ANPCilly Dartell
NOS News•today, 5:17 PM•Adjusted today, 6:15 PM
Thick Verkuil
editor Online
Thick Verkuil
editor Online
In Amsterdam, formerHeart of the Netherlandspresenter Cilly Dartell passed away. She was 66 years old. She recently announced that she did not have long to live due to her metastatic lung cancer. She had lived in Florida for years, but had returned to the Netherlands because she wanted the option of euthanasia. Dartell was one of the faces of for years Heart of the Netherlandsbut she has done much more in her career.
Cilly Dartell was actually called Priscilla Veltmeijer. She grew up in Hilversum, as the daughter of the famous impresario Lou Veltmeijer. At the Nieuwe Lyceum in Hilversum she was spotted in the school cabaret by Youp van ‘t Hek, who was looking for an actress for his company Cabaret Nar.
Veltmeijer decided to enter the theater permanently after a season at NAR, left school at the age of seventeen without a diploma and from then on called herself Cilly Dartell, because she did not want to be known in the theater world as her father’s daughter. She came up with the name Dartell as a variation on D’Artelle (of the arts) and it also reflected that she was ‘frisky’.
Annie M.G. Schmidt
For sixteen years she was successful with the women’s cabaret and other theater companies. She considered her role in The perpetrator did it, a musical by Annie MG Schmidt and Harry Bannink from 1983, also featuring top actors Conny Stuart and Piet Römer. “It was a dream come true that I could play a leading role next to them,” she said.
When her father started to slow down, she became co-owner of Lumen, the imprint he had founded. She did production, publicity and bookings for, among others, Youp van ‘t Hek and Martine Bijl. She also produced the musicals with her husband Jan Cocheret My Generationwith music from the sixties, and Up on the Roof, an a cappella musical that focused on the music of the 1970s. The couple also had two sons, Christian and David, during that period.
In 1990, out of interest and because she wanted to try something new, she switched to journalism. She started presenting art and culture programs for the AVRO radio. She had been asked if she wanted to become an interviewer and had quipped that she had experience with that.
After a somewhat difficult start, she was also successful with that. She got her own programs, Dartell on Tuesdaya pretender Dartell. These programs were broadcast live from De Heeren van Amstel in Amsterdam. She felt, she said, like a fish in water.
In 1996 she went as a substitute as well AVRO’s Radiojournaal doing. That year, the newly founded channel SBS6 offered her the opportunity to present a news program on television, Heart of the Netherlands.
Heart of the Netherlands
Heart of the Netherlands was born out of necessity because SBS had no money for a news program like it NOS News of RTL News. After a difficult start, the program acquired a permanent place in the media landscape, with one and a half million viewers at its peak.
Following the example of American local television stations, it was initially a program without political and foreign news, and with a lot of regional news about abuses, accidents and other incidents and all attention was paid to the people to whom the news happened. From 1996, Milika Peterzon and Cilly Dartell were the two faces of the program.
ANPCilly Dartell in 2003
The idea of a news section for ordinary people who don’t feel heard appealed to Dartell. Their opinions and interests were central. The editorial staff spoke of “white caps, black caps journalism”. The ‘white hats’ were the ordinary people who got stuck with the government and other institutions, the ‘black hats’ the authorities. Heart of the Netherlands stood “alongside the people”, and called the black caps to account on their behalf. They had to explain to the camera.
Dartell received a lot of criticism after her switch, because this was not serious journalism. She always defended the program, pointed out that Heart of the Netherlands stuck to the facts and that making such a program required more creativity than following politics and world news. She was averse to emotion and drama in the presentation texts: “The event itself is often dramatic enough.”
Dubai
She remained one of the faces of for years Heart of the Netherlands and went too Show news present. It helped that she had “fantastic colleagues” and there was “a lot of mutual warmth”. When she moved to Dubai in 2007 because of her husband’s work, who had become a pilot, she continued to work there. From now on she presented two weeks a month Heart of the Netherlands in Show newsso she also flew back and forth between Amsterdam and Dubai twice every month.
She was having a great time in Dubai, which is often considered unliveable, where there is air conditioning everywhere inside and people only travel outside by car. “Everything here is the most beautiful, largest, fastest. Everything is finished and beautifully made. Even the viaducts have beautiful tile scenes,” she said in an interview with de Volkskrant. “Dubai is of course a dictatorship, but it is also a safe and pleasant society. It only becomes unpleasant if you don’t follow the rules, drink alcohol on the street or steal.”
Buckets of tears
In 2012, to her great disappointment, she was fired after sixteen years at SBS because viewing figures were declining and the new management of the broadcaster wanted to try with younger faces. She shed “buckets of tears”, but in her last broadcast she held up and smiled professionally. Afterwards there were hugs and cuddles from colleagues.
Cilly Dartell was quickly able to start working for the public broadcaster at Omroep Max. There she presented the afternoon program together with Frank du Mosch from 2013 Studio Max Live. She found delving into the stories and lives of the people she was going to interview the most beautiful thing there was.
Dream house
In 2017, she moved to Florida, where she had owned a home with her husband and children since the 1990s. Together they built a new ‘dream house’ on an airstrip, a strip of grass that local residents use to take off and land with their private planes. “Every day feels like a vacation,” she said in an interview, but she also became increasingly weaker due to her illness.
She had previously had lung cancer, but in February 2020, just before the corona pandemic broke out, she was told it was terminal. She continued to battle her illness for almost four years. On November 15, she announced that she had lost the battle and the end was near.
2023-12-06 16:17:00
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