When somebody says, well, I started out young and I always knew that this was what I wanted to do, it’s usually a fairly meaningless generalisation. But when veteran actress Diane Wilson says it, it rings true and bold. In fact, what she says is this: “I was a war baby born in 1941. My father and mother conceived me in 1940 and he immediately left to join the war. My mother had to work so I started school as a boarder at Durban Girls College at the age of four. I moved as a boarder to Maris Stella Convent where Joan Brickhill was my drama mistress. She told me that I was a born actress so naturally I believed her and decided at the age of nine that that was what I was going to do.”
And there’s serendipity right there. A born actress, and who should your school drama mistress be but Joan Brickhill, grande dame of the South African stage. But that was all a lifetime ago. Diane Wilson, who was named after the song Diane, the theme song from the 1927 silent movie Seventh Heaven (later a smash hit for Irish vocal harmony group The Bachelors in the Sixties), has just turned 80, and Maverick Life approached her for an interview to mark this milestone.
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