And repeating the language became central to her process. Instead, she came to view language itself as the great window onto character. One result was that Smith did not become a method actor, that is, an actor who uses their own personal experience and the context of the play to understand a character’s motivation. For the next three years, as I trained seriously, I never had an experience like that again.” As she told The Drama Review, “I had some kind of transcendental experience. Smith, who had once thought of becoming a linguist, was affected by the exercise, especially its simple, repetitive focus on saying the words. Like countless actors, she was afraid of the Bard, afraid of giving voice to “that thick, antiquated language that seemed totally irrelevant to the world around me.” Her teacher instructed the class to “take fourteen lines of Shakespeare and say it over and over again to see what happened.” Smith picked a speech from Richard II in which Queen Margaret bitterly laments the devastation wrought by Richard, “That foul defacer of God’s handiwork, / That excellent grand tyrant of the earth.” The answer was an emphatic no, but she stayed on the phone and asked about classes for actors, which led to an audition and enrollment.Ī transformative moment came early in her training, when Smith encountered Shakespeare. Their goal, as she put it in her memoir, Talk to Me, was “to see America and to make sense, each in our own way, of what to do with all the breakage and promise that had been released through the antiwar movement, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the beginning of the environmental movement, and the bra-burning, brief as it was, of the women’s movement.” Casting about for a line of work that would suit her, Smith called up the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and asked if they were looking to hire a stage manager. As one of only a few African-American students at Beaver College in the 1960s, she recently told NEH Chairman William Adams, she helped form a black student group, which led to changes to the curriculum and to the hiring of the school’s first black professor.Īfter graduation, she drove west with four friends. In middle school, she discovered a gift for mimicry in college, an interest in social justice. Smith was born on September 18, 1950, in Baltimore, Maryland, the first of five children to Anna, an elementary school educator, and Deaver, a coffee merchant. A hybrid artist if ever there was one, she collects stories through recorded interviews and then personally portrays the tellers on stage, in curated displays of American character organized around pressing questions of our time. His love for figures culminated in his being selected as a judge for the Miss South Africa Pageant both in 19 - not forgetting the cute little numbers on A Word Or 2.Even in an era when anyone with a computer connection can broadcast their own life story for everyone or no one to consider, Anna Deavere Smith continues to shock and dazzle audiences with her stage portraits of the humble and the great. He has a passion for nature and conservation and owns the Featherbed Nature Reserve in Knysna where he lives. JLB Smith, of coelacanth fame) in the list of the 100 people who, in the last millennium, had the biggest impact on making South Africa the country that it is. He was also included (with his father, Prof. One of his developments was a completely new method of producing educational television programmes - and the Liberty Life Learning Channel was born.ĭuring 1998 William was voted as one of the top three presenters on TV. He received many accolades for his innovations in teaching, including the highly prestigious 'Teacher of the Year' award. He became a household name over the next 25 years and his schools have taught almost a million pupils of all races in South Africa. Star Schools provided value for money education with top class teachers. He then joined Afrox for two years as technical manager, which also included their industrial training.īut the teaching bug kept biting and he moved into the supplementary education arena. Here he developed a world-wide patent in safety-fuse manufacture. Realising that he was not cut out to be an academic he left the university environment and joined AECI in their Work Study Department. He then obtained a masters degree in 7 months at Natal University, Pietermaritzburg. Andrews Prep and then matriculated from Union High in Graaff Reinet.Īt Rhodes University he obtained his B.Sc in Physics and Chemistry, followed by Honours in Chemistry with distinction. William was born in Grahamstown 'at about the time of Noah'.
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