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Al Waxman Tribute
Perry Rosemond is not one to hold back praise — especially when it comes to Al Waxman.
“He’s one of the finest performers I’d ever worked with and, of course, a friend,” Rosemond said over the phone from his Toronto home last week. “Al was confident. He had stature, but he was a really grounded actor. He had an integrity as a human being. Al helped people.”
The King of Kensington director was reflecting on Waxman on the eve of the 2015 Toronto Jewish Film Festival, where the actor will be the subject of the festival’s Canadian Archival Series. Selecting Waxman, TJFF program director Stuart Hands says, was a way to spotlight the late Toronto actor’s strengths beyond the supporting roles for which he is most widely known.
“A lot of his best performances were supporting roles. What I’m hoping to show with this series is how great he also was as a lead actor in film and TV,” Hands says. “A lot of his great performances were onstage, which don’t exist anymore. I wanted to bring a real seriousness to him as an actor, for Canadian audiences but also for Jewish audiences, to see what his persona says about us.”
For Hands, exploring Waxman’s work — the sitcom King of Kensington, yes, but also the 1979 CBC film The Winnings of Frankie Walls and the 1969 short film The Dowry, among other TJFF screenings this week — was also a way to explore the actor’s connection to the Jewish working class, and to look at how Waxman portrayed and celebrated that aspect of his persona, onscreen and off.
“That connection, it’s gone — well, I shouldn’t say gone, but it is as re- flected in popular culture,” Hands says. “There’s something this figure, this icon, that allows connection with other working-class members. For something like Frankie Walls, he taps into it. It’s amazing how nuanced that performance is. And then in reading his memoir, you read how his parents have a strong work ethic.”
Rosemond echoes Hands’ assessment, saying that what Waxman brought to the table with King of Kensington, which ran for five seasons on CBC from 1975-1980, was not only a sense of humility, but an unfaltering dedication to getting the job done.
“Let me first explain that the character that I had in mind was somebody who could solve everybody’s problems,” Rosemond says of Waxman’s character, the convenience storeowning Larry King. “He’s omnipotent. He has one major flaw: he can’t make a buck. So what I wanted was somebody of true stature, in other words. Al understood his craft, he dedicated himself to his craft and he conveyed it. When people acted with Al, they had to crank it up a notch. He set the bar. The bar was grounded, realistic, naturalistic. If you look at the history of sitcoms, today it’s hard to find that guy who’s not a stand-up comic. Al wasn’t that. But Al brought truth to it.”
“When I look at people with an ethic I look at people like De Niro, Pacino and Hoffman,” Rosemond continues. “They give you a day’s work. Al gave you day’s work.”
In addition, Hands is hopeful that a spotlight of Waxman’s more serious cinematic offerings will disassociate him from our collective memory of what he calls “cheesy Canadian cinema.” “I hope that this series will help dispel that misconception, and attempt to begin a serious discussion about his work and value as a cultural icon,” he says.
Waxman died in 2001, at age 65. In attempting to shed more light on the late actor’s impact as a person and not just an artist, Rosemond remembers an anecdote he delivered during Waxman’s funeral.
“Al told me, ‘I was in a fenderbender, and the cop asked me how fast I was going, and I knew it was a 30-mile zone. He said I was going 32 miles. And I said why didn’t you tell the cop I was going 30 miles? And he said because I was going 32 miles.’ “Rosemond cracks up. “That’s what I mean. He had this kind of integrity.”