Tony Award Winner Zakes Mokae Dies at 75

Zakes Mokae, a South African actor who specialized in the anti-apartheid plays of Athol Fugard, died on September 11 in Las Vegas from complications after a stroke. According to The New York Times, Mokae had also been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. He was 75 and lived in Las Vegas and Cape Town.

Mokae won a featured actor Tony Award in 1982 for his masterful performance as a tea room servant in one of Fugard’s most well-loved plays, Master Harold…and the Boys, opposite Danny Glover and Lonny Price. In 1993, he was nominated for a second Tony as a jailed South African activist in Tug Yourgrau’s The Song of Jacob Zulu. His off-Broadway credits included Fugard’s Boesman and Lena, in which he assumed the lead opposite Ruby Dee after the departure of James Earl Jones, and an all-black production of The Cherry Orchard at the Public Theater. He understudied Jones in the Broadway production of another Fugard play, A Lesson from Aloes.

Born in Johannesburg on August 5, 1934, Mokae was working as a musician in the 1950s when he was introduced to Fugard, a fledgling playwright. They began a multi-racial theater company and became the first white and black performers to perform together on a South African stage in The Blood Knot, Fugard’s 1960 drama about brothers with different skin colors. The play went on to a celebrated London production, and Fugard and Mokae revived it at Yale Rep in 1985. Also in 1985, Mokae starred in a TV movie version of Master Harold alongside Matthew Broderick and South African actor John Kani.

While building a celebrated acting career, Mokae endured personal hardship. He’d been jailed in the 1950s, and was banned from his native country after the London production of Blood Knot, returning for the first time in 1982 to see his brother executed for participating in a robbery and murder. After political changes, Mokae and his wife, Madelyn, began spending time in Cape Town in 2005.

Mokae is survived by his wife, two sisters, two brothers, a daughter and three grandchildren.