Mitzi Booysen

Mitzi Booysen (1958-) is a South African actress, director, translator and playwright.

Biography
Mitzi Booysen was born in Rome and, because her father was a diplomat, she subsequently lived in Holland, America and South Africa. She completed her schooling at the Pretoria High School for Girls and studied Drama at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Pretoria. After graduation she acted for PACT, PACOFS and CAPAB and worked at The Space, The Baxter Theatre and The Market Theatre. In 1982 she married German theatre director Dieter Reible and they moved to Germany, where Reible worked as Artistic Director for a theatre company in Wuppertal. They returned to South Africa in 1985.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance
As actress she performed in Agter Geslote Deure (1978), Die Geldpot (1980), Along Came a Spider (1980), Confetti (1980), Dimetos (1981), Die Saai Lewe (1981), Groucho at Large (1981), Die Oresteia-Trilogie (1981),Playing with Fire (Baxter Theatre, 1983), Comrades (1986), The Last Twist of the Knife (1987), The Balcony (1988), Gulls (Baxter Theatre, 1989), Antjie Somers and I (1989),  Macbeth (Dieter Reible, 1990), Die Wonderwerk (1991), Drie Susters (1992), The Great Gatsby, Die Eend (Soekie) 1993.

Assistant director Women of Troy (1987).

Translated and played in The Island of Slaves (1982), Callaway; Farce (1990). Other translations include Bernard-Marie Koltés’s Battle of the Dogs and the Black (19**) and Bloeiende Lente (Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen or Spring Awakening) and Ayckbourn’s ** (into German as ).

As playwright she wrote Ashes on our Heads (19**), The Time of the Hyena (Windybrow Theatre circa 1986), *.

The creative head of Endemol South Africa, she became became the chief writer on the TV series Isidingo in 1998 and in 2005 became the storyline writer of the TV series Binnelanders.

Awards, etc
She received the 1987 Johannesburg Repertory Players DALRO Award for her role as Liz in Ashes on our Heads.

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