Obituary: Keith Anderson: Top trapeze artist and selfless teacher

1937-2013: Keith Anderson, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 75, was a self-taught trapeze artist who turned rough youths from broken homes in one of Cape Town's toughest working-class suburbs into some of the most accomplished "high-flyers" in the world.

He performed with them in top circuses in Europe, the UK and the US , which many of them subsequently joined.

Anderson was also a world-class designer. He designed the opening ceremonies for the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002 and the Cricket World Cup in South Africa in 2003.

He designed six Sun City extravaganzas, the Broadway musical Meet Me in St Louis, ice shows for Walt Disney and countless musicals, ballets, operas, revues and stage plays around the world. He designed for film giants 20th Century Fox and MGM and was the art director for David Lean's film Ryan's Daughter. He designed circus acts for Ringling Bros & Barnum and Bailey in the US.

Anderson had about a thousand shows to his credit. During one period of his life he was involved creatively in 10 different productions at the same time.

He was born in Cape Town on October 23 1937. He attended Rondebosch Boys' High School, started a puppet theatre with three friends when he was 13 and left school at the age of 16 after failing standard eight. He was a precociously talented artist and, despite having no matric, was accepted by the University of Cape Town's Michaelis School of Fine Art when he was 17.

He left a year later to join a national theatre tour of John Wright's marionettes. In the face of his mother's strenuous objections, he joined Boswell's Circus with his puppet act, The Wonderettes.

His interest in the art of the flying trapeze started with a love of tightrope-walking, which he practised professionally at Boswell's Circus. At 20, he fell from the tightrope and broke his leg, and this was when he turned to the trapeze.

In 1966, when he was 29, he and some friends designed their own flying trapeze rig after observing professional rigs as closely as they could, given that trapeze artists did not allow others to measure their rigs.

They set their rig up in the Little Theatre workshop at the University of Cape Town drama school, where Anderson was resident designer. But the area was too small and the safety net only a metre from a brick wall that he went flying into and broke his hip. Students wrote "Splat!" in red point on the wall, which is still there today as a reminder of this disaster.

Anderson was fitted with a metal hip joint. Thereafter he walked with a limp but with surprising agility, although he needed constant painkillers and, later, a walking stick.

The YMCA in Observatory allowed him to build a new rig in its grounds and he started what became one of the most famous trapeze schools in the world.

It attracted tough, streetwise youths as young as eight - one actually began learning at the age of five - who, for the most part, came from broken homes and some of whom were petty criminals. Anderson taught them all he knew at no cost and, in many cases, set them on the path to international circus careers.

He was a charismatic, charming, wild-Gypsy type of man who lived in a caravan at the YMCA and fantasised about ancient Greece.

His close friend was Mary Renault, the world-famous author of historical novels about the classical Greeks and Alexander the Great. He visited her frequently when she was in her late 60s. They used to chat animatedly to each other and he had all her books in his caravan.

He was a harsh disciplinarian, who made his boys train at least three hours a day, in good weather or bad. He demanded absolute obedience, which, he told them, could be a matter of life or death. He could be physically violent if he did not get it.

"You will lose your life if you do not listen to me when you are on the trapeze," he would tell them. "And I will be responsible for your death."

He inspired great respect and loyalty from them. Many of them remained with him until well into their 20s.They formed a tight-knit team, worked incredibly hard building their own rigs, doing terrifying manoeuvres such as triple backward somersaults 30m from the ground, touring abroad, sleeping in caravans and performing in circuses. Their high-flying acts won enormous praise and a number of trapeze Oscars and world championship awards.

Anderson was about 1.77m, lean, incredibly strong, tough and fearless. He had a ruthless streak and was not someone you wanted to get on the wrong side of.

He was at a cinema one day when an old lady asked some rowdy young men to be quiet. They insulted her and carried on talking. Anderson got to his feet and told them to shut up. When he was sworn at, he knocked out the culprit. There was no more noise after that.

One of Anderson's flying trapeze students was the film director Revel Fox.

In 2005, he made a film loosely based on Anderson's life, called The Flyer.

Anderson was passionate about his art and must have earned a great deal of money over the years. But he died in a Salvation Army home, alone and depressed.

He never married.