Film Centre honours Don McKellar

Actor, producer, writer, director and Tony Award winner Don McKellar is being recognized by the Canadian Film Centre for his body of work.

The CFC will present McKellar with its 2016 Award for Creative Excellence at a reception in Beverly Hills on March 23.

“Don is a real creative force in the industry; a quadruple threat working in film, television and theatre as an actor, writer, producer and director. He truly represents the world-class storytellers who come out of the CFC and we are proud to call him a CFC alumnus,” Slawko Klymkiw, CEO of the film centre, said in a news release.

To call McKellar’s three-decade career prolific is almost an understatement.

After starting out in theatre, form- ing the Augusta Group with his late wife Tracy Wright and playwright Daniel Brooks, McKellar wrote the screenplay for Bruce McDonald’s 1989 film Roadkill.

His writing credits include the films Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, The Red Violin and Blindness. As an actor, he has appeared in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ; Atom Egoyan’s Exotica and Where the Truth Lies; and Last Night, which he also wrote and directed and for which he received the Prix de la Jeunesse at Cannes. He won a Directors Guild of Canada Award for Best Direction in 2014 for The Grand Seduction. And he has co-starred in TV series such as Slings and Arrows and, recently, Sensitive Skin with Kim Cattrall.

McKellar won the Tony Award in 2006 for Best Book of a Musical for The Drowsy Chaperone, which he cowrote with Bob Martin.