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by Gordon Pinsent

  “I’d like to use my voice to sing for all of you,” she told the hundreds of family, fans, and friends who had come out for the occasion – and then delivered a throaty, flawless a cappella version of “Danny Boy,” with appropriate lyric changes (“O Gordie Boy …”).

  Her impromptu performance earned her the first spontaneous standing ovation of the evening. Which seemed to surprise her. But not us.

  There were more tributes, each salute more generous than the previous one. “Are you sure I still have a pulse?” I murmured. Charm flashed her one-thousand-kilowatt Warning smile, and we both laughed.

  After I got up to thank my roasters and my admirers, I admitted I was feeling awkward about the whole thing. “I didn’t count on anything. I thought my payment was in the work I was doing. But you haven’t forgotten me. You remembered me, bringing me back into the heart of Grand Falls again.

  “When I was young,” I told them, “I admired the grown-ups. I admired what they had done. My interests, my fascination with the grown-ups had a touch of forefather to it. I was in a hurry to be grown-up. I was training to be like the people in this town.

  “As young people we didn’t think that life started with us. We knew our history was there to pick like blueberries whenever we needed it, whenever we wanted it.

  “We didn’t know it then but we know it now – our family was rich beyond belief. We were rich in each other. Without exception my three sisters would show up at every live theatre event I did, no matter how small.”

  I looked out at the crowd. Nita’s family, Hazel’s family, and Lil’s family were all seated at tables facing me. I had known them when they were children, and I knew them now, and it was an absolute delight to see it all coming together.

  “Yes, it was showing off,” I continued. “That’s what I did, from as early on as I can remember. I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be heard. I was so driven, so fast-track, trying to push a career as far as I could. So I had to go into what I had to do.”

  My teachers, I added, would be surprised if they could see me now. “No, no, that’s not him, he’s wearing a necktie, for God’s sake!”

  And then I finally ’fessed up.

  “When I was very young I wanted a birthday party,” I admitted. “Wanted some excitement. Wanted some attention. I was ten at the time. So I told my pals, ‘It’s my birthday, you know – pass it on. I’m having a party. In the family woodshed. Bring gifts.’

  “They did. They brought gifts they’d been given for Christmas, or their birthdays. One fellow brought an ice cream maker and all the ingredients. I went into the kitchen to negotiate with my older sister Nita and my mother. ‘I need plates and spoons, please. I’m having a party.’

  “One of the girls had a crush on me, and she asked what was going on. One of my pals explained that it was my birthday, and I was having a party.

  “She was puzzled by this information. ‘It can’t be Gordie’s birthday,’ she said, ‘because Gordie’s birthday is the same day as mine.’ So they all left and took their gifts with them.

  “And it did occur to me, fleetingly, at this seventy-fifth birthday celebration, that the 750 guests might all decide to leave and take their gifts with them. But happily that didn’t happen.

  “I’ve just had a whale of a time. And I will not be shaken from that memory.”

  Before we adjourned I was presented with a special award from the RCMP. The presenter was a statuesque blonde female RCMP officer. Without thinking, I thanked her and kissed her on both cheeks. She blushed.

  “I’ve never kissed a Mountie before,” I said. “But then, there’s a first time for everything.”

  Charm and I were still blissed out by the whole event when our Air Canada flight landed us safely back in Toronto.

  away from her

  NO MATTER HOW MUCH OF LIFE YOU EAT UP, THERE’S always something left over.

  How else to explain my good fortune when Sarah Polley cast me, Porky Pinsent, seventy-five years young, as Grant Anderson in Away from Her? Sarah wanted to work with people she knew, people she liked working with. And she was so ready, so prepared. I wasn’t concerned about this being her first time directing, because I knew her well enough to know that she would be ready. It’s that moment, that moment of realization, that you’re about to do something you really want to do, something maybe you’ve always wanted to do, and I think that must have been what Sarah was feeling when we started shooting. She had come over to the house a couple of times, and walked around looking at everything, especially all the photographs on the walls, and she said, “Gordon, every picture that you’re in, you’re laughing!”

  “Yes,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “I don’t know, Gordon,” she said. “But you laugh SO much. You’re always laughing!”

  So she knew me, and she had worked with Julie Christie and Olympia Dukakis before, so she didn’t have to worry about us and she could concentrate on other things. She knew we had her back.

  Working with Julie was great fun. Julie is terrific. I had never seen Darling. I have seen her in all sorts of other stuff, going all the way back to Billy Liar, but not the one she won the Oscar for, so many years earlier.

  Olympia was fun to work with too. On our first day of shooting together I detected a lovely scent in the air.

  “You smell good,” I told her. “What are you wearing?”

  “EV-rything!” she said, and cracked me right up.

  We had a week of rehearsal, which was great. Just lovely. Just Sarah and Julie and Olympia and me, and we would have sandwiches. It’s like going back to school together. You get there and you bring an apple for the teacher, and try to put the piece together, try to make your own contribution to it, to make it richer if you possibly can. We had all come from different places, to play in the same kindergarten together. And suddenly it felt like you were part of their game, and they were part of yours. Suddenly you were speaking the same language.

  Apparently Sarah had given Julie a choice of three actors, 1, 2, and 3, and I was number 3. And Julie said, “No to number one, no to number two, and yes to Gordon Pinsent.” The first time I met her we happened to be getting out of our cars at the same time, and she opened her arms and cried, “My husband!” Which was very sweet of her. One time I picked up some coffee for us, and Julie said, very grandly, “That’s all I’ll ask of you, Gordon! That’s all you will have to do, pick up the coffee and not forget it!”

  “Be guaranteed of it,” I said rather formally, “I will!”

  On another occasion she caught a certain glint in my eye and somehow discerned what I was thinking but not saying aloud.

  “Y’know, Gordon,” she said, “you strike me as someone who’s sitting on a lot of one-liners!”

  “Oh no,” I said, “not me. Not at all.” And she just grinned back at me, not buying it for a second.

  Like many stars she would choose her moments to be light, but you never knew when they would happen. We were in Paris, Ontario, shooting, and she was on the other side of the street with her assistant, waiting to be called. And she saw me on this side of the street and screamed, “Gordon Pinsent! Oh my God, it’s Gordon Pinsent!” And I started to bark, “Julie Christie! Look, it’s Julie Christie!” And we stood there laughing and shouting at each other across the street.

  Charm visited me on location whenever she could. Back in Toronto she had returned to Albert Schultz and Soulpepper to play two classics in rep: Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The Soulpepper production of Our Town was so popular, she confided, that there was already talk of mounting it again next season, and Albert had approached her about doing Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, and she was already bubbling with enthusiasm.

  Meanwhile, we were shooting our winter scenes in the Ontario snowbelt. On the first day we were getting dressed to shoot the cross-country skiing sequence, and our trainers were there with us. Julie got into her suit, and s
he got out onto the snow, and she was good. She was better than I was, faster than I was, catching on quicker than I was. I wasn’t catching on at all. I was having a series of falls, telling Sarah that I hoped she was getting them all, because I thought they could be inspirational, and really add a level of sincerity to the film. In the film itself, of course, they cut from me struggling to my double, who is whizzing across the horizon like a pro. But Julie was good.

  Julie had done a lot of preparation. I think that was the way she approached everything. Very professional. It was a large part, and in the past few years she had been doing smaller roles, so she was feeling a bit insecure. At one point she introduced us all to Lindy Davies, a director friend of hers from Australia, who sat on the set and scrutinized her performance. “I’m not sure about that move, dear,” she might say. Or, “Maybe go up the stairs a little faster.” Sarah was perfectly sanguine. Her expression never changed.

  Lindy went to see rushes one night, to report back to Julie, and when Julie came on the set the next morning, she told me, “Lindy said you were stunning.” And I thought, Okay, I’m home free. So it was wonderful for me, because we got along so well.

  Julie also devoted a lot of time and energy to green initiatives, working to save the planet. Which of course I teased her about.

  “You’re going to be very proud of me, Julie,” I told her one day, “because I just bought a hybrid.”

  “Oh my!” she said, genuinely surprised. “That’s wonderful, Gordon!”

  “Yes,” I said, “and it’s so quiet! It’s perfect for sneaking up on baby seals.”

  I decided to play the husband as an observer, someone who was playing catch-up, and I did it that way because I wanted to play him as an average guy who had no reason to know very much about this particular disease. Even today most people still don’t know very much about Alzheimer’s. I didn’t know very much about it then. So I imagined myself as a man on the street who, suddenly faced with having to deal with it as a caregiver, has to find out as much about it as he can, and discovers a whole new world. And that way I could stand back a lot, watch the procedure, and see who was involved, and feel the shock of losing her all the more. And as long as I stayed with that, I could go anywhere.

  Truthfully, I had only sort-of-read the short story – skimmed it, really – before we started shooting. But it was Sarah’s screenplay I wanted to shoot. Because the writing is everything. You enter into someone else. It’s rather a childlike thing, once you’re into a character like Grant in that movie. It’s like a day away from yourself. You go away into another life. You have no idea of time passing by or anything else. It’s a lovely thing. And sometimes, if you’re doing it right, you can speak with silence. I had very little dialogue to learn, but I was in almost every scene of the film, so I had to make the most of all those moments, for me and for the audience.

  Months later Away from Her was selected for a gala screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. Sitting in the centre box that night at the festival, with Julie and Sarah and the rest of the cast, watching the audience watch the movie, watching for any sign of restlessness whatsoever, hearing no sound except what was coming from the screen, because the audience was so silent, so still, and then at the end, that explosion of applause – it was one of the highlights, maybe the highlight, of my life as an actor. Standing there, in the front row of the box at Roy Thomson Hall, the spotlights blazing on us, blinking at the hundreds of little flashes from cameras all over the room, and all the time, people cheering – for a minute I thought I was in another film. David Perlmutter, a producer and an old friend, was so moved that he rushed over and kissed me on the cheek, and I was so happy to be there with Charm on my arm.

  After the screening we all went out to celebrate, of course. Little did we know what a memorable post-gala party it would be.

  TORONTO (CP) - Veteran actor Gordon Pinsent was resting at home Tuesday, a day after collapsing at a party for the new Sarah Polley film Away From Her. “He’s fine. He’ll have to take it easy for a day or two,” his wife, Charmaine King,* said in an interview. “He’d been doing too much work for the last 10 days or so, promoting the film. But he’s fine.”

  Pinsent, 76, is a companion of the Order of Canada and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He worked in theatre as a teenager and moved on to roles in radio drama, television and film. King said doctors told Pinsent he was dehydrated. He stayed overnight in hospital.

  I’m sure some people thought it was a publicity stunt. There we were, at the traditional glamorous after-party, at which I smiled profusely, modestly accepted the extravagant praise being showered upon me, and then, without so much as a by-your-leave, I collapsed. Oh sure, arrive by limo, depart by ambulance. Talk about an exit!

  Okay, dehydrated. I don’t suppose it had anything to do with endlessly talking about myself for three consecutive days before the screening, to any newspaper, radio, or television interviewer who would have me. This was one film I was eager to help promote, but when you’re running on that particular treadmill you can sometimes mistake one thing for another. Apparently I mistook drink for food. It happens.

  Needless to say Charm was terribly upset with me. No one who gets billing above the title is supposed to collapse at his own party. It’s simply not done. But at least I had a good excuse.

  When Charm asked me what had happened, I was perfectly candid.

  “I was talking to some English producers,” I told her, “and I was having a bite to eat, and a drink, and people kept coming up to us, interrupting us, to tell me how great I was in the movie. And I turned, and I tripped over my ego.”

  Charm loved that.

  I subsequently managed to get through premieres in New York and L.A. without falling down again. Sarah and Julie and I were together for the New York and L.A. Writers Guild screenings for the film. At the New York event Sidney Lumet, a director I’d always admired, sought me out after the screening to tell me how moved he was by the film and my work in it, and Robin Williams did the same thing in L.A., which, as you can imagine, didn’t hurt my feelings at all. Even if they did get a bit bruised around Oscar time.

  The company distributing Away from Her was Lionsgate Films. Lionsgate launched an Oscar campaign for the film, promoting Julie for Best Actress and Sarah for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. I too thought Julie and Sarah were the most obvious Oscar candidates and agreed with Lionsgate’s choices, and professionally I did not feel slighted. I knew it wasn’t personal, and I assumed that Lionsgate did not have an unlimited budget for Oscar trolling.

  “This is outrageous!” Larry protested when he learned of this. “Lionsgate should be promoting you too!” he stormed. “Don’t they read their own reviews? Let’s get real here! You stand a better chance of growing angel wings than winning an Academy Award. In fact you stand a better chance of growing angel wings than being nominated for an Academy Award. But, by God, you should absolutely be included in their For Your Consideration ads in the trades! After all those reviews, they don’t even mention you?? That’s ridiculous!”

  When the 2008 Oscar nods were announced, Julie was nominated for Best Actress and Sarah was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. Closer to home, when the 2008 Genie nominations were announced, Away from Her was up for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Editing.

  The Oscar buzz began. “Gordon, you’ve got to come down here!” Julie messaged from Hollywood. “Everyone is talking about you. Everyone wants to meet you!”

  She was right. I should have gone down there. It wasn’t like I didn’t know the town. But instead, I stayed put. I should’ve gone down there and hung out, or delivered papers or something, to establish once and for all a reputation. But that’s not who I was. It’s still not who I am.

  After all these years I still don’t play the game very well. I’ve always kept my mouth shut around stars. I don’t know why. Maybe because of the Pin
sent anxiety. Maybe because of my fascination with them when I was growing up.

  Away from Her was winning global acclaim. Would my career be different today if I had been more aggressive then? Maybe. Maybe not. My agent received two offers from Hollywood after Away from Her opened in the U.S. One was insignificant window-dressing; my character was not even remotely essential to the story. The other was a horror film in which a bunch of elderly characters in an old folks’ home get slashed and trashed by a middle-aged serial killer who didn’t get along with his parents. What you really want to say is, YOU’VE GOT TEN MINUTES TO GET THIS SCRIPT OFF MY RANCH! But this is show business, so what you say is, No Thank You I Don’t Think This Particular Script Is Right for Me at This Particular Time but Thanks Very Much for Thinking of Me.

  On February 24, 2008, Julie and Sarah, both beautifully coiffed and gowned, looked stunning on camera at the 80th Academy Awards. Julie lost Best Actress to Marion Cotillard for her stunning portrayal of Edith Piaf in La vie en rose; Sarah lost the Writing prize to Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men. The Coens also took Best Picture and Best Director, so at least she knew she’d been beaten by the best. She later reported back to me, very sweetly, that later at the Governor’s Ball she was sought out by Susan Sarandon and Best Actor winner Daniel Day-Lewis,* both asking for me.

  “Please tell him for me,” said Day-Lewis, “that his was one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.”

  Sarandon was equally effusive. “This is a performance all actors should see,” she told Sarah.

  Yes, I should have been there.

  Julie sent me a postcard from a woodland retreat in California.

  Dear Gordon,

  I appreciated your flowers more than any others I received. It was so thoughtful and generous, and everyone was saying, who is that brilliant actor? And how could he not be nominated? More and more there was a feeling that you deserved a nomination just as much as, if not more than, we. I’m counting on you and Sarah to retrieve our ragged collars. Lots of love, sweetheart.