look up as if to say, 'How dare you waltz back in and expect us to be here for you; we don't need you.' The work never did pay well enough to compensate for that."

When asked by TV Guide to identify a time in her life when she was called on to be heroic, she noted her divorce. She elaborates for Metro: "Going through a divorce calls for a kind of heroism because you have to try to be fair, no matter how bad you feel, fairer than you want to be; if you have children, you have to put their needs before your own, no matter how much it hurts. I could have also said that being a working parent is also heroic. You suffer guilt for not always being there when you're needed and your kids don't understand that."

To suggest that Lucy's success as Xena brought about the breakup of their marriage is to oversimplify the situation. The marriage had ended before she became Xena; she remembers that pre-Xena camping trip as "the worst Christmas ever for everybody".

The woman originally cast as Xena had become ill and alternatives back in California were offered the job but turned it down. Lucy was known to the show's producers because she had appeared in Hercules.

"It was an amazing series of circumstances," she says, looking back. Had she not turned down $60,000 to do a tampon commercial in Australia (I'm just reporting what she said), she never would be where she is today.

The story goes like this: Rather than go back to Australia, where she was married, where she became pregnant, where the money was good, Lucy took charge and, in a Xena-like way led the family from Crummer Road to Vancouver so she could study drama.

They may have been on the bones of their buttocks but she wanted formal training and she was going to get it. "When you come from a big family," she says, "you learn how to get what you want."

A woman she had met while travelling in Europe two years earlier had told her about the William Davis Centre for Actors Study in Vancouver. She was adventurous and it was the only drama school she knew about, so they went. Her one-year course did not result in any immediate work here the highlight of her career at this stage was cohosting Holiday but she considers William Davis (sometimes seen on The X-Files) one of her most influential teachers.

It's a path-of-life argument. She figures that had she gone to Australia and started working there, she would not have been in the position to take the Xena job when Renaissance Pictures called her back to the big smoke from the smoke of her camp fire.

And she's probably right. Of course she's right. She's Xena! Don't quote me, quote Hercules. Kevin Sorbo has said: "Lucy is Xena." It's the long black hair, the sharp, beautiful face, those white-as-white teeth and those famous laser-blue eyes. Who else but a mythical warrior woman would look like that?

After two years it's hard to imagine anyone else playing the part. Lucy has become Xena. A nervous passenger in a speedy car at the best of times, I felt comfortable riding in her Alpha Romeo as she steered us through a storm into the city from the Xena set on Henderson Valley Road. It was the Monday of Queen's Birthday Weekend, the first truly miserable day of winter if you recall, and only the middle of the afternoon but with dark clouds and a dark sky, wipers going full bore, holiday traffic building up, our car swooshing and splashing between lanes to gain an advantage. Yet there was nothing to fear, because Xena was at the wheel!

Lucy Lawless was born in Auckland 29 years ago, the first daughter after four sons of Frank and Julie Ryan. Frank Ryan was the mayor of Mount Albert and today is an Auckland City councillor. The Ryans were a large Catholic family of five boys and two girls; Lucy is number five and the eldest girl. Playboy asked her in a recent interview about her Catholic upbringing and she described herself as a "recovering Catholic". No explanation was given.

Over a cup of tea at her Auckland home, a modest and unpretentious looking house on the outside, with a recently renovated interior, she told me: "As a child, certain dogma really affected me. It was the mortality issue, you know, 'Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.' I'd have to say that it was the thought of dying, I suppose, that frightened me. I don't blame my schooling for that. It was something in me that latched on to the death aspect, and for a six-year-old to realise one's mortality is a pretty intense discovery. Other girls had the same experience and never reacted as fearfully as I did."

Lucy was 23 years old before she gave up Catholicism; she doesn't attend church now. "I've put the scary monsters to bed," she says, "and I should also say that the discipline of those school years help make me what I am today. I didn't screw around. I worked hard and I still work hard. I've always been a hard worker and I think it goes back to my early school days."

Her father was supportive but it was her mother, Julie, who arguably had more to do with developing Lucy's interest in performance. "As the mayoress, my mother had senior citizens to entertain every week," she remembers, "so she would rope a friend and I into helping her out. I was 10 years old when I discovered I wanted to be an actor, but that was at Marist Primary when I had a part in the parable of the Prodigal Son. What I thought would be scary turned out to be quite a lot of fun."

Her mother bought the opera records Lucy listened to and when Lucy was 15 they went off together on an opera tour of Europe (compliments of Dad). Back in Auckland, she performed in school musicals at Marist Sisters College in Mount Albert where she was also the head girl, and although she appears to be athletic, she wasn't sporty. Her father told NZ Women's Weekly "She had a fine singing voice but all she wanted to do was to get into film and television." Or as her mother told People magazine: "She used to get up on the coffee table with a seashell for a microphone and sing away."

Next month, one of Lucy Lawless' childhood fantasies comes true when she debuts on Broadway. She'll spend the two-months' break from the shooting of Xena playing the part of Rizzo in Grease. It's an opportunity which developed from an appearance she made on The Rosie O'Donnell Show, one of the leading talk shows on American television. Rosie had herself played a part in Grease and the producers of the long-running Broadway musical saw Lucy on her show that night and one thing led to another. "I'm a little frightened of the prospect," she admits, "but I'm also very excited."

Lucy's appearance on Rosie O'Donnell has lifted her career but the same couldn't be said after her appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno last October. While rehearsing for the show, Lucy's horse fell and she was thrown onto the concrete outside the studio, fracturing her pelvis in four places. "I was trying to ride a western horse English-style on shiny, painted concrete. I had to bring the horse in on a trot around a corner but the set was tense, everyone was in such a rush, the horse was tense, and I didn't have the guts to stop it and say to them, 'You're not listening to me.' I thought, 'Oh, just be a trooper and get on with it.' So we did two takes that were okay and I agreed to a third and final take. It was as if someone pulled a tablecloth out from under us. We rounded the corner and the horse slipped and went down. I was thrown clear and [was] lucky in a way not to have been caught underneath."

By any account, Lucy is a star in America. In Auckland and on the set of Xena she's also the star, but you'd never know it by the way she interacts with the rest of the cast and crew. The hours are long, made longer by the attention to detail required by all involved, from Oley Sassone, one of the three directors of the series, to Donny Duncan, the director of photography, to the lighting and sound crew and the rest of the cast: about 400 in all for both Hercules and Xena.

Yet for all the demands, complicated at times by the weather, the making of Xena is fun. A big budget helps (no figures revealed) but it's also the story. Anyone who takes Xena seriously is missing the point.

"In Xena," reports Entertainment Weekly, "history is bunk. Characters spout Shakespearean platitudes one minute, Brooklynese wisecracks the next. Plotlines don't so much careen across eras as co-mingle them, creating a milieu that's primeval, classical, medieval, and surfer dude all at once. One episode finds our heroine plunked into the middle of the Trojan War (turns out Helen was an old acquaintance); in another she's visiting 1940s Macedonia. Somehow, hilariously, it works."

For Lucy, the show's star, it's especially important she not take herself and her role too seriously. "It's true," she says, "that the lead actors are the mood-setters on a set because everybody is looking at you all the time. If you're diffficult, if you whine and moan, it makes everybody's life more difficult. You have to respect other people for the work they do; they work just as hard as you do and they're not getting paid as much."

It's been two years since the divorce. Garth tells me "we're friends again", while Lucy tells me "Daisy is happier than she's ever been and so am I".

She's now in a relationship with one of the show's producers, Rob Tapert. Tapert is originally from Detroit and an avid fan of the Detroit Red Wings, thus the connection that led to Lucy singing "The Star Spangled Banner" at a Detroit-Anaheim National Hockey League playoff game in Los Angeles earlier this year. She sang the American national anthem well, by all accounts, but when she waved to the crowd, her red, white and blue top slipped, exposing a breast. She told People magazine: "Obviously I was mortified. It was quite a bit more exposure than I want." She told Metro: "Some people thought it was a publicity stunt, but as adventurous as people think I am, I'm also an extremely private person, certainly not the type to show off my body parts in that way. I've never done a nude scene and I doubt I ever will."

She is "for women" without making an issue of it, which may be why she has never appeared at the New York lesbian nightclub Meow Mix, where "Xena nights" are famous, where every time she kick-boxes a male culprit into oblivion, the standing-room only crowd goes crazy. "Can you imagine," she says, "me walking into that club and introducing my boyfriend?"

She told Bill Zwecker of the Chicago Sun-Times that her toughest day on the set of Xena was shooting an episode in rain and hail but that she got through it because she knew it wouldn't last forever. In a philosophical way she acknowledged that "all things end".

So where will it end for Lucy Lawless? She feels three more years of Xena will be enough and declares she'll never do a television series like it again, because it takes her away from her daughter for too long and it gives her little or no time to enjoy life. She'd like to move on to feature films...not a Xena film.

"I'm just having a rich life," she said. "I've done all these crazy, geeky, dangerous and sometimes slightly embarrassing things and I just think I'll be so glad when I'm an old woman and I can look back and say I've lived a life... put myself in some spooky situations others would not have. The payoff will be that when I'm on my deathbed I'll be going, 'Hooray, I went for it.' "

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