Cape Town

The Two Oceans Aquarium is an aquarium located at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa. The aquarium opened... on the 13 November 1995 and comprises seven exhibition galleries with large viewing windows: It is possible to scuba dive with ragged tooth sharks at the Aquarium if you hold a Padi Open Water Certificate.
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Sharlto Copley is a South African producer, actor, and director who has produced and co-directed short films which have appeared at the Cannes Film... Festival, as well as commercials and music videos. He is perhaps best known for playing the roles of Wikus van der Merwe in the Oscar-nominated science fiction film District 9 and Howling Mad Murdock in the 2010 adaptation of The A-Team. Copley was born in Pretoria and educated at St. Andrew's Preparatory School in Grahamstown and Redhill School in Morningside, Johannesburg. His brother Donovan is a the lead singer/songwriter of the South African band Hotwater, and his sister Marisa is a fashion designer. He resides alternately in Cape Town and Los Angeles. A year after leaving high school, Copley first met director Neill Blomkamp; Copley was 22 and Blomkamp was 16, and Copley provided Blomkamp with use of computers at his production company to assist the company with pitches for various projects and allow Blomkamp to further pursue his passion and talent for 3D animation and design.
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William 'Bill' Kerr is an Australian film and television actor. He was born into a performing arts family in Cape Town, South Africa, but grew up in... Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia. He began working as a child actor in depression era Australia, taking his first major role in The Silence of Dean Maitland, one of Australia's first talking films. After serving in the Second World War, Kerr moved to England to further his acting career, and during the 1940s he was regularly featured in the BBC radio series Variety Bandbox. His trademark was his catch phrase "I'm only here for 4 minutes" In the 1950s, he had a recurring role as an Australian lodger in the BBC radio comedy series Hancock's Half Hour. Initially sharper than Hancock's characterisation, it was developed into a more dim-witted character who became the butt of Hancock's jokes. His television appearances in Britain include a 1968 Doctor Who story called The Enemy of the World, with Patrick Troughton, and a long-running part in the early 1960s BBC-TV soap, Compact.
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Abdullah Ibrahim , born Adolph Johannes Brand, 9 October 1934 in Cape Town, South Africa, and formerly known as Dollar Brand, is a South African... pianist and composer. His music reflects many of the musical influences of his childhood in the multicultural port areas of Cape Town, ranging from traditional African songs to the gospel of the AME Church and ragas, to more modern jazz and other Western styles. Ibrahim is considered the leading figure in the sub-genre, Cape Jazz. Within jazz, his music particularly reflects the influence of Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington. With his wife, the jazz singer Sathima Bea Benjamin, he is father to the New York underground rapper Jean Grae, as well as to a son, Tsakwe. He first received piano lessons at the age of seven, was an avid consumer of jazz records brought by American sailors, and was playing jazz professionally by 1949. In 1959 and 1960, he played alongside Kippie Moeketsi and Hugh Masekela with The Jazz Epistles in Sophiatown; the group recorded the first jazz LP by Black South African musicians in 1960. Ibrahim then joined the European tour of the musical King Kong. He moved to Europe in 1962.
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Brenda Fassie was a South African pop singer. She was known for her "outrageousness" and widely considered a voice for disenfranchised blacks during... apartheid. She was affectionately known as the Queen of African Pop and her nickname among fans was Mabrr. Fassie was born in Langa, Cape Town, as the youngest of nine children. She was named after the American singer Brenda Lee. Her father died when she was two, and with the help of her mother, a pianist, she started earning money by singing for tourists. In 1981, at the age of 16, she left Cape Town for Soweto, Johannesburg, to seek her fortune as a singer. Fassie first joined the group Joy and later became the lead singer for the township pop group Brenda And The Big Dudes. She had a son, Bongani, in 1985 by a fellow Big Dudes musician. She married ex-convict Nhlanhla Mbambo in 1989 but divorced in 1991. Around this time she became addicted to cocaine and her career suffered. With very outspoken views and frequent visits to the poorer townships of Johannesburg, as well as songs about life in the townships, she enjoyed tremendous popularity.
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Sir Antony Sher, KBE is a double Olivier Award winning South African-born British actor, writer, theatre director and painter. Sher was born into a... Lithuanian Jewish family in Cape Town, South Africa, the son of Margery and Emmanuel Sher, who worked in business. He grew up in the suburb of Sea Point and is a cousin of the playwright Ronald Harwood. Sher, however, has worked mainly in the United Kingdom and is now a British citizen. In 1968, after completing his compulsory military service, he left for London to audition at the Central School of Speech and Drama and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but was unsuccessful. Instead, he studied at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art from 1969 to 1971. After training, and some early performances with the theatre group Gay Sweatshop, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982. In the 1970s Sher was part of an astonishing group of young actors and writers working at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. It consisted of the likes of writers Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale and fellow actors Bernard Hill, Julie Walters, Trevor Eve and Jonathan Pryce.
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Louis Tebugo Moholo , is a South African jazz drummer. He formed The Blue Notes with Chris McGregor, Johnny Dyani, Nikele Moyake, Mongezi Feza and... Dudu Pukwana, and emigrated to Europe with them in 1964, eventually settling in London, where he formed part of a South African exile community that made an important contribution to British jazz. He was a member of the Brotherhood of Breath, a big band comprising several South African exiles and leading musicians of the British free jazz scene in the seventies and is the founder of Viva la Black and The Dedication Orchestra. His first album under his own name, Spirits Rejoice on Ogun Records, is considered a classic example of the combination of British and South African players. In the early 1970s, Moholo was also a member of the afro-rock band Assagai. Moholo has played with many musicians, including Derek Bailey, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Enrico Rava, Roswell Rudd, Irène Schweizer, Cecil Taylor, John Tchicai, Archie Shepp, Peter Brötzmann, Mike Osborne, Keith Tippett, Elton Dean and Harry Miller.
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Robert Peter Schneider is one of the co-founders of The Elephant 6 Recording Company, along with Will Cullen Hart, Bill Doss, and Jeff Mangum. He is... perhaps best known as the lead singer/songwriter behind The Apples in Stereo. After spending the first six years of his life in Cape Town, South Africa, Robert Schneider's family moved to Ruston, Louisiana. In Louisiana, Schneider befriended Mangum, Hart and Doss and began discovering and playing music with them. After graduating from Ruston High School, where he was Junior and Senior class president, and spending two years at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, Schneider moved to Denver, Colorado to attend university. Although he subsequently left school to pursue his musical ambitions, his academic interests remain strong, being an avid student of analytic number theory, and in recent years Schneider has studied mathematics at the University of Kentucky while also composing, producing albums and touring.
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