Jeremy Mansfield

Jeremy Mansfield (1963-2022) was an actor, sound recordist and popular radio personality

Biography

Born on 15 August, 1963 in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, and had his schooling at Kingswood College[1]. There he appeared in numerous college productions, including Oliver!, The Mikado (playing the lead), Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (the narrator), and was the first student to win Honours for Drama at Kingswood.

He then went to Rhodes University to major in Speech and Drama and Journalism, appearing in a number of productions for the Drama Department.

He passed away on Monday 31 November, 2022.

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

Theatre

His many stage roles from his student days and later include A Midsummer Night's Dream (directed by Francois Swart), The Taming of the Shrew (directed by Ken Leach), plays by Bertold Brecht, various dance dramas choreographed and directed by Gary Gordon, and appearances in Môre is 'n Lang Dag (1984) and From Midnight to Morning (1985) - both by his fellow student Deon Opperman

In 2013 he was persuaded to play "Abanazar" in Janice Honeyman's pantomime, Aladdin at Joburg Theatre.

He did the sound recording for Deon Opperman's 1994 production Goya,

Radio and TV

He started his radio career on Capital Radio 604 in 1985, and worked for various stations (Radio 702, Highveld Stereo and Hot 91.9), hanging up his headphones in 2021. His shows included the The Rude Awakening (Highveld Stereo), which gave him cult-like status in South African radio. Having stopped working for radio, he was presenting his Mansfield2day show on YouTube before his death.

TV work included presenting SABC2's A Word or 2, M-Net's Front Row and Laugh Out Loud, as well as presentations for the Supersport channel.

He did voice-overs for a number of characters in full length animated features, such as Pixar’s South African print of Toy Story 3 and for Jock of the Bushveld.

He also produced a number of Audio CDs, among them The Sibanda Files (2009) and RAW, and contributed to another called Thrown in the Deep End (by Whackhead Simpson, 2009).

Publications

He wrote a number of books, including Jeremy Mansfield's Vrot Jokes (Zebra Press, 1999), and Zhoozsh (Struik Publishers, 2007, a cookbook written with his former wife, Jacqui Mansfield).