In a year that finds no less than three veterans vying for the best actress Oscar – Streep, Mirren and Dench – it’s only fitting that after nearly 100 television and film credits, as well as four Gemini Awards, our very own grand dame Wendy Crewson will be honored with the ACTRA Toronto award of excellence at an industry fete two nights earlier on Feb. 23.

‘Thank goodness Sarah [Polley] got it last year. Otherwise it makes you just feel old,’ quips a fit and youthful Wendy Crewson, 50, adopting an upper-class British accent for a stodgy ‘Thank you so much.’ ‘It’s fantastic, humbling and amazing to be given an award by your peers,’ she adds sincerely. ‘I’m thrilled – and terrified that I have to say something.’

The Hamilton, ON-born actor will no doubt find the words. And they will likely be trenchant, heartfelt and provocative. As we sit in her living room – which a friend describes as ‘early bordello’ – in Toronto’s Rosedale neighborhood, it takes about five minutes for polite conversation to turn from the likelihood of The Santa Clause 4 into a passionate diatribe on the survival of the Canadian production industry.

‘Because we’re on strike, I think there’s going to be a little politics involved,’ she says somewhat impishly while considering the effect of the ACTRA lockout on her acceptance speech. ‘But I’m preaching to the converted. You know how much the average actor makes in Canada? $12,000 a year. It’s a tough, tough life.’

It’s a life Crewson has been living for the past 25 years. Born and raised in Steeltown before moving to the suburbs of Winnipeg, where her father sold farm equipment, she did a year of post-grad theater in London and wasn’t considering a return to Canada.

‘I just came back for a holiday,’ she recalls. ‘But because I’d been living in London I had this British accent that I could do. Unlike Madonna, I did not use it in my real life. So I auditioned for [the CBC MOW] War Brides and got it.’

Crewson followed that up with a regular role on another CBC series, Home Fires, which lasted three seasons and was also set during World War Two.

‘At that point I still thought it was possible to have a career here,’ says Crewson. That changed when she was told by the CBC that she wouldn’t be considered for a big show she wanted to do.

‘They’d already used me on a couple of things, and it wasn’t my turn anymore,’ she deadpans with perfect comic timing.

This prompted Crewson’s first cross-border trip in search of work – a back and forthing that continues to this day and makes her one of the most successful and prolific Canadian actors, with credits on hit series like 24 and Hollywood blockbusters including Air Force One and What Lies Beneath with Harrison Ford and Disney’s Santa Clause franchise.

‘There wasn’t really a movie scene in Toronto,’ says Crewson of the early eighties. ‘The idea was that if you wanted to stay in films – which I did – you had to go away in order to come back and make movies. Because you didn’t have enough of a name until you did.’

Crewson considers 1991’s The Doctor with William Hurt her first ‘movie,’ but technically it was a $90,000 feature called Whodunit?, produced in 1986 by a first-timer named Christina Jennings and shot on an island in the Muskokas.

‘She borrowed my wardrobe and drove my black Beetle convertible,’ recalls Jennings, now co-CEO of Shaftesbury Films, ‘although Wendy couldn’t drive standard at the time.’

The modest shoot was catered by director Aiken Scherberger’s mother, who was German and served up all the sauerbraten the cast and crew could eat.

‘The clothes got so tight I could barely breathe,’ says Crewson. ‘I couldn’t get my jeans on I was so fat. I look back at that movie and I was just a porker.’

Although they’ve collaborated on a number of projects together over the years, including six Joanne Kilbourne mysteries and the more recent TMN/Movie Central series ReGenesis, Jennings says she knew early on there was something special about her lead actress.

Remarkable presence

‘When you say the camera loves [an actor], it isn’t necessarily about beauty – obviously Wendy is a beautiful woman – but some actors just have this presence, male or female, that’s remarkable,’ she says. ‘The camera just wants to stay there. You knew it in our little feature that we did.’

Someone else in Hollywood noticed the same qualities, although it took a little more leg work to convince casting agents that she could make the transition from TV to the big screen. While her role in The Doctor led to more auditions, she still had to get in line with 700 other actresses for the role of Harrison Ford’s wife in Air Force One (1997).

‘It got down to a bunch of us who had made it through 15 auditions,’ she says. ‘I’m not kidding. And his wife had nothing to say other than, ‘My husband!”

Crewson charmed director Wolfgang Peterson (Poseidon, Das Boot) by going into detail about her character’s back story (‘Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,’ she says) and landed the role. She’s since worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger (The 6th Day), Robin Williams (Bicentennial Man) and Robert Redford (The Clearing), among others.

But her most memorable experience came on Tanner ’88, a Robert Altman series about fictional presidential candidate Jack Tanner (played by her real-life husband Michael Murphy), set within the 1988 New Hampshire primaries. Crewson wasn’t initially cast in the show, but that quickly changed one night.

‘I’m sitting there reading the newspaper in the lobby,’ she says, setting the scene. ‘I’ve got a skirt on with stockings. Bob comes down.’ As has happened a half dozen times in the conversation, Crewson launches into a spot-on impersonation, this time of Altman. ”You want to be in this movie?’ ‘Yeah. Sure. Okay.’ ‘You’re gonna be his girlfriend. His mistress. I want to see you just like that reading the newspaper with your legs crossed and those black stockings. With those high heels. We’re just gonna see your legs go up the stairs and stuff.”

And that was that. Altman would shoot whatever happened during the day. ‘He sees something and it’s in the film,’ marvels Crewson. ‘For the first four episodes, he just shot my ankles. It was guerilla filmmaking, but you really see what all that creativity does. How you’re allowed to just let things happen. If you’re open to it.’

But while she’s grateful for the opportunity to work with name American actors and directors, and enjoys the attendant glamour, she’s realistic about the limitations.

‘It’s fun hanging out with those guys,’ she says. ‘But you know, if I want a real part, I come home. I get to do something meaningful to me. Stories that you really want to tell and need to be told. About women that you admire.’

Which is exactly what she did after she got to ‘hang out’ with Harrison Ford for three months. She read the script for the Barna-Alper MOW At the End of the Day: The Sue Rodriguez Story and connected immediately with a woman who is dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease and chooses to spare her son the burden of caring for her.

‘That’s what you want to do [as an actor] – explore psychology. These parts allow the chance to explore why people make the choices that they make,’ says Crewson passionately, citing other roles that followed, like Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour in Hunt for Justice and Lorraine Evanshen (the wife of a CFL star who lost his memory after a car crash) in The Man Who Lost Himself. ‘But certainly that American feature world allows me to do the Canadian stories that I want to do. It’s a nice trade-off.’

It also allowed her to say yes to Sarah Polley without looking at the script for the latter’s directorial debut, Away from Her. Crewson recalls how important Polley’s mother, the late casting agent Diane Polley, was for her early in her career.

‘She was the only one you wanted to go to,’ the actress says. ‘When you’re young and kind of hurt easily, you think, ‘I just can’t stand going to somebody mean.’ Sarah’s mom was just the best. You knew you always had a chance.’

The younger Polley is quick to return the compliment: ‘When I was stressed, my first A.D. Dan Murphy would just turn to me and say, ‘In three more shots, Wendy’s coming back.’ It would completely level me out.

‘She would arrive and some kind of curtain would just lift,’ adds Polley. ‘That black cloud would just go away. It feels when she’s on the set that there are way fewer problems – which isn’t the case at all – but she solves half of them before they arrive on your doorstep. I’ve never seen anyone function more confidently and with more spirit than her on a set.’

Jennings agrees. ‘Wendy is not just an actor that comes on the day and does it. It’s all about her wanting to talk about it and improve it with what she brings,’ she says.

‘It was like a coup that she wanted to join the cast of ReGenesis. Wendy Crewson is like Canadian royalty. And she stayed. Even when she was in California, she never really ever left. She’s just a proud Canadian. Like all of us, she wants our stuff to be the best it can be.’

‘I’m just pretending to be an actress,’ laughs Crewson when reminded that this is supposed to be a profile about her career in front of the camera. ‘I’m really a politician.’ She pauses for a minute to consider what she’s said. ‘If you’re a Canadian actor, you must be political – or you have no life.’

Selected Filmography

‘ReGenesis’ (2007)
Away from Her (2006)
The Man Who Lost Himself (2005)
Hunt for Justice (2005)
Sex Traffic (2004)
’24’ (2003)
Perfect Pie (2002)
A Killing Spree (2002)
The Many Trials of One Jane Doe (2002)
The 6th Day (2000)
Bicentennial Man (1999)
Better Than Chocolate (1999)
At the End of the Day: The Sue Rodriguez Story (1998)
Air Force One (1997)
The Santa Clause (1994)
The Good Son (1993)
I’ll Never Get to Heaven (1992)
Getting Married in Buffalo Jump (1990)
‘Tanner ’88’ (1988)
‘Night Heat’ (1985)