Wendy Crewson has carved out an impressive career playing virtuous moms in Holly-

wood and tough, go-for-broke heroines on Canadian television.

Case in point is Crewson’s lead performance in the CBC MOW The Many Trials of One Jane Doe, produced by Indian Grove and Original Pictures, which has earned her a 2003 Gemini nomination. The movie tells the story of the traumatized victim of a serial rapist who is driven to action against a police department that knowingly exposed her to danger.

Before that, there was the 1998 TV movie At the End of the Day: The Sue Rodriguez Story, in which Crewson won the big prize for playing a victim of Lou Gehrig’s disease pursuing the right to die. A year previously, she grabbed a Gemini for a guest stint on Due South. Then, last year, she was recognized with the Gemini Humanitarian Award.

Hamilton, ON-born Crewson credits Jane Doe director Jerry Ciccoritti with making another Gemini possible, not least of all by helping to delicately capture a victim’s quest to expose a negligent and insensitive police and legal system.

‘[Ciccoritti] captured the horror of the rape, and [the victim’s] sheer determination and force of will to keep the case going, through every setback,’ Crewson explains on a rare day off in Toronto.

Leading Hollywood roles elusive

But while Crewson may have become a household name in Canada for her TV work, playing the leading lady in Hollywood has thus far eluded her.

Instead, 47-year-old Crewson has long toiled in the trenches stateside, appearing as the wife and mother opposite Harrison Ford in Air Force One, Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man and Arnold Schwarzenegger in The 6th Day.

‘I do sort of get cast as the strong wife in the background, with a solid marriage and a nice family,’ she says. ‘Not that that’s bad. I get to hang out with a lot of interesting guys.’

None of this will be news to fellow Canadian actors, but it does give some measure of the mountain Crewson has had to climb in Hollywood in order to make it in Canada. For while she might disparage Hollywood for its lack of creativity and bottom-line mentality, Crewson used her damsel-in-distress U.S. credits to stretch her acting muscles in CBC and CTV MOWs.

‘I get the Canadian roles because I do the movies down there,’ she says, point blank.

The irony of her career is that she had to leave Canada for acting school in Britain and a career as a character actor in Los Angeles before she could arrive as a leading lady back home. Early Hollywood credits in 1982/83 include forgettable sword-and-sorcery fare such as the MOW Mazes and Monsters and the feature Skullduggery.

Crewson recalls being an exile in Hollywood early on, wondering along with other Canuck ex-pats about how to get back home.

‘All we wanted to do was to be asked back,’

she remembers.

Los Angeles may have year-round sunshine, but it stifled the young actor’s yearning for juicy, dramatic roles.

‘Nothing dampens creativity more than a bunch of producers on set in black suits and ponytails,’ Crewson remarks. She adds she wanted to return to Canada to ‘do the things that are important. Everyone wants to feel the ideas are flying.’

And she wanted to play the leading lady and produce, as is the case with Jane Doe.

‘I like being number one on the call sheet. It’s a completely different experience, being passionately invested in what you’re doing,’ she says.

Crewson’s other recent credits include four Joanne Kilbourn films for Shaftesbury Films and CTV, based on crime novels by Gail Bowen. She also has a recurring role on the third season of the acclaimed spy series 24 on Fox. All of which means Crewson is a frequent flyer between Toronto, her current home, and Hollywood.

‘I’ve been going back and forth since the middle of July, as [the makers of 24] block two shoots at a time. So I organize my children and lay down the law, and then take off again,’ she says.

Also keeping her returning to Toronto is husband Michael Murphy, with whom she lived in San Francisco for 10 years before they decided to move north two years ago.

‘He loves Canada and truly loves Toronto. He’s more of a New Yorker than a Californian,’ Crewson says of her husband, whose own screen credits include Magnolia and Manhattan.

And now Murphy, at age 65, loves Canadian acting gigs, having just finished performing in Winnipeg opposite Fiona Reid in the Shaftesbury MOW In the Dark.

‘He tells me it’s like Hollywood used to be, in the sense that you don’t have a big corporation looking over your shoulder, analyzing your every move,’ Crewson says of her husband’s work here.

But TV movie roles for Crewson and Murphy are drying up as Canadian TV production subsidies shrink.

‘I do a lot of work up here, but I used to do more when there was an industry here,’ Crewson says.

She adds that TV dramas and MOWs are crucial to ensuring and sustaining Canada’s identity and culture.

‘There’s so little funding, and it’s easier to buy American programming, and that’s sad. What are we telling the kids watching Canadian TV? No one is thinking about this,’ she argues.

Hence Crewson’s determination to give back on Canadian screens, and not simply take the money and run in Hollywood. To that end, she is collaborating with veteran Canadian TV director George Bloomfield and colleagues on a filmmaking co-op that aims at shooting prestige films on a budget.

‘Everyone knows there are jobs you do for money,’ she concedes. ‘But you ask yourself, ‘How are we all going to find our way back to what we really want to do, and tell the stories we really want to tell?’ You want to make films where you sit in the theater and cheer about getting that one shot. We had $50, but we still got that incredible shot.’