Canadian stage and TV actress Frances Hyland TORONTO (CP) - Frances Hyland, the Saskatchewan-born actor described as the first lady of Canadian theatre, died Sunday. She was 77.
Hyland died at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto of respiratory failure due to complications from recent appendix surgery, her son Evan McCowan said Monday. In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Hyland starred in and directed numerous productions at both the Stratford and Shaw festivals but was also known for her appearances in regional theatre, films and in CBC-TV shows including the internationally popular Road to Avonlea.
"She had been ill for a number of years," McCowan said, indicating she hadn't acted for the past six years. "This came on in the last little while, the respiratory (illness). Heavy smoker, just like my dad."
Hyland's former husband, pioneer stage director George McCowan, who moved to Los Angeles to direct series television in the 1970s, died of emphysema in 1995. Evan McCowan describes his mother as one of those Canadian talents who refused to leave Canada for the U.S. where they could have made a lot more money.
"It still holds true today about people leaving because we can't afford to put people in the business into a place where they can save money," McCowan added.
Richard Monette, Stratford's artistic director, said Hyland was "very courageous in her choices."
"She dealt with the world, and all its problems and joys, through her art," Monette said. "She was a great lady of the theatre."
Born in Shaunavon, Sask., in April 1927, Hyland displayed a penchant for acting at an early age, and after graduating from the University of Saskatchewan in 1948 won a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in England. After graduation there with a silver medal, she made her professional debut in 1950 in a London production of A Streetcar Named Desire. She took an usher's job at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre to study rehearsals and at 19 snagged a tiny role on the then-new medium of television.
"I don't think I'd ever seen TV and I certainly hadn't been in a studio," she said in a later interview. "We had to wear orange makeup and there were banks and banks of lights. We'd sweat like horses."
She also recalled the many ups and downs of that early career - "even a couple of times when I've had to phone the Actors' Fund and say I can't pay the rent."
Hyland had long been a champion of greater status and higher pay for Canadian actors. In a 1970s interview she remarked that it was a good year when she earned more than $10,000.
"We're now equal with policemen," she said in 1986. "Although they have a very difficult and dangerous job and are probably not as well paid as they ought to be."
In 1954 she was brought back to Canada by Tyrone Guthrie, founding artistic director of the Stratford Festival, to appear as Isabella opposite James Mason in Measure for Measure. She spent 10 seasons at the festival, co-starring, too, with John Colicos, Martha Henry, Douglas Rain and Bruno Gerussi in King Lear in 1964.
In 1969 at the Vancouver Playhouse she starred in the original production of George Ryga's The Ecstacy of Rita Joe with Chief Dan George as her father. It was a role written with her in mind and which she counted among her most meaningful achievements.
Her Shaw Festival stage credits include Noel Coward's The Vortex in 1984, The Women in '85, Shaw's difficult masterpiece Back to Methusela in '86 and Major Barbara in '87. Also at Shaw, she directed Agatha Christie's murder mystery Black Coffee and in '79 directed the Stratford production of Othello.
On Broadway, she performed opposite Tony Perkins in Look Homeward Angel. In '89 after leaving the Shaw Festival, she played the curmudgeonly title role in Driving Miss Daisy in a Toronto theatre production.
Hyland played many great female characters onstage, including Elizabeth 1 (also in an episode of Patrick Watson's early '80s TV biography series The Titans), Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire and Ophelia in Hamlet.
When she won the Governor General's Performing Arts Award in 1994, then Gov. Gen. Ray Hnatyshyn called her the first lady of Canadian theatre. She was also an officer of the Order of Canada.
Prominent film and TV-movie roles include Moonlight Becomes You, I'll Be Home for Christmas, Never Talk to Strangers, Lives of Girls and Women, The Lotus Eaters, Glory! Glory!, Pygmalion, Hounds of Notre Dame, The Changeling and The Drylanders. Television appearances included co-starring with Leslie Nielsen in the miniseries The Albertans - a sort of Canadian version of Dallas - in 1979, and as Nanny Louisa in Road to Avonlea. There were also episodes of PSI Factor, Due South and ENG among others.
Critics wrote of her "glorious honey-whisky voice" and her surprisingly petite frame despite an often vivacious and commanding presence onstage.
"People who see me off stage are often surprised I'm so tiny," she once said.
Hyland is survived by son Evan and his wife Anne-Marie, two grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. As per her request there will be no funeral service, although her son expects there will be a memorial event in the next few weeks at Toronto's Performing Arts Lodge where she lived.
