Alec Bell
BELL, Alec (19**- ) Actor, stage manager.
Contents
Biography
Youth
Training
Career
Started his career in Cape Town amateur theatre, inter alia working for the Masque Theatre in Muizenberg. His professional career started with Gwen ffrangcon-Davies, Marda Vanne, Nan Munro and Margaret Inglis as prompt, stage manager and actor. In 1947 he went overseas and, after periods of work and study in Prague, Warsaw and England, he returned to South Africa in 1954.
Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance
Key professional roles include Estragon in Waiting for Godot (directed by Leonard Schach in 1955 and 1956), Androcles and the Lion, The Waltz of the Toreadors, The World of Sholom Aleichem, The Cave Dwellers, Mornings at Seven (NTO 1959), Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten , (1960), King Henry II in Becket (1963), Luka in The Lower Depths, Tevye in Tevye and His Daughters (produced by Taubie Kushlick and Brian Brooke, 1966), Heartbreak House (PACT, 1967), also Tango, ‘n Skip is Ons Beloof and Cyrano de Bergerac (KRUIK 1969).
He has also appeared in The Merry Wives of Widsor, The Rainmaker, Milestones, The Government Inspector, What Every Woman Knows, You Can't Take it With You, Full House, And So to Bed, Flare Path, While the Sun Shines, London Assurance, Back to Methuselah, The Big Knife, The Mask and the Face, Die Physiker, Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi, Tango, The Bespoke Overcoat.
Awards, etc
Three Leaf Arts Award for Best Actor, 1966, for his role in The Lower Depths.
Sources
Mornings at Seven programme notes, 1959.
Teater SA, 1(3), 1969.
SACD 1973.
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