Perhaps you don’t even recognize Paul Gross in the photo above, throwing a tantrum in Act I of Shakespeare’s King Lear at the Stratford Festival. Even though he’s had one of Canada’s most successful acting and film producing careers, you may still mostly remember Gross as Const. Benton Fraser, solving crime and overdressed in red serge as a Mountie in Chicago in the CTV/CBS series Due South in the 90s.
I got used to seeing Gross in Ottawa a few years later, when he would often visit federal heritage ministers to encourage the growth of a home-grown English Canadian film industry. Those days ranged, approximately, from Men With Brooms (2002) to Passchendaele (2008). Results were mixed. But he also made Slings and Arrows, which is often mentioned as a contender for the best series ever made for (English-) Canadian broadcast television.
My reaction when I heard Gross would play Lear this season at the Stratford Festival was complex. In order: (1) My God, I’m old; (2) My God, he must be getting old; (3) This might be what it takes to get me back to Stratford, which I came to late and which takes work to get to from Ottawa; (4) Lear is a cautionary tale about the exercise of political power, so maybe I can do some journalism about this; (5) there’s a Trudeau angle, so maybe I should do some journalism about this.
