Miemsie Retief

Miemsie Retief (b. 1937) was an actress.

Biography

Maria Johanna (Miemsie) Retief was born on 15 August 1937. According to her wedding license she was born in Wynberg (Cape Town), but she seems to have grown up in Worcester, where her father was a businessman and where she attended the Hugo Naude School of Art. She was a typist at a travel agency and a part-time model when, in 1958, Pierre de Wet cast her in the film Nooi van my Hart (1959), though apparently her first role was as Snow White in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, an amateur film made at the Technical College. There were two more films for Pierre de Wet – Piet se Tante and Oupa en die Plaasnooientjie, both in 1959 – and these were followed by Jy’s Lieflik Vanaand (Gordon Vorster/1962) and Petticoat Safari (David Millin/1959). At one stage she was promoted as South Africa’s Marilyn Monroe and appeared on the cover of Die Huisgenoot in October 1959.

She married Abraham Wiid du Toit in 1959, but the couple divorced a few years later. In 1976 she married Filmalter Heckroodt, who was head of the legal department at the SABC. After her retirement from the screen she devoted most of her time to her art and writing poetry.