Gordon Pinsent, Canadian acting icon, dead at 92
'Gordon passionately loved this country and its people, purpose, and culture to his last breath,' family says
Gordon Pinsent, one of Canada'smost prolific and iconic actors, has died. He was 92.
"Gordon Pinsent's daughters Leahand Beverly, and his son Barry, would like to announce the passing of their father peacefully in sleep today with his family at his side,"said a note released late Saturday,written on behalf of Pinsent's family by his son-in-law, actor Peter Keleghan.
"Gordon passionately loved this country and its people, purpose, and culture to his last breath."
The Grand Falls, N.L., native and Canadian household name had a storied acting career spanning dozens of films and TV projects over six decades, including Due South, The Red Green Show, Babar and the Adventures of Badou, The Grand Seduction and The Shipping News.
Focusing on CBC programs alone, one could add The Forest Rangers,Quentin Durgens, M.P.,the original Street Legaland Republic of Doyle, among others.
In the U.S., where he lived in Los Angelesfor six years, it was such TV series and movies as It Takes A Thief, Silence of the North, Young Prosecutors, Banacek, and the feature filmThe Thomas Crown Affair.
"My whole career has depended on the happiness that I get when asked to do something," Pinsent said in a 2010 Toronto Life interview. "Pick up the phone and say 'yes.' I do that a lot."
Comedian and actor Mark Critch, a fellow Newfoundlander, saidhe will miss Pinsent as a mentor, friend, hero and "giant colossus of Canadian entertainment."
Actors in Canada are following "on a path that [Pinsent]cut through a forest," Critch said.
My pal Gordon Pinsent passed. I saw him a few weeks ago, his twinkle as bright as ever. I looked up to him as the Rowdyman but loved him as Porky Pinsent from Grand Falls. He cut the path the rest of us travelled. A household name based on Canadian work. The best there ever was pic.twitter.com/1s9yoE9Wml
—@markcritchBorn on July 12, 1930, Pinsent was the youngest of six children born to Stephen Pinsent, a paper mill worker and cobbler, and his wife, Flossie.
Pinsent said he was a shy, awkward child who once suffered from rickets but found freedom in acting, starting in the 1940s at the age of 17.
In the early 1950s, Pinsent took a break from acting and joined the Canadian Army, serving for about four years.But acting washis true love.
More than 150 roles
Pinsent joined the Stratford Festivalin 1962 with roles inMacbeth,The Taming of the Shrew,The TempestandCyrano de Bergerac, and he returned to Stratford in the mid-'70s as a leading player.
He had more than 150 TV and movie acting credits to his name, with hisInternet Movie Database resum spanning from a 1957TV movie to a cartoon voice in 2021.
A companion of the Order of Canada and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Pinsent alsoreceived the Governor General's Performing Arts Award, the Earle Grey Award for lifetime achievement in television, and a star on Canada's Walk of Fame.
He won every major acting prize in the country, including the Genie for best actor in 2001'sThe Shipping News,based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Annie Proulx.
Five years later, Pinsentwon best actor Genie and ACTRA awards for his internationally recognized work in Sarah Polley'sAway From Her.
'Extraordinary' performance
In the 2016 documentary about his life,The River of My Dreams a film where a reflective, sometimes impish Pinsent speaks in eloquentparagraphs infused with his Newfoundland accent he says his wife, the actress Charmion King, suggested he take the role, which turned out to be the high-water mark for his career.
Canadiandirector Norman Jewisonsaid in the same doc thatPinsent's performancein Away From Herof a man losing his wife (Julie Christie) to Alzheimer's disease was "extraordinary."
"It was so simple, yet so powerful and so moving," Jewison said of Pinsent. "And I think a lot of it was because you believed him."
Those types of kudos tickled the modest Pinsent.
"Now you see, I don't talk that way about myself, so I was pleased it was just terrific," hesaid about similar praise at the time from English actor Daniel Day-Lewis.
Amid the plaudits,Pinsent had a tragedy in hispersonal life as the film was being released: King, hiswife of 45 years,died in January 2007 after a long struggle withemphysema.
"It was something I wasn't necessarily drawing on except in the general sense of how anyone must feel at a certain time of life after spending so many years with a partner," an emotional Pinsent said then.
"It's almost impossible to grasp ... how do you prepare? Where does love go? Where do you go, the leftover?"
King and Pinsent had one child together, actress Leah Pinsent. Healso had two children from an earlier marriage, Barry and Beverly.
A Renaissance man
Pinsent was also a painter, a writer, a playwrightand a director. Two of his Newfoundland-set novels, The Rowdyman andJohn and the Missus, were turned into feature films.Pinsentstarred in the former and both directed and acted in the latter.
His memoirs, By the Way, were published in 1994.
Though he struggled with chronic pain in his later years, Pinsent remained prolific, with about 20 acting credits during the 2010s.
At age 80, he went viral on CBC's This Hour Has 22 Minutesby reading 16-year-old Justin Bieber'smemoir with mock gravitas.
And at 81, he put out an album of his own poetry set to rock music by Greg Keelorof Blue Rodeoand Travis Good of The Sadies.
In 2016, he released a short film he wrote and self-funded called Martin's Hagge, about a middle-aged writer burdened by a personified version of anxiety and depression.
He said he kept workingbecause each new project felt like getting away with something he didn't quite deserve.
"I ran fast before they could catch me and say,'No, no, acting is for silly people!'" he told CBC Newsin 2010.
Canadian actor R.H. Thomson, who has been almost as prolific as Pinsent, said in the 2016 documentary that artists have an enormous role in how a country's "cloth is woven."
"And artists like Gordon ...[have]pulled that thread back and forth, as Canada's loom has made this cloth of who we are and where we've been and where we're going to," he said.
"And that colour of Gordon Pinsent going through and through the tapestry is now inevitably part of any story of Canada for me."
With files from CBC's Deana Sumanac-Johnson and The Canadian Press
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