Trivia

Daughter of Mary Dresselhuys and Cees Laseur.

Sister of Merel Laseur

She enrolled at the Amsterdam Theater School at the age of sixteen, where she graduated in 1959.

In April 2024, Laseur announced she was terminally ill and did not want treatment.

Petra Laseur was a Dutch theatre and film actress.

In 2011 took on the role of Queen Wilhelmina in the musical Soldaat van Oranje ( Dutch musical production, based on the true story of resistance hero Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema).

She received the Colombina award ( awarded to the most impressive female supporting actress of the Dutch theater season) in 1969 for her role in the play Uncle Vanya.

Petra Laseur was no diva. She sometimes spoke mildly mockingly of the new generation of actors who worked with transmitters, and had a hankering for the stage of the past, but she was also down-to-earth, did what was asked of her and delivered. She was praised for her diction, with perfectly pronounced words, a beautiful melody, for her plain speaking and always intelligible, even in the back of the room.

She began her career with De Nederlandse Comedie, much to the frustration of her father Cees Laseur, who was director of its competitor in The Hague.

Laseur was the daughter of actress Mary Dresselhuys. On the occasion of Dresselhuys' eightieth birthday in 1987, they performed together in"Een bijzonder prettig vergezicht" (A particularly pleasant vista), a play that was written especially for them.

For her leading roles in Hedda Gabler (1972) and Groot en Klein (1981), Laseur received a Theo d'Or, the most important Dutch theater prize.

Long before the term "fake baby" was invented, Petra Laseur was one. Her mother was Mary Dresselhuys (1907-2004), stage diva, whose name is so big that awards and venues are still named after her. Her father was Cees Laseur, director, actor and later director of the famous Haagsche Comedie. If you want to make it yourself in that already small theater world, you have to come from good stock. But Petra Laseur came from good stock.

In 2017, Laseur was a guest at Een Leven Lang Theater in Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg, where she spoke at length about her life and career in front of a live audience. It stood out again then: that quirky combination of passion, reserve, irony and a touch of biting humor now and then. In that same theater hangs a life-size portrait of the actress, colorfully dressed, with red beaded necklace. It is the place where she has shown audiences so much beauty in her long career.

In 2024, Laseur announced that she was seriously ill and would not seek treatment. "To then live deathly ill for three more months? Not me. I had a wonderful life," she told family and friends.

In 2014 she received the ShortCutz Amsterdam Annual Award, as best actress in the short movie "Viskom".

The two-time Theo d'Or winner wanted to experience the wedding of her eldest grandson and the sixtieth birthday of her youngest son, and she succeeded.

Her first role was in Learned Ladies (Les femmes savantes) by Molière, directed by Fons Rademakers, her mother ( Mary Dresselhuys) played the lead role in it.

Like her mother, Laseur was still on stage into old age. She played her last major role in the musical comedy We Want More, which appropriately ended in the Mary Dresselhuys auditorium of Theater DeLaMar named after her mother.

At the Montessori Lyceum in Amsterdam, she was not allowed to do drama, because there it was true that students were not allowed to be advantaged. "So because both my parents were doing drama, I was not allowed to participate," she recounted in 2016.

As one of the last grande dames of the Dutch theater, Petra Laseur was a sought-after and appreciated actress.

Memorable is her mother role in Maria Goos' play "Family," of which a film version was later made. How to play an unsympathetic mother, and still understand her - that was what she showed in that role. 'She is in everything an anti-heroine: hard, cynical, ruthless, but also unspeakably lonely,' said the review in the Volkskrant at the time.

Her mother said she could drop out of school at 16 as long as she went to drama school. And so she did. Barely 19 years old, she was a drama graduate and the acting ("Acting? It used to be called just playing") could begin.

After graduating from the Theater School in 1959, Laseur played with various major companies such as De Nederlandse Comedie, Globe, Toneelgroep Amsterdam and Het Nationale Toneel.

She herself considered the role of Lotte in Botho Strauss' Groot & Klein to be one of her best. In this portrait of a lonely woman, wandering around postwar Germany, she showed all of her talent. 'That was one of those roles that comes along only once in a lifetime - if you're lucky. I remember walking through the park with the dog and thinking: if nothing ever comes along now, I can still be satisfied with what I have achieved now. Wasn't like that, of course, but that's how you think.

Together with Trudy de Jong and Theo de Groot, among others, she founded Toneelgroep Dorst, especially for actors of advanced age.