Pieter-Dirk Uys Family, Real Name, Spouse, Profession, Eye Color, body stats, Feet Size, Wiki

Pieter-Dirk Uys Family, Real Name, Spouse, Profession, Eye Color, body stats, Feet Size, Wiki

Pieter-Dirk Uys (/ˈeɪs/; born 28 September 1945) is a South African

performer, author, satirist, and social activist.Uys was born in Cape

Town on 28 September 1945, to Hannes Uys, a Calvinist Afrikaner

father, and Helga Bassel, a Berlin-born Jewish mother. Hannes Uys, a

fourth-generation South African of Dutch and Belgian Huguenot stock,

was a musician and organist in his local church. Bassel was a German

concert pianist, whom the Nazis expelled from the Reichsmusikkammer in

1935 as part of their campaign to root out Jewish artists. She later

escaped to South Africa and managed to take her grand piano with her,

with which she taught her daughter, Tessa Uys (b. 1948), now a concert

pianist based in London. Bassel spoke little about her Jewish past to

her children. It was only after her suicide that they discovered she

was fully Jewish. Uys and his sister had an NG Kerk upbringing and

their mother encouraged them to embrace Afrikaner culture.Uys received

a B.A. from the University of Cape Town where he began his dramatic

career as an actor under the tutelage of Rosalie van der Gught, Mavis

Taylor and Robert Mohr, among others. His performances at this time

included roles in Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs,

The Fantasticks, and Once Upon a Mattress. He later went on to study

at the London Film School during the early 1970s. It was in one of his

student films, an advertisement for milk, that he performed in drag

for the first time (as a milkmaid). He then began a period in his

dramatic career as a serious playwright. Several of his plays were

performed at the Space Theatre, Cape Town, and his 1979 play Paradise

is Closing Down was performed in London, at the Edinburgh Festival

(co-produced by William Burdett-Coutts), and later produced for

Granada Television in 1981. He subsequently switched to performing

one-man revues at the height of the Apartheid era.
Pieter-Dirk Uys Family, Real Name, Spouse, Profession, Eye Color, body stats, Feet Size, Wiki


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