Cirrus@Austlit

'Actor and writer Henri Szeps speaks three languages fluently. He was born in a refugee camp in Switzerland during the Second World War. His parents had fled Poland in fear of the invading Germans in 1938, and he lived in two countries before arriving in Australia at the age of eight. He already spoke Swiss German, French and Yiddish. The young Henri discovered acting at Greenwich primary school in Sydney and taught himself tumbling on a grassy slope in the park at Lavender Bay. As a teenager he found a gymnastics teacher called George Sparkes who taught him to do back flips and had a profound impact on his life. It was this man, Sparksey, who eventually helped Henri to put together a club act. Szeps studied science and engineering at university and also took acting classes with Hayes Gordon at his boatshed theatre in North Sydney. In 1963 Gordon cast Szeps in a play by Durrenmatt called The Physicists, and he has performed at the Ensemble Theatre regularly ever since. Szeps recalls that Hayes Gordon advised his young student actors to do ‘vaudeville, variety, stand up comedy’. Szeps took his teacher’s advice, worked the clubs, and went on to become one of the most well-known comic rogue characters on Australian television, playing the selfish older son in the landmark series Mother and Son that ran from 1984-1994.' (Introduction)