Reel Beach: Three Best Actress Oscar winners with Canadian roots

By BERNIE FLETCHER

Toronto often plays an American city on screen. If you saw a Chicago police car on Queen Street East last August, don’t worry, it was just a scene from the show Accused.

Debra Winger’s character is arrested by an officer (and a gentleman) outside the Beach Ballroom beside Jonathan Ashbridge Park.

A 2002 documentary, Searching for Debra Winger, explored ageism and sexism in the movie industry. Even today actresses who do well after 50 are said to be making “a comeback.”

In Sunset Boulevard (1950) faded film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) famously said, “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” as she was taken away to an institution. Swanson was all of 50 years old.

Last month Sunset Boulevard itself looked like a scene out of a disaster movie. Golden statuettes may not mean as much this year in a Los Angeles devastated by fire.

There was a time when Winger was a rising star, then it seemed like she “couldn’t get arrested in Hollywood.”

She was nominated for an Oscar for 1983’s Terms of Endearment, but Shirley MacLaine won the Academy Award for Best Actress playing Winger’s mother. Alfred Hitchcock once described MacLaine, the 20-year-old star of The Trouble with Harry (1955) as having “the guts of a bank robber.”

Last month I watched MacLaine in The Apartment (1960) and also in Only Murders in the Building (2023). I wondered how many Best Actress Oscar winners were still working.

Oddly enough, three of the oldest winners still going strong all have Canadian family roots. It’s been a long time since a Canadian won the Best Actress Oscar: Mary Pickford (1929), Norma Shearer (1930) and Marie Dressler (1931).

Pamela Anderson (The Last Showgirl) was passed over for an Oscar nom. Her character, Shelly, says, “I’m not that old” and asks, “I just have to disappear?”

“It’s unfortunate but our society is such that, for women in Hollywood, you get to a certain age and just fall off a cliff. But in my case I refuse to die. I will hang on, by a little finger if necessary.”

Ellen Burstyn.

What do Ellen Burstyn (92 years young), Shirley MacLaine (90) and Jane Fonda (87) have in common besides Oscar wins?

They are all outspoken, free-spirited, social activists with Canadian roots that go back centuries. They don’t suffer fools gladly and would never be “invisible”!

Burstyn has maternal French-Canadian and Indigenous roots. Her mother was Corriene Hamel whose maple-flavoured family tree goes all the way back to Jean Hamel (1652-1712) in Nouvelle France.

Jane Fonda will receive a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award on Feb. 23. Her mother, Francis Ford Seymour, was born in the Brockville area of Ontario. Fonda’s grandmother, Sophia Bower (1886-1974) was born in nearby Kemptville. The ancestors of the Bower family were prominent United Empire Loyalists and officer heroes in the War of 1812 defending against Americans attacking Upper Canada.

“The acquisition of Canada this year…will be a mere matter of marching.”

Thomas Jefferson, Aug. 4, 1812.

The United States wanted to annex British North America into the union as the “fourteenth state,” but the war brought Upper Canadian settlers and First Nations together to fight off the invaders. The War of 1812 laid the foundation for the emergence of Canada as an independent nation.

When Jane Fonda was filming Stanley and Iris (1990) with Robert DeNiro in Kew Gardens, I wonder if she knew her grandmother’s first cousin (Caroline MacGregor nee Bower) once lived nearby on Waverley Road.

Shirley MacLaine and her brother Warren Beatty are also descendants of United Empire Loyalists who settled in the Brockville area. Both were strongly influenced in progressive ideas by their Canadian relatives. Their mother Kathlyn MacLean (1903-1993) was born in Nova Scotia. Their maternal grandmother, Blanche Lehigh (1866-1943) was born near Brockville, studied voice at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and taught elocution here.

She encouraged her children and grandchildren to pursue the stage. Kathlyn yearned to be an actor and performed in a Toronto production of Twelfth Night in 1925 before getting married and moving back to Nova Scotia where she was the Dean of Women at Acadia University. MacLaine refers to her mom’s family as the “Canadian Redgraves.”

Kathlyn’s sister, Virginia “Ginny” MacLean was an actor in Toronto who married Alexander (A.A.) MacLeod, a prominent member of the Ontario Legislature from 1943 to 1951 for the Labour-Progressive (Communist) Party. Shirley and Warren often visited their family in Nova Scotia and Toronto when they were young. Warren was especially fascinated by his glamorous aunt and brilliant uncle. Though his own parents were staunch Republicans, Warren’s radical uncle and aunt were an inspiration for Beatty’s acclaimed 1981 film Reds.

A. A. MacLeod was called the “Red Tory” for his close friendship with Conservative premiers. When A. A. died in 1970, the Globe and Mail called him the best speaker at Queen’s Park who “dominated the Legislature as a left-wing member”.

I might also include Julie Andrews, born 1935, on this list. She gets her Andrews name from her stepfather, Ted Andrews, the “Canadian Troubadour” from East York.

Will things change for actresses “of a certain age”?

The best speech at the Golden Globes was by Demi Moore (The Substance) who is an Oscar frontrunner for playing a TV star fired because of her fading popularity and age.

You can watch the 97th Academy Awards live in the Beach at Oscar Night at the Fox. It starts at 7 p.m. on March 2. Doors open at 6 p.m. It’s free but donations to Cystic Fibrosis Canada will be accepted. For more information, go to https://www.foxtheatre.ca/