Winston Ntshona
Actor who was imprisoned for his part in Sizwe Bansi Is Dead
WINSTON NTSHONA, who has died aged 76, was a South African actor and playwright who worked with Athol Fugard, Roger Moore and Marlon Brando and won a Tony Award on Broadway.
When he was in his twenties, and working at a Ford car plant in his home town of Port Elizabeth, Ntshona joined the Serpent Players theatre group. There he began working with Fugard, as well as an old schoolfriend, John Kani.
In 1972 the trio wrote Sizwe Bansi is Dead, inspired by Fugard’s time as a clerk at the Native Commissioner’s Court in Johannesburg and an unforgiving examination of South Africa’s apartheid pass laws. It received its premiere in Cape Town, directed by Fugard and starring Ntshona and Kani.
They took the play to London, where it opened at the Royal Court before transferring to the Ambassadors, and in 1974 it won the London Theatre Critics Award for Best Play. It transferred to Broadway in a double bill with the trio’s second joint effort, The Island, set in a prison based on South Africa’s notorious Robben Island.
Ntshona and Kani were joint winners of the 1975 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for their roles in both productions, which went on to be performed, often by Ntshona and Kani, around the world for the next few decades.
The playwright David Hare remarked recently: “For people of my age, the plays Athol Fugard did with John Kani and Winston Ntshona were the best political theatre we ever saw … I have never read a book or an article that has got anywhere near what those actors brought to their work. You were left shattered.”
In 1976 Ntshona and Kani were thrown into jail in Transkei and kept in solitary confinement for 15 days, thanks to Sizwe Bansi’s “inflammable, abusive and vulgar subject matter”.
Winston Ntshona was born on October 6 1941 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He attended Newell High School, where he acted alongside Kani.
Film roles followed, among them Sizwe Bansi and The Island: in 1978 Ntshona played a deposed president in the mercenary thriller The Wild Geese alongside Roger Moore and Richard Burton.
Kani also appeared, as a soldier. He and Ntshona were initially reluctant to join the cast of a film about mercenaries, but concluded that they appreciated its central theme, of codependency between blacks and whites.
Ntshona played a similar role in a similar 1980 film, The Dogs of War, and the same year he starred – again alongside Kani, as well as Fugard – in the screen adaptation of Fugard’s play Marigolds in August, about three men struggling to survive under apartheid.
In 1982 Ntshona played a porter in Gandhi, but there was a more substantial role in A Dry White Season (1989). Written by Colin Welland and co-starring Donald Sutherland and Marlon Brando, it depicted a teacher (Sutherland) who tries to uncover the truth about the arrest and torture of his gardener (Ntshona).
Ntshona’s other screen credits included Ashanti (1979), a disappointing action film starring Michael Caine; the South Africa-set Second World War drama The Power of One (1992); and the poorly reviewed basketball comedy The Air Up There (1994).
Ntshona’s theatre work proved more satisfying, including his one-man tour de force in Michael Hastings’s Full Frontal at the Royal Court in 1979. Ntshona played a man born in Nigeria but brought up in Britain – “I’m the new type of man, I’m neither here nor there” – who addresses an unseen member of the National Front, initially in an attempt to join the party. One critic described the play as “Swiftian”.
In 2012, Fugard, Kani and Ntshona were honoured by the city of Port Elizabeth, who renamed streets in their honour: Chapel Street became Winston Ntshona Street. He is survived by his wife and son.