Drama teacher revels in all the stages of his varied life

On stage, Derek Anthony has played insane murderers, lovelorn bankers and kings. Off stage, the roles were equally far-fetched - making sausages in a food factory to building scaffolding on oil rigs - until opera singing led him to his latest incarnation - a drama professor.

Dr Anthony was a senior lecturer in the voice and opera department at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts for seven years but left in 2000 over dissatisfaction with the local arts education.

He founded his own school, the Music and Drama Institute in Wellington Street, Central, which now has 400 part-time students.

'Generally speaking, the local students typically have excellent skills but they lack cultural background,' Dr Anthony said. 'Students should have fun and at the same time develop critical and independent thinking in relationship to the performing arts. I encourage the young students to read and experience more. It will lay solid foundations for their learning.'

The actor was seven when his family left South Africa to move to Norway. After leaving school he worked in a sausage factory and helped build scaffolds on oil rigs, before entering the Hochschule fur Musik of Vienna, the renowned music school and a training ground for the Vienna Philharmonic, where he studied opera.

'I was forced to drop out of school and worked in a sausage factory when I was 17 in Norway because my father's business went bankrupt. I had to earn money for going to university. My job was to cut up all the meat,' he said.