Mary-Ann Berold

Mary-Ann Berold (b. 1941) was a sometime actress. Occasionally credited as Mary Anne Berold.

According to her first marriage certificate, Mary Ann Diener was born in Cape Town on 28 February 1941. One source claims that she trained to be a teacher at Trinity College in London, but at the age of 18 she married George Pahziloglou, who was a café proprietor in Johannesburg. The marriage did not last and the couple divorced in 1964. Subsequently she married the actor Ivan Berold, whom she is said to have met during the filming of the Basil Mailer film Africa Shakes (1965), though neither of them are credited. She only seems to have started acting after her second marriage.

In 1967 she appeared ón the stage in the title role in Gigi, with her husband as Gaston. The play was directed by Taubie Kushlick for JODS and staged at the Zion Hall. Some twelve years later she acted in Pajama Tops, directed by Alexander Doré for the Toerien-Firth Company at the André Huguenet Theatre in Johannesburg and at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town. The films in which she is known to have appeared are Staal Burger (Daan Retief/1969) and Safari 3000 (Harry Hurwitz/1980), as well as in the television series Die Avonture van Joachim Verwey (1981), directed by Katinka Heyns.

Eventually the couple gave up their acting careers and moved to the United States, though in 1984 they both appeared in a commercial for a residential development project, with the always handsome Berold playing a James Bond-like secret agent and his wife impersonating Margaret Thatcher. From 1985 they ran a luggage store in Redondo Beach in California, which finally closed down towards the end of 2008.