Anne Ziegler

Anne Ziegler (1910 - 2003) English singer and actress.

Biography

Career

She formed a singing partnership with her husband Webster Booth and they specialised in light classics and operetta. The pair were known as the "Sweethearts in Song" and were among the most famous and popular British musical acts of the 1940s.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

They toured South Africa in 1948 and then returned to settle in 1956 and remained until 1978, teaching and made numerous appearances in the country, beginning with a ‘B’ tour to rural areas and smaller towns in 1956. They began with Spring Quartet for Leonard Schach in Cape Town in September 1956. They established a school of singing and stagecraft in Johannesburg, made an LP recording of their popular duets translated into Afrikaans and trained many promising singers.

For the first time in their careers they appeared in non-singing roles in various plays. Booth was the Prawn in The Amorous Prawn in 1961, and he and Ziegler played Mr and Mrs Fordyce in Goodnight Mrs Puffin in 1963. Ziegler also starred in The Glass Slipper, which the National Theatre Organisation presented in conjunction with Children’s Theatre and the Johannesburg Reps for Christmas 1959. It was a musical version of Cinderella which also starred Hilda Kriseman and Olive King. Ziegler and Booth gave their farewell concert in Somerset West in 1975, believing that their singing days were at an end. They returned to the United Kingdom in 1978 where they broadcast on BBC radio, appeared on television in the Russell Harty Show and made personal appearances throughout the United Kingdom in An Evening with Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth.

See also Booth, Webster

Sources

Wikipedia [1].

Tucker, 1997.

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