Cecil Williams

(19*-) Actor and director. ** **

He died in London in 1979. (The Star, 10 May 1979)

Directed ** Winterset (1953, with Leonard Gluckman), Hugh Mills’s The House by the Lake (Johannesburg REPS, 1957) Also directed plays for the East Rand Theatre Club. On occasion acted as adjudicator for the FATSSA Play Festival. WILLIAMS, Cecil. A school teacher by profession, also directed plays. While in the South African Navy, Leonard Schach directed Leon Gluckman and Cecil Williams in The Middle Watch at the Little Theatre in 1944. Directed a production for the East Rand Theatre Club. Directed Ferenc Molnar’s Liliom, starring Molly Seftel and Leon Gluckman in May 1953. Directed Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset starring Leon Gluckman in 1953. He directed the Children’s Theatre open-air production of The Merchant of Venice at the Zoo Lake in the summer of 1957. It starred Rory MacDermot and Valerie Philip. The set was designed by Len Grosset, and Louis Jacobson did costumes. They did another performance of this play at the Donaldson Orlando community Centre. For their two-hundredth production, the Reps presented The House by the Lake, directed by Cecil Williams and starring the West End actress Sonia Dresdel in 1957. He directed a production of The Strong Are Lonely at the Library Theatre in June 1957. He failed to draw audiences with Jean-Paul Sartre’s double bill, The Vicious Circle and The Respectable Prostitute at the Library Theatre in 1957. Towards the end of the same year, Cecil brought out British actor David Kossoff to star in The World of Sholom Aleichem. It co-starred Sarah Sylvia and Joyce Grant. He directed The Kimberley Train, which was staged at the Library Theatre in 1958. It was written by Lewis Sowden, the theatre critic for the Rand Daily Mail. He directed Guilty Party for the Reps in 1962, which proved to be his last production before he was forced into permanent exile.

Sources

Tucker, 1997

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