Anneline Kriel

Career

Kriel was only 19 years old when she became Miss World in 1974. This marked a tumultuous period in South Africa's history, as the international boycott of South Africa continued to take pace. As a result, she sometimes caught the fire of international media that depicted her as a face of the apartheid state. In support of the boycott, the US and Australia refused to accept her as part of the obligatory world tour of a Miss World.

Singer Shirley Bassey also protested against her crowning. However, the US later relented and Kriel made television appearances there. In South Africa, her crowning received a rapturous response from the public and local media.

Thereafter she became an ambassador for several beauty brands, completing public relations activities.

She has also starred in several Afrikaans Movies, Soap operas, Stage plays and the International hit-film, Kill and Kill Again which debuted at no.2 at the US Box Office.

In 1981 she released the pop single, 'He Took Off My Romeos'

Personal life

Kriel was born and brought up in the mining town of Witbank, the daughter of a prison officer.She has two siblings.

As a student, she lived in Huis Asterhof, Vergeet-my-nie back then, while studying drama at the University of Pretoria. Kriel studies drama and made 1 film "Somer" which was a set book for schools written by CM van den Heever. She also made a television short story in her mother tongue, Afrikaans, called "Storieboekmoord" While she was at university she became Rag Queen and entered the Miss South Africa competition and won the Miss Northern Transvaal Competition. She won Miss South Africa, won Miss World after coming second when the winner had to step down.

In March 1976, Kriel was embroiled in a scandal over nude photographs that were leaked and appeared in the media and on the front page of the Sunday Times. Roy Hilligenn, Mr. South Africa of 1943, 1944, 1946, and 1976, and Mr. America of 1951, took the photographs and sold them to a British newspaper for R100 000. The photos revealed her on vacation sunbathing nude and the nudism of those around her such as her boyfriend, Richard Loring and Hilligenn and his family.

Kriel went from being Miss World to be a fashion model and worked in Italy for 5 years. She worked as the Birra Peroni model in television and magazine adds. She also worked as a model in Paris and New York with Johnny Casablanca Model Management Agency. Anneline Kriel has also made efforts to learn French and Italian.

Kriel returned to South Africa after working in New York to marry Sol Kerzner in 1980. After her divorce 5 years later she married Philip Tucker in Johannesburg where they lived and had 2 children, Tayla and Witney. They divorced in 1994.

Kriel married Peter Bacon in 1997, the CEO and former protege of Kerzner. They have been married for 21 years and currently reside in Mauritius.

Kriel and Sol Kerzner sought an interdict against Jonathan Ball Publishers Ltd. and Allan Breenblo over Breenblo's Kerzner Unauthorised, an unauthorised biography of Kerzner. They claimed that the content would infringe on their reputations.

In 2007, Kriel, a Goldin family friend, attended the murder trials of the killers of actor Brett Goldin and fashion designer, Richard Bloom.