‘Her life became art’
Stratford Festival mourns death of theatre legend
When Martha Henry turned 50, she decided that acting was “getting too hard.”
She was one of North America's most distinguished actresses, the reigning queen of Canadian theatre, an artist indelibly identified with the Stratford Festival. Her performing credits filled an entire column in Who's Who in Canada. Yet in 1988, she was determined to put her acting into semi-retirement and concentrate on directing.
“I decided I wanted to get away from acting and wait until I was more grown up,” she told Postmedia at the time. “Then maybe I'll have a better idea of what I want to do and what I'm capable of doing. And maybe, when I'm a very old lady, I'll really want to go back and act.”
Martha Henry would eventually return to the boards with a vengeance, and she was 83 when she died at her Stratford home this week, only 12 days after completing a critically acclaimed run in the festival's sell-out production of Edward Albee's Three Tall Women. A 2020 cancer diagnosis did not deter her in her desire to perform to the end, and by the time the production closed on Oct. 9, she was in a wheelchair.
“Her life became art,” festival artistic director Antoni Cimolino commented Thursday.
“Her sense of responsibility to the theatre was so profound that it enabled her to endure pain and face down her terminal disease to complete an astoundingly truthful performance as a dying woman in Three Tall Women.”
Born in Detroit, and a Canadian citizen since 1970, Henry's commitment was always there — going back nearly six decades when she became the first graduate of Canada's fledgling National Theatre School and promptly joined Stratford's acting company. There she immediately made an impact playing Miranda opposite the magic-making Prospero of William Hutt (another Stratford legend who would become a life-long friend) in a 1962 production of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Fiftysix years later in 2018, an 80-year-old Henry would herself deliver a resonant and entirely believable performance as Prospero on the stage she had known and loved for more than half a century. Her achievement symbolizes how extraordinary her twilight years were.
She had always been a brilliant and often courageous actress, and there are many performances from earlier years that burn in the memory — among them a spiritually torn Isabella in a revolutionary 1975 Stratford production of Shakespeare's Measure For Measure, the free-spirited prostitute May Buchanan in Theatre Calgary's controversial 1983 premiere of John Murrell's Farther West, and her award-winning performance as a troubled Rosedale matron in director Robin Phillips's film version of the Timothy Findley novel, The Wars. Yet in many ways these achievements were eclipsed by her astonishing work in the final decades of her life.
As always, the Stratford Festival remained her linchpin. She chalked up 47 seasons, appearing in 70 productions and directing 14 more.
Yet, she was in exile from Stratford for 14 years, a victim of a 1980 crisis that saw her and three other members of a newly appointed artistic directorate unceremoniously fired by a bumbling festival board. The experience left lasting wounds, and her personal integrity would not allow her to return until 1994 when artistic director Richard Monette coaxed her back. That brought new glories.
Those late-period achievements are staggering. She and Hutt appeared in a production of Eugene O'neill's searing Long Day's Journey Into Night that achieved legendary status and was later filmed. The 1998 season saw Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing emerge daringly as a work of autumnal beauty, with Henry and the great Brian Bedford middle-aged and irresistible as those duelling lovers, Beatrice and Benedick. There was a revival of Ibsen's Ghosts that saw Henry find genuine tenderness in the role of the intimidating Mrs. Alving. And her directorial skills continued to be honed.
Her memorable 2018 Prospero struck a valedictory note when she announced that “our revels now are ended.” But there's perhaps there's a more telling memory now. A few years earlier, a revival of The Trojan Women gave us her Hecuba, grey-haired, bent in body, grief-stricken and defiant — but revealing an indomitability of spirit that persisted no matter how broken she might be. She was truly one of a kind.