Shaleen Surtie-Richards, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 66, was a kindergarten teacher turned actor whose roles in film, television and on stage as Fiela, Nenna and Shirley Valentyn were part of SA’s national heritage and improved the landscape.
Her searingly authentic performance as Fiela in the 1988 film Fiela se Kind helped sweep away apartheid.
Set in the Knysna forest in the 19th century it told the story of a coloured woman, Fiela Komoetie, who adopted and loved as her own a white boy she found abandoned on her doorstep, who was then ripped from the bosom of his new family by officials of the segregationist government.
It had an immediate and profound impact on white, apartheid-supporting Afrikaners in the northern Cape town of Upington where she was born Shaleen Surtie on May 7 1955.
Her schoolgirl dream of being a ballerina was shattered by white parents who refused to allow their daughters to dance with a “hotnotjie”.
Her father Shagan, a school principal, had to arrange for a ballet teacher to give her private lessons in their lounge.
But when Fiela se Kind premiered in the town she was saluted by a long line of young white Voortrekkers who formed a guard of honour for her.
When she was asked to attend the first showing of the movie at the Upington drive-in she agreed on condition that the wall separating “white” cars from “coloured” cars was demolished and the local town council removed all the “whites only” signs from public facilities.
When she left school she worked as a nursery school teacher. When an amateur drama group was started by the department of coloured affairs, her schoolteacher mother Ellen, who had long recognised her dramatic talents, tried to persuade her to join.
At first she resisted but then, “net om haar te please”, she grudgingly relented, and was instantly stage-struck.
She performed in amateur productions starting in 1974 with the title role in Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena at The Space theatre in Cape Town as a member of the Cape Flats Players. Ten years later, with no formal training, she turned professional.
Her first big success was as Hester in Athol Fugard’s Hello and Goodbye, which won her the prestigious Fleur du Cap award in 1985.
In 1986 she acted in the stage version of Fiela se Kind at what was then the Nico Malan (now Artscape) Theatre, where she was one of the first actors of colour to perform.
Also in the mid-1980s she performed in Adam Small’s Kanna Hy Kô Hystoe, and was directed by Pieter-Dirk Uys in his play Just Like Home in a sold-out three-week season at the Edinburgh Festival.
This was followed by a three-week run, also sold out, at the King’s Head Theatre in London.
Then came her longest and most popular stage role in the one-woman play Shirley Valentyn, which she’d seen being performed in London by Pauline Collins and vowed she would perform herself in SA.
As it happened, director Hennie van Greunen had been struggling to translate it from the Liverpudlian accent of the original into Afrikaans, but it hadn’t worked.
“The jokes didn’t land and the uniqueness of the character didn’t land,” he says.
Then he tried it in Cape Afrikaans and it came together. Having seen her perform he knew immediately that there was only one person to play it and that was Surtie-Richards, who was a Cape Afrikaner to the core.
He recognised her as an exceptional actor.
“Many people think she was funny or a comedian, but she wasn’t,” he says. “She was just a phenomenal actor. Comedy was one of the arrows in her arsenal.”
Being completely untrained, all of it came straight from the heart. Like life itself the play is traumatic, sad, hopeless, hysterically funny and redemptive. It has all those emotions in a single moment and Surtie-Richards conveyed them without giving any sense that she was acting.
She could deliver a joke that had the audience in stitches one minute, and the next minute you’d hear them sniffling.
It played for the first time in the Oudsthoorn High School hall packed with 600 patrons. Van Greunen never forgot “how she just picked them up as if they were a rag and washed the floor with them”.
The acoustics weren’t good so she used a hand-held microphone that malfunctioned so badly that after 15 minutes they had to go backstage to fix the problem. Ten minutes later she walked back on swinging a new microphone with such pizzazz she promptly got a standing ovation.
“You felt a complete wave of emotion coming from 600 patrons onto this one focal point on the stage,” remembers Van Greunen.
She played Shirley Valentyn in up to 450 performances between 2008 and 2014 around SA and Namibia, all of them sold out, including the massive main theatre at the Baxter Theatre where the run officially began.
It swept up most of the big awards, including most popular production and for her the prestigious Fleur du Cap in 2009.
She saw herself, as did those who knew her, in the feisty, straight-talking Shirley Valentyn.
“She says everything that all women would love to say but can’t. She calls a spade a spade. She most certainly does not mince her words. She is honest, straight-forward and very funny. I really love and respect the character,” she said.
Surtie-Richards starred in SA’s first TV soap opera, Egoli: Place of Gold, as Ester “Nenna” Willemse, appearing in most of its episodes over its 18-year run from 1992 to 2010.
She appeared in numerous other soaps including 7de Laan, Villa Rosa and Generations.
Her extraordinary appeal lay in her unpretentious, quintessential, humorous South Africanness with which everyone, regardless of colour or class, could identify.
She was as South African as biltong, braaivleis and the Adderley Street flower sellers of Cape Town, the city of her dreams, she said, although she lived in Johannesburg.
She was colourful, ebullient, warm, approachable, fun to be with and very, very funny. She invited intimacies she didn’t always appreciate.
“You’re 20 years older than I am, how can I be your aunty,” she snapped when a stranger addressed her, as so many did, like a close relative.
Everybody felt they knew her, and she agreed that they probably did.
“My life is such an open book. Everybody knows everything about me. Believe me, I can’t keep things to myself.”
My life is such an open book. Everybody knows everything about me. Believe me, I can’t keep things to myself
— Shaleen Surtie-Richards
In a 2019 interview on kykNET she admitted candidly that she’d fallen on hard times since the end of Egoli and Shirley Valentyn. There were times she didn’t have a cent to her name, couldn’t keep up the payments on her house and lived from day to day expecting it to be sold from under her.
The parts had dried up, she said. She had to hustle for gigs and go to auditions like when she was starting out, which she said she was “just so tired” of having to do.
But she didn’t do self-pity; she did humour. And even the worst of times she turned into uproariously funny stories.
She had diabetes and heart problems. She suffered a mini stroke and was rushed to hospital in an ambulance. If she’d got there five minutes later she’d have died, the doctor told her. She spent four days in the intensive care unit. When she could speak, her first question was where she could get a cigarette.
“Nee, donner,” she said when told she had to give up. “Do you want to deprive me of all my pleasures?”
The two things she’d never give up, she vowed, were smoking and swearing.
She was married to Gerald Richards. It lasted less than a year but they remained friends, she said.
She was found dead in a Cape Town guesthouse where she stayed while shooting scenes for the telenovella Arendsvlei, in which she played retired nurse Muriel Foster. She’d just wrapped up and was about to return to Johannesburg.
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