Baby blues for Keisha

Teen mum and Oscar nominee Keisha Castle-Hughes is playing her most daunting role yet - a young mother made to give up her new-born baby.

The Whale Rider beauty stars in Piece of My Heart, a TV movie about unmarried pregnant women forced to have their tots adopted in the cold, conservative New Zealand of the late 1960s.

"The act of having to give up a child was hard to portray. It's not an easy place mentally and emotionally to take yourself," Keisha told Sunday News.

"It was difficult to allow myself emotionally to go to a very hard place of hurt and loss, especially as a mother.

"But Fiona (Samuel, who wrote and directed the movie) carefully guided me and made it feel very safe.

"I read a whole bunch of documents from the late '60s and met with women who had been through the experience. It was really interesting to see the different effects it had on different women."

Keisha who hit headlines two years ago when, at age 17, she became a mum to Felicity-Amore had mixed feelings when she read the script for the TVNZ production.

"I was shocked, angry and excited," she said.

"I truly felt this was an important story to be told, in this country especially. As an actor and mother I can't imagine anything more hurtful, something that would completely destroy me and my identity."

The TV movie, which screens next Sunday on TV One, follows two fictional women Kat Porohiwi and Flora Thurnley through the trauma of having to give up their babies as teenagers to the heartbreak of looking back at their losses later in life.

Keisha plays a young Kat, Once Were Warriors lead Rena Owen is the adult Kat, In My Father's Den babe Emily Barclay is 17-year-old Flora and screen queen Annie Whittle plays Flora in the present.

Keisha, who at 13 became the youngest-ever nominee for a Best Actress Oscar, revealed she formed a strong bond with Emily during their two months on location.

"Emily was fabulous. It was love at first sight," she said. "We've got an amazing friendship now."

Keisha admitted that being a mum and having played the Virgin Mary in Hollywood movie The Nativity Story gave her an advantage over Emily when it came to acting with a baby bump.

"Obviously, playing pregnant was a lot easier for me," she said. "Although the physicality of a pregnant woman is quite tricky to pull off when it's a big strap-on mould of foam!"

Piece of My Heart was filmed at the end of last year in locations including south Auckland boarding school St Stephens, former psychiatric hospital Kingseat and the albatross colony at Taiaroa Heads near Dunedin.

Keisha, who says her greatest career ambition is "to tell great stories", hopes the movie will have a healing effect on viewers who have experienced the storyline.

"I hope this story helps women who went through this, who lost children they would have loved so much and who were deeply affected by the experience. This is ultimately for them," she said.

Sunday Theatre: Piece of My Heart, TV One, Sunday April 5, 8.30pm.