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For almost five decades Ian Roberts has created diverse personas.
‘Nomad Heart’ is a biography unlike any other. Picture: Hein Kaiser
He’s as rugged as they come, but actor Ian Roberts is equally as expressive and his conversation as moving as a Da Vinci masterpiece.
For almost five decades his larger than life persona has created characters as diverse as Castrol’s Boet through to tours de force in shows like Arende and Vesrpeelde Lente in the ‘80s. The stage too, was his playground, and writing an intellectual outlet.
“I’ve been writing my whole life,” Roberts said. He said that his creative impulses were always there, bubbling just beneath the surface.
“I wrote my first play at the age of 10 with my cousin Dan,” he recalled. It was an early seed that led to Nomad Heart.
It is more than a straightforward autobiography, Roberts said. It’s a collection of anecdotes, funny and thought provoking, that spans his acting career – the chaos, humour and madness behind the scenes.
Nomad Heart, Roberts said, began when he started writing it in the back of a taxi during lifts to set for the MNet drama The Wild.
“Then I met this Russian guy on set,” Roberts recalled, “He said, ‘You South Africans, you always do joke, joke, joke. In Russia, we do the anecdote.’”
The fellow proceeded to share a typical version of same with Roberts. “He told me this story: ‘In the steppe, you know, by the ice, from one hut to the other, there’s a little house in the middle of the steppe. It has one door and one window. Inside, there’s a table with a violin on it, and one man sitting at the table. He picks up the violin and plays it for a while, then he puts it down, gets up, walks to the door, opens it, looks out at the steppe, and says, (Russian phrase),’ before walking back, closing the door, sitting down, and playing the violin again.”
When Roberts asked him what the phrase meant, his colleague strung together an expletive that started with “mother”..
The actor wasn’t sure what to make of it at first because it didn’t follow the structure of South African storytelling. The slower, more reflective style stuck though, and he grew to appreciate it.
It also inspired him to start writing his own anecdotes which, in turn, became the foundation for his memoir. He sought out the “funny little things that happened in my career as I tried to act, direct, and do all this stuff”.
Roberts also introduces readers to his alter ego, a “great red-haired Irishman” who, as he described, lives inside him and emerges in moments of chaos or emotional intensity.
“Everyone has a different aspect of themselves inside, it’s just that not everybody allows it to surface. It can make you ill to deny parts of your personality,” he said.
“This mad Irishman acknowledges the parts of me I sometimes keep hidden.”
For Roberts, the persona is both a coping mechanism and a source of creative energy.
Roberts doesn’t do things in half measures. His life has been a full-throttle ride of stage, screen, the written word and a mantelpiece of awards.
The values of hard work and grit were instilled in him from an early age while sweating on his dad’s citrus farm. After completing his national service in 1971, Roberts explored various jobs and studied photography before discovering his passion for acting.
In 1976, he enrolled at Rhodes University to study speech, drama and social anthropology, which paved the way for his future career.
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“Hard work has been the essence of it all,” he said. “You didn’t just arrive on the scene as an actor. You started low down and worked yourself up, and it might take you 10 years.
“Then you start playing the leading roles,” he said.
The iconic Castrol oil series of ads were a sidebar adventure of 17 years for Roberts in between non-stop acting gigs. “There was a magic in those ads,” he said.
His on-set exploits included disciplining noisy crew when the assistant director and director didn’t have the gonads to do so. It’s all trademark Roberts. And there’s plenty to tell.
For Roberts, authoring the stories in Nomad Heart were cathartic, but not from the get-go.
“I didn’t really think much of them,” he said, but over time, those anecdotes took on a life of their own. “When I completed the book it hadn’t really sunk in; but when I read the copy for the audio book version in studio there were often times that I had to stop recording, because it evoked so much emotion in me,” he said.
He added that when people read the book, they may laugh a bit while at the same time finding resonance. Just as life imitates art, he said perfection doesn’t exist.
So don’t worry if you’re not perfect, don’t worry if you bomb. That’s just art. Or life.
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