Evelyn Frank

Evelyn Frank (1930-2014) was an actress.

Biography

Evelyn Frank was born in Johannesburg on 29 September 1930, where her father, Harry Fluxman, was one of the pioneers of the South African fashion industry. Born Evelyn Bella Fluxman, she used her married name for her acting career. During the late 1950s and early 1960s she appeared in a number of plays for the Johannesburg Reps, including The Diary of Anne Frank, in which she played Anne’s sister Margot, and Under Milk Wood, one of a number of productions staged by Hugh Goldie. In 1962 she played the role of a sympathetic lawyer in Dilemma, Danish director Henning Carlsen’s film version of Nadine Gordimer’s novel A World of Strangers, a production that, because of its anti-apartheid subject, was of necessity shot in secret. Not surprisingly, like the book, the film was ultimately deemed “objectionable” and banned by the Publications Control Board. In 1965 Evelyn Frank and her American-born husband, Michael (Meyer), left for the United States, where she acted in a few indifferent films and in the television series Medical Center. She obtained American citizenship in 1976. In 1998 she, Carlsen and some of the other actors appeared in Johannesburg Revisited, a documentary directed by Anders Østergaard that dealt with the clandestine making of Dilemma. She died in Lake Tahoe in California on 4 October 2014.