Annelisa Weiland

Annelisa Weiland (b. Sea Point, Cape Town, 15/02/1949) is a stage, film and television actress.

Biography

Annelisa Dora Deborah Weiland is the daughter of Ewald Paul Weiland and his wife Stienie Hoogenhout Goosen. Her father came from Bielefeld in Germany at the age of 22 to help install textile machinery, but after initially returning to Germany, he soon came back to South Africa to settle. Annelisa grew up in Durbanville and in 1966 she matriculated from the Durbanville Hoërskool, where she was head girl and attended drama classes by Babs Laker. She went to the University of Cape Town to study drama, where Janice Honeyman, Paul Slabolepszy, Bill Flynn and Grethe Fox were contemporaries and Robert Mohr was her lecturer. In 1969 she was cast by Mavis Taylor in the role of the daughter in Strindberg’s The Father. She played in Dieter Reible’s version of Titus Andronicus in 1970 and was Ophelia in Robert Mohr’s production of Hamlet, both for CAPAB.

In 1973 she started acting for PACT and the following year she became a permanent member of its Afrikaans company TRUK until early 1977, when she went freelance. A versatile performer, she featured in everything from Shakespeare to risqué extravaganzas and from 1976 onwards also turned to television, acting in many plays and numerous series. Many of them were directed by her friend Stephan Bouwer and by Ken Leach, with whom she had a seven-year relationship. In 2002 she made her first appearance in Danie Odendaal’s long-running soap opera 7de Laan as Hilda de Kock, a role with which she was identified for 17 years. In the series she was later ostensibly married to Septimus “Oubaas” van Zyl (Pierre van Pletzen), but when Oubaas was written out of the series the excuse was he had discovered that their marriage was not legal. In addition she did occasional radio work and was the voice of Heidi in the Afrikaans version of the Japanese animated television series.