Gordon Pinsent - Next

COPYRIGHT 2012 BY KINGPIN PRODUCTIONS INC .
AND MALJO ENTERPRISES INC .

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Pinsent, Gordon, 1930
Next / Gordon Pinsent.

eISBN: 978-0-7710-7138-6

1. Pinsent, Gordon, 1930-. 2. Actors Canada Biography.
I. Title.

PN 2308. P 49 A 3 2012 792.028092 C 2012-900972-5

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited
One Toronto Street
Toronto, Ontario
M 5 C 2 V 6
www.mcclelland.com

v3.1

Charm, this is for you,
as is everything I do.

Who is Gordon Pinsent?

Hes an actor, a movie star, a painter, a writer, a poet, a lyricist. And, first and foremost, an artist.

We sit at the kitchen table in his downtown penthouse apartment, looking out at the west side of Toronto. My assignment, my task, is to elicit memories. we talk about the Winnipeg years, the Hollywood years, and his boyhood in Newfoundland, and suddenly he starts singing a verse of Farewell, Amanda, the Cole Porter song that David Wayne crooned to Katharine Hepburn in Adams Rib.

Of all things to remember! he says, chiding himself. Yes, of all things to remember a song from an MGM movie that came out in 1949, more than six decades ago, when he was an admittedly callow youth of nineteen.

Gordon the Actor has an actors memory. Gordon the Poet rhymes words Ive never heard rhymed before and makes verbs out of nouns.

Old ladies, plain old ladies,

lackadaisin under a tree thats shady

Gadflies and gals, Pepsodent pals in the sun

wonderin how it will be when the war is won

Old gentry, hoi polloi gentry

gentlemen distinctive and parliamentary

Has anyone ever before or since made a rhyming lyric of parliamentary?

No wonder we get along so well.

In many ways we had grown up in show business together. In one earlier professional incarnation, I interviewed actors and movie stars for a living. And because I was raised in screening rooms and spent so much time in Hollywood, I knew almost all those films he saw as a child, who was in them, and why he was so taken by them. So it was, for me, pure pleasure to coax and cajole those stories from him, so he could revisit all those moments and share them with all of us in this autobiography.

It was also fascinating, and more than a bit heartwarming, for me to hear him talk about his life with Charmion King. As you will learn, Gordon and Charmion met when she was starring on stage and he was cast as her love interest. (And was apparently of some interest to her, he notes, on the luckiest day of my life.)

I was already familiar with Charmion Kings work on the big screen and the small screen; she made her moments count. I remembered her work with Don McKellar, playing the Meals on Wheels lady in his quirky television series Twitch City, and the cameo she did for him in the first feature film he directed, Last Night. But my memories of her work on stage are far more vivid. Ill never forget her portrayal of Ethel Barrymore in Royal Family at the Shaw Festival, or the huge laughs she sparked when she rocked the house as Jessica in Jitters.

I also have this fond, funny memory of going through U.S. customs with her one day at the Toronto airport. I was on my way to L.A. to interview some movie star, and Charm was on her way to Houston to do a play. She had bought a box of very good Cuban cigars as a gift for the director, a man whom she knew was exceedingly fond of cigars, at a time when you couldnt get good Cubans in America. Much to her clearly apparent chagrin, two male U.S. customs officials refused to let her take the Cuban cigars to Texas. When she asked what the hell she was supposed to do with them, she was told to just leave them with us. At which point she smiled sweetly at the customs officer and replied, No. No, I dont think Ill be doing that. She then opened the box of Cuban cigars, walked over to a large trash can and destroyed each cigar breaking them one by one, rendering them unsalvageable and dropped each one, now torn asunder, into the trash, while the U.S. customs officials watched in horror.

Witnessing her performance that day was the highlight of my trip.

I still regret that I never saw her that very last time, doing Our Town with Soulpepper in Toronto in 2006. It was such a big hit that they had already announced they were bringing it back again; I thought there was plenty of time. But, there wasnt. My wife and I ended up, along with most of Canadian show business, at Albert Schultzs memorial tribute to her, held at the Young Centre on the same stage she had shared with him in Our Town. Richard Ouzounian wrote in the Toronto Star, She was the class act of Canadian show business. Next is, in so many ways, a love letter to Charmion King.

The author of the love letter remains open yet enigmatic, practical yet romantic. Gordon Pinsents lifelong friend Perry Rosemond sees him as a true Renaissance man: He acts, he writes, he directs, he paints he even builds furniture!

Another long-time friend, Larry Dane, sees Gordon as a man whose greatest work of art is himself a man who knows his own brand.

Gordon has a reputation of being an actor, he says, of being someone who can really act. And yes, there are a lot of actors out there, but most of them are not considered that way. The way you are perceived will lay the groundwork for your entire career. And that perception has to come from you. You pass it on to your agents, and you pass it on to the world of show business. I will do this, but I will not do that. Its up to you to set the tone.

From the very beginning, Gordon was considered and regarded as an Actor. He isnt playing the same part in the same series for years and years, so audiences dont get tired of him. And Gordon is happy when hes working, as long as you treat him with respect. He does have a line that he will draw; there are certain things he will not do. When he says I wont do this, and I wont do that, producers may get pissed off for a few minutes, but ultimately they like it. Because they know where they stand with him, and they respect him for it. And that creates longevity.

And how. Pinsent has been onstage and onscreen for more than half a century. He is a member of a select group of actors Christopher Plummer, William Shatner, and Donald Sutherland among them who have never stopped working. Only HRM Queen Elizabeth II has held her job longer than they have and she never had to audition. Paul Gross, a relatively new Old Friend in Pinsent chronology, has described him as preternaturally young, bottomlessly creative; his contribution to our country is immeasurable and his passion for our country is inexhaustible. And the fact that Pinsent decided to live and work in Canada was not lost on Gross, who, in his own words, did a similar sort of thing. He says, I went down to L.A. and came back home to do