Pieter-Dirk Uys

Pieter-Dirk Uys
After the show Foreign Aids in Berlin 2006.
Born	(1945-09-28) 28 September 1945 (age 71) Cape Town, South Africa
Occupation	Satirist, performer, author, social activist

Pieter-Dirk Uys (/ˈeɪs/; born 28 September 1945) is a South African satirist, active as a performer, author, and social activist.

Uys was born in Cape Town on 28 September 1945, to Hannes Uys, a Calvinist Afrikaner father, and Helga Bassel, a Berlin-born Jewish mother. Hannes Uys, a fourth-generation South African of Dutch and Belgian Huguenot stock, was a musician and organist in his local church. Bassel was a German concert pianist whom the Nazis expelled from the Reichsmusikkammer in 1935 as part of their campaign to root out Jewish artists. She later escaped to South Africa and managed to take her grand piano with her, with which she taught her daughter, Tessa Uys (b. 1948), now a concert pianist based in London. Bassel spoke little about her Jewish past to her children. It was only after her suicide that they discovered she was fully Jewish. Uys and his sister had an NG Kerk upbringing and their mother encouraged them to embrace Afrikaner culture.

He received a B.A. from the University of Cape Town where he began his dramatic career as an actor under the tutelage of Rosalie van der Gught, Mavis Taylor and Robert Mohr, among others. His performances at this time included roles in Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, The Fantasticks and Once Upon a Mattress. He later studied at the London Film School in the early 1970s. It was in one of his student films, an advertisement for milk, that he performed in drag for the first time (as a milkmaid). He then began a period in his dramatic career as a serious playwright. Several of his plays were performed at the Space Theatre, Cape Town and his 1979 play Paradise is Closing Down was performed in London, at the Edinburgh Festival (co-produced by William Burdett-Coutts), and later produced for Granada Television in 1981. He switched to one-man revues at the height of the Apartheid era.