Bright sunshiny day.

Fonction Business: entrepreneur

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Perhaps it's her business background that gave her the edge; or maybe the credit should go to her passion for comedy. At any rate, actor/writer/director/coach Sylvia Day has improvised her way into a sparkling career.

"I realized you have to make your own opportunities." So says Sylvia Day, a self-motivated performer who turned what could have been a daunting challenge--the language barrier facing a would-be English-speaking actress in Zurich --into a business niche.

While entrepreneurship isn't a word most people associate with actors, in fact, making a career from theatre requires a great deal of strategic thinking and careful management--especially in such difficult circumstances. Day, an energetic and warm woman with the kind of mobile, expressive face that does as much work in conveying her thoughts as her actual words, embodies the kind of creativity that belongs in a boardroom as much as a rehearsal space.

Two decades ago, back in the United States Day was working in corporate communications and pursuing her interest in comedy on the side, studying with Stevie Ray in Minnesota and then the storied Second City in Chicago. But Europe was calling. "I wanted to have that European experience, having lived in Brussels for five years as a child," she told me over coffee. "And (thanks to a Swiss father) I had the passport."

It was a bold move as an actress, I suggest, to move to a country that's not English speaking?

"Well, I didn't know how far the acting would take me. At the time I was working in corporate communication, so when I came here, realistically I thought, 'Okay, that's where I'm going to get the work."' Once in Zurich she joined the English-speaking Zurich Comedy Club, later starting a monthly improv workshop (together with her now husband, whom she met in the club), which performs as The IMPROVables. "And I was still always wanting to go further and further. So then I started branching out into my own business."

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By this time Day had a son, so doing improv workshops with children was a natural progression. "And then I started finally putting my thoughts to paper and I said, I'm going to write my own show. I want to write my own show.

"I always had these sketches in my mind, these ideas, and I thought, 'Now is the time.' It just felt like the right time. My son was at the age for it, he didn't demand so much of me. And I had stopped working full-time when he was born anyway, I...

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