an outstanding professional boxer. A victim of racial discrimination (Jackson was black), he was denied a chance to fight for the world heavyweight championship while in his prime.

Jackson won the Australian heavyweight championship in 1886 and the British Empire title in 1892. On May 21, 1891, in San Francisco, he fought a 61-round draw with Gentleman Jim Corbett (Corbett, James J.), who would later, in 1892, win the world heavyweight title from John L. Sullivan (Sullivan, John L.). On March 22, 1898, Jackson, who was 36 years old and had not fought for six years except for a few exhibition matches, was knocked out in three rounds by James Jackson Jeffries (Jeffries, James Jackson). As a consequence of this victory and his subsequent knockout of Bob Fitzsimmons (Fitzsimmons, Robert) (June 9, 1899), Jeffries is retrospectively considered by many to have been the first true world heavyweight champion under the Queensberry (Marquess of Queensberry rules) rules.

When Jackson was eight years old, his parents bought an 8-mm movie camera, and he began making short films. He later purchased a used 16-mm camera and, with his friends, began work on what started out to be another short film. It kept growing, however, and, with the aid of a grant from the New Zealand Film Commission, Bad Taste was released in 1987. The movie won acclaim at the Cannes film festival and went on to become a cult horror classic.

Jackson followed up with Meet the Feebles (1989), which features puppets and people in animal suits engaging in the seamier aspects of human behaviour, and the zombie film Braindead (1992; U.S. title, Dead Alive), which won numerous international science fiction awards and was said by some to be the goriest film ever made. He then turned to a real-life incident for Heavenly Creatures (1994), about two teenage girls who kill one girl's mother. Its screenplay garnered Academy Award nominations for Jackson and Frances Walsh, his partner. The mock documentary Forgotten Silver (1995) and the ghost story The Frighteners (1996) followed.