28 Facts About Athol Fugard

Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard was a South African playwright, novelist, actor and director.

Athol Fugard is best known for his political and penetrating plays opposing the system of apartheid, some of which have been adapted to film.

Athol Fugard received many awards, honours and honorary degrees, including the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver from the government of South Africa in 2005 "for his excellent contribution and achievements in the theatre".

Athol Fugard was an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Athol Fugard was honoured in Cape Town with the 2010 opening of the Athol Fugard Theatre in District Six.

Athol Fugard received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2011.

Athol Fugard's mother, Marrie, an Afrikaner, operated a general store and then a lodging house; his father, Harold Fugard, of Irish, English and French Huguenot descent, was a former jazz pianist who had become disabled.

Athol Fugard attended Port Elizabeth Technical College for his secondary education from 1946 to 1950, then studied philosophy and social anthropology at the University of Cape Town on a scholarship.

Athol Fugard "celebrated" his two years as a merchant seaman in his 1999 autobiographical play The Captain's Tiger: a memoir for the stage.

In 1958, the couple moved to Johannesburg, where Athol Fugard worked as a clerk in a Native Commissioners' Court.

Athol Fugard became "keenly aware of the injustices of apartheid", and befriended local anti-apartheid activists, an experience that was to colour his earliest work.

In 1958, Athol Fugard organised "a multiracial theatre for which he wrote, directed, and acted", writing and producing several plays for it, including No-Good Friday and Nongogo, in which he and his colleague, black South African actor Zakes Mokae, performed.

Athol Fugard publicly supported the call of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain for an international boycott of racially segregated South African theatres.

Athol Fugard began to have his plays published and produced outside South Africa.

In Mr Athol Fugard's earlier plays he seemed to be dealing with life at a proper level of humanity.

Blankenship stated that the performance he attended featuring "only haphazard sketches of plot and character" was perhaps the result of Athol Fugard allowing director Suzanne Shepard to revise the play without showing him the changes.

Athol Fugard developed these two plays for the Serpent Players in workshops, working with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, publishing them in 1974 with his own play Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act.

Athol Fugard appeared in his A Place With the Pigs at the Yale Rep in New Haven in 1987.

Athol Fugard himself suggested that it was a reflection on his long battle with alcoholism.

The first play that Athol Fugard wrote after the end of apartheid, Valley Song, premiered in Johannesburg, in August 1995, with Athol Fugard in the role of both a white, and of a coloured, farmer.

In October 1995, Athol Fugard took the play to the United States with a production by the Manhattan Theatre Club at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey.

In January 2009, Athol Fugard returned to New Haven for the premiere of Coming Home.

Athol Fugard's plays are produced internationally and have won multiple awards, and several have been made into films.

Athol Fugard himself performed in the first of these, as Boesman alongside Yvonne Bryceland as Lena, in Boesman and Lena directed by Ross Devenish in 1973.

Outside of his own work, Athol Fugard had a number of cameo film roles, most notably as General Smuts in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, and as Doctor Sundesval in Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields.

In 2012, Athol Fugard was the subject of a major documentary, Falls the Shadow, directed by Tony Palmer and produced by Eric Abraham and David Elstein.

Athol Fugard died at his home in Stellenbosch, Western Cape, on 8 March 2025, at the age of 92.

In 2006, Athol Fugard had reserved a grave plot for himself in Nieu-Bethesda, a village in the Karoo where he had a home and where the preserved Owl House and statuary gardens of the reclusive artist Helen Martins inspired his play The Road to Mecca.