Dame Kate Harcourt was born on 16th June 1927 in North Canterbury, New Zealand. Her professional career began in the 1960s with the pre-school radio programme Listen with Mother and Junior Magazine, a weekly WNTV1 weekly children’s programme. Since then she has worked extensively on radio, television, film and in theatre.

In 1990 and 1991 she toured internationally with Colin McColl’s Downstage Theatre production of Hedda Gabler to the Edinburgh Festival, Oslo, London and Sydney. She was a founder member of Hen's Teeth, the Women’s Comedy Group which has toured most of New Zealand and to the Adelaide Festival. In 1996 she appeared with her daughter, Miranda, in the International Festival production of Flowers from my Mother's Garden, written by Miranda and her husband, Stuart McKenzie, which subsequently toured both the North and South Islands.

Since then Kate has appeared in three productions of The Vagina Monologues, one of which toured to Nelson and Christchurch and in The Musicians of Bremen for the National Children’s Theatre, which toured to the Taranaki Festival, Hawera, Palmerston North and Auckland. She was part of the ‘ loop group’ which recorded ‘voice offs’ for The Lord of the Rings; she appeared in the stage adaptation of Maurice Gee’s The Half Men of O for Calico Theatre in Napier; performed in The Truth about Love in Circa’s Studio for Christmas 2003; in Joe Musaphia’s Ugly Customers; in 2005 Blood, Guts & Khaki in the Circa theatre Studio and in Renee’s Wednesday to Come at Downstage Theatre.

Kate has adjudicated for the Sheilah Wynn Shakespeare Festival and has taught Speech and Drama at the Wellington Performing Arts Centre. She is on the Board of Studies at Toi Whakaari, the New Zealand Drama School and a tutor at the National Singing School in Napier. Kate is also a patron of several arts organisations. In 1996 was honoured to be made Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her contribution to theatre, and in 1997 she was chosen as The Evening Post’s Wellingtonian of the Year.