A busy screen life
ACTRA rewards Jayne Eastwood’s five decades of work in show business
TORONTO Looking back on her five decades in show business, Toronto character actor Jayne Eastwood can’t help but rhyme off a tsunami of famous names she’s worked with. “Just the cast of Godspell alone, with Martin Short and Eugene Levy and Gilda Radner and Andrea Martin; and Victor Garber was our Jesus, Paul Shaffer was our bandleader,” Eastwood recalled in a recent interview, noting she’s still close with her former co-stars. “Then Second City, where we met Dan Aykroyd and John Candy. Then my brother-in-law is Joe Flaherty, who brought Second City to Toronto. I ended up marrying his brother David, who was also a comedy writer, a good one, too. And John Belushi was part of that gang, and Harold Ramis.” Eastwood’s star-packed sentences aren’t an exercise in name-dropping but simply a reflection of her prolific body of work, which the Toronto chapter of Canada’s performers’ union ACTRA honoured with an Award of Excellence earlier this month.
“I didn’t want them to give it to me but then they said I had to take it,” Eastwood said with a laugh. “Stuff like that makes me kind of like a nervous wreck.”
The Gemini Award winner has been an onscreen mainstay in Canada and the U.S., racking up more than 200 roles to her name — from geography teacher Miss Wimsey in the film Hairspray to the neighbour across the hall in Chicago and the foster mother Mrs. Hammond in Anne of Green Gables. Born and raised in Toronto, Eastwood started her career as a painter, which she still does. She got into acting when a fellow commercial artist suggested she audition for a local production of the play Suddenly, Last Summer and she was recruited by a New York acting teacher who was in the audience. Her older brother was a successful entrepreneur who inspired her hunger for jobs, telling her: “Make sure you work harder than the other guy.”
“And I’ve never been a complainer,” Eastwood said.