Acting community mourns theatre pioneer Joy Coghill
Joy Coghill made her acting debut with Vancouver Little Theatre on Dec. 7, 1941, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Her last gig was in 2010, when she played Emily Carr in An Interview Between Douglas Coupland and Emily Carr at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
That’s a seven-decade run at the top of the Vancouver theatre world, a storied span that saw her honoured with the Order of Canada and the Governor General’s Award for the Performing Arts.
“She was really the queen of actresses in Vancouver since the ’40s,” said Norman Young, the former head of the University of B.C. theatre department. “The actress that did the big parts, (though) not in the last 20 years. She was a great director, too, and a really fine person.”
Coghill died last Friday, Jan. 21, in the palliative-care ward of St. Paul’s Hospital after suffering massive heart failure. She was 90.
Joy Dorothy Coghill was born May 13, 1926, in Findlater, Sask.
“Her father was a Presbyterian minister, and he was preaching out in Saskatchewan,” said Coghill’s son, Gordon Thorne. “I think he was on his way through Findlater when the birth came. It wasn’t even where they were living at the time. After that my grandfather got MS and they returned to Scotland, where she was brought up in Glasgow.”
Her father died in 1939 and two years later Joy and her mother were among British families evacuated to Canada during the Second World War. They came to Vancouver, where her aunt lived, and Joy got into theatre at Kitsilano High.
Her talent was evident out of the box — in 1943, she won a scholarship to UBC’s Summer School of the Theatre. A year later she won best actress in the Vancouver High School Drama Festival.
After getting her BA from UBC she went to Chicago, where she studied at the Goodman Theatre. She also linked up with fellow Vancouverite John Thorne, an acquaintance from the theatre world who became her husband, and a CBC producer.
Back in B.C. in 1951 she became an actress and assistant artistic director at Sydney Risk’s Everyman’s Theatre. In 1953, she co-founded Canada’s first professional children’s theatre, the Holiday. She would remain its artistic director until 1966.
“She and Dorothy Somerset were two of the great (forces) in Vancouver theatre,” said Young. “Right after the war, they were the two that made theatre move in Vancouver, and did the best theatre.”
She was artistic director of the Vancouver Playhouse from 196769, spent several years in Montreal and continued to rack up a long list of acting and directing credits — her resume is so extensive it’s divided into four separate sections on her online website.
Her husband died four years ago. She’s survived by her three children, Gordon, Debra and David, and her grandchildren, Casey and Lucy. A celebration of her life will be held in the coming weeks at Christ Church Cathedral.