Lucy Lawless, 'Xena' Actress, Arrested With 5 Greenpeace Activists In Oil-Drilling Ship Protest

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Police on Monday arrested actress Lucy Lawless and five Greenpeace environmental activists after the group spent four days protesting aboard an oil-drilling ship docked in New Zealand.

Police removed the group from their perch atop a 174-foot (53-meter) drilling tower on the Noble Discoverer in Port Taranaki. Lawless and six activists climbed the tower early Friday in an attempt to raise awareness about oil drilling in the Arctic and prevent the ship from leaving.

One of the activists left the tower Saturday and was initially charged with unlawfully boarding a ship. All seven activists, including Lawless, have now been charged with burglary, a more serious charge. All have been released and are due to appear in a New Zealand court Thursday.

Chartered by oil company Shell, the ship had been due to leave over the weekend for the Arctic to drill five exploratory wells.

Lawless, 43, a native New Zealander, is best known for her title role in the TV series "Xena: Warrior Princess," and more recently for starring in the Starz cable television series "Spartacus."

Lucy Lawless—a.k.a. Xena the Warrior Princess—Occupies a Shell Oil Drilling Ship

Lucy Lawless is illegally seated atop a 174-foot derrick rising from a drilling ship off New Zealand's western shore, and she really, really doesn't want to talk about Xena: Warrior Princess. The ship is called the Noble Discoverer, but Lawless has rechristened it the Ignoble Destroyer. It used to be called the Frontier Discoverer, and before that the Discoverer 511, and sometime before that, the Jessica. It's a nearly 50-year-old ship, built for offshore drilling, and its owner, the Noble Corporation, has leased the ship to Royal Dutch Shell. This weekend, the Noble Discoverer is scheduled to head out on a 6,000 mile journey to the Chukchi Sea, off Alaska's northwest coast, to break open the ice and suck out some of the 26.6 billion barrels of recoverable oil estimated to await in the Arctic's outer continental shelf. That's why Lawless left her house very early Thursday morning, her three kids still asleep, drove to Port Taranaki in Wellington, walked straight up the Noble Discoverer's gangplank along with five other climbing experts and Greenpeace volunteers, and scaled its massive derrick.*