SO LONG, SHALEEN

The beloved Egoli star had been through hard times, but things were starting to come right – until her tragic end in a guesthouse

THIS year is going to be different, she told her friends shortly after celebrating her birthday in May. Shaleen Surtie-Richards had had a tough time in recent years and the pandemic didn’t help. But things were looking up for her – she had work again after long, desperate periods of joblessness that left her almost destitute.

She’d also had many health issues, including two strokes and an extended battle with type 2 diabetes. Her financial situation was so dire at one stage that she struggled to keep a roof over her head and could barely afford food.

“I don’t have money for electricity either,” she said in an interview in March this year. “I have to rely on family and friends.”

Shaleen, who shot to prominence playing the beloved character Ester Willemse – or Nenna, as everyone called her – in the long-running soap Egoli, took whatever work she could find. At one stage she lent her voice to radio ads for a linen company.

Yet in recent months, hope started to emerge after all the hardship. She had regular work again – there was a role in the kykNET&kie telenovela Arendsvlei and she played Constance in the movie Swirl. She was also planning to do a show in Paternoster in the Western Cape and another movie was in the works.

“She’d had tough times,” actor and musician Pedro Kruger says. “Work had dried up, there was loneliness, there was her health. But recently she’d been doing well.

“She bragged that she’d lost weight and she was loving working again. She’d say, ‘As long as the work comes in, things will only get better’.”