Alison Bruce

Alison Bruce was born in the year 1962. She is a New Zealand television and film actress best known for her role in the 1999 film Magik and Rose. She also starred in the adolescent show Being Eve, Xena: Warrior Princess, and Young Hercules as Simula. Bruce grew up in Tanzania, the son of a Scottish father and an English mother. Her family relocated to New Zealand when she was about eight years old. She began her acting career in the early 1980s after studying at Auckland's Theatre Corporate, where she starred in Hamlet (as Ophelia) and Cyrano de Bergerac (as Roxane).

Bruce made her cinematic debut in The Minders, a 1984 teleplay. Since then, she has appeared in over 30 films, including significant roles in two feature films: the 1990 chase comedy User Friendly, in which her character steals a prized dog statue from a crazed former boss, and the 2001 film Magik and Rose, which Bruce later described as a watershed moment in terms of the types of roles she is offered. In this comedy-drama, Bruce portrayed Magik, a fortune-teller who comes in a New Zealand village in a house-truck searching for the daughter she had given up for adoption many years earlier.

Bruce has played the quirky mother of Eve, the main character in the award-winning series Being Eve, and the hospital personal assistant who becomes pregnant in Mercy Peak. Bruce would win two straight New Zealand television awards for best-supporting actor for the latter segment. She also appeared in a few minor parts in the Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys franchises, including one as an Amazon Queen.