PRIME TIME
The reboot of Street Legal brings Cynthia Dale back to TV representing women who “own it” in this new age of gender politics and female empowerment
IT ALL STARTED, as so many good ideas do, with two women having lunch. They were both successful women, with much important work behind them. What interested them as they sat down to lunch, however, was the important work that lay ahead.
One of the women, Cynthia Dale, is an actress. The other, Sally Catto, is the head of programming at CBC. One had worked as a lawyer; the other had played one on TV. They talked about all the things: books and life and art, the reboot of Dynasty, why there are so few good roles for actresses who are on the other side of 30. They talked about the role that Dale had played on TV so successfully for six years: lawyer Olivia Novak on the hit CBC drama Street Legal. Then they walked away from lunch happy, and Cynthia Dale didn’t think much about it again.
But the thought of Olivia Novak lingered in Sally Catto’s mind. Olivia – ambitious, sexy, combative – had sent shockwaves through staid early ’90s television. What would it be like to bring her back? What would she be like, 30 years later, in the era of #TimesUp and a dynamic new Toronto? What would she be like, most importantly, in the hands of the actress who herself had grown and changed, been up and down over the same three decades? After floating the idea of rebooting Street Legal with colleagues at the CBC, Catto sent an email to Cynthia Dale saying (and here I paraphrase): let’s do this thing.
“It was such a shock,” says Dale, perched on an armchair after a photo shoot in a west-end Toronto studio. “Once I got over the shock and the fear and the realization that I should have moisturized more in the last 30 years and had one less bottle of wine – or 400 less bottles – I thought, okay. Why not? I’m old. What else am I going to do?”
We will get to all this – the moisturizing, the fear, the being “old” – but the first thing you need to know is that Cynthia Dale said yes. And that Olivia Novak is back on Canadian television screens this spring in a six-part series (longer if Street Legal is a success with viewers and gets renewed).
It is hard to avoid the parallels between fictional Olivia and real-life Cynthia: they are both women at the prime of their lives in a world that does not necessarily value women in their prime; they are bold and outspoken; they have known failure; they have climbed back up.
When we meet Olivia in the first episode of the new Street Legal, her career at a high-powered Toronto law firm has just imploded, and she’s forced to team up with a group of young, street-smart, somewhat disdainful lawyers. When I first meet Cynthia Dale, she’s dancing in heels and a leather dress for the photographer’s camera. She started out as dancer, decades ago, and she’s one today, even if most of her dancing happens off stage for her own pleasure. When I watch her, I don’t think middle-aged or
moisturizer or any of the other manufactured crises that advertisers sell to women in their 50s. I think, Wow.
Later on, Dale has changed into her own clothes – including a mossgreen velvet skirt and a pair of very enviable grey suede ankle boots. One of the photographer’s assistants brings her the wedding rings she’d taken off for the shoot, and she accepts them with a gush of gratitude (her second marriage, to CBC journalist Peter Mansbridge, took place in Prince Edward Island in 1998). She’s been grooving in front of the camera for a couple of hours, and her face is flushed, expressive and mobile. In other words, it moves as nature intended. This is a particular point of pride.
“We were talking about the look of the show, and I was like,” Dale says, drawing a square around her face, framing it, “this is me and that’s what it’s going to be. I’m not fixing it. As long as you guys are okay with it, then it’ll work.”
What she’s saying is that, at 58, she has the face of a beautiful 58-yearold. She’s not interested in having the face of someone younger, which has become the standard on television and movie screens: the waxen, plastic, immobile look that is the chilling norm for actresses as soon as their first crow’s feet appear. This “just me” stance is one that a few actresses like Frances McDormand have embraced but, in an era of high-definition screens, it’s sadly still quite radical.
Dale points out that she dyes her hair, so she’s hardly a purist, and she has no problem with the choices that other women make; they’re just not for her. “I hate my f***ing wrinkles,” she laughs, “and I would never do a thing to change them.”
If you ask Sally Catto, the actress has nothing to worry about: “She looks fantastic, and her performance is fantastic.” The CBC executive is firmly in favour of performers embracing their aging infrastructures, flaws and all: “It’s incumbent on the networks to be supporting that and pushing for it, and equally you want your producers and your actors to say, ‘Yeah, I’m going to go there because it’s honest and authentic and gorgeous and beautiful.’”
Dale came on board Street Legal for the first time in 1988. She’d been performing in the hit immersive play Tamara on Broadway when she was cast as Olivia, a driven, resourceful and sexually empowered young lawyer. A line in the first script described Olivia thus: “Her only crime is that she doesn’t give a damn.” Or if you’d prefer the sexist lens of the time, here is a description of the character from the Globe and Mail in 1989: “A superbitch partner who is the best argument for misogyny since Alexis Carrington Colby hit the airwaves.”
Not surprisingly, Dale didn’t like the b-word then, and she doesn’t like it now. “Other people called her a bitch, not me. She was full of moxie, she was brazen and bold and she was aggressive. She was sexual. She was opinionated.”
The new series, which was shot in Montreal but is set in a street-front office in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, unfolds against the backdrop of the opioid crisis. Olivia’s career is in crisis, and she teams up with a scrappy young firm to launch a class-action suit against a pharmaceutical company.
In the intervening years, Dale says, her character has become “older and wiser. She’s just as tough and aggressive, though.” To get a sense of what life is like for a contemporary lawyer working on highprofile cases, she consulted a group of female attorneys, including Marie Henein, best known for defending Jian Ghomeshi on sexual assault charges in 2016.
What did she learn from those women? Dale smiles, a small, impish smile. “One of the greatest things somebody said to me was, ‘You know all that shit about women not liking each other or fighting or bitchiness? It just doesn’t happen. We’re like comrades. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to fight you in court. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to do everything in my power to win the case. But we walk out of there and we go for a drink.’”
As a producer on the show, Dale wanted to explore all of these complexities. Eric Peterson, the veteran Canadian actor who met Dale 30 years ago when she joined the cast of Street Legal, had a chance to reconnect with her when he reprised his role as firebrand lawyer-turnedjudge Leon Robinovitch for two episodes in the new show. “She’s been one of the driving forces in this reboot,” he says. “For me, there’s the aspect of having seen Cynthia at that early stage in her career and now seeing her maturity and growth – not just as an actress but as a human being. She’s a mother, she’s done all that work at Stratford. Her passion and energy are really wonderful to see.”
Stratford is close to Dale’s heart, personally and professionally. She and Mansbridge have a home there, as well as one in Toronto (their 19-year-old son, Will, lives on his own). For years, Dale was one of the stars of the Stratford Festival, a favourite and protege of its thendirector, the late Richard Monette. For 10 years beginning in 1997, Dale sang and danced in many of the festival’s marquee musicals, including Camelot, My Fair Lady and South Pacific. When Monette retired as artistic director in 2007, Dale found herself in exile.
For five years, she was absent from Stratford’s stage, until Des McAnuff, who was then Stratford’s artistic director, asked her to come back and star in 42nd Street: not as the bright-eyed ingenue Peggy but in the smaller – but far more interesting – role of the cynical, beenaround-the-block actress Dorothy Brock. The forced absence from Stratford hurt, but it also healed.
“There’s no doubt it was hard,” she says. “It was heartbreaking. It was devastating for a time. And it was the best thing that could’ve happened to me.” She finally had the time to travel with her family, to act in different projects and
to not feel the burden of hundreds of high kicks doing eight shows a week. She leans forward for emphasis and says, “Stratford was the best place to work. And I’m really glad I’m not there.”
Stratford was never her only professional home. For more than five decades, the little girl born Cynthia Ciurluini – she’s never officially changed her name – has been at home on various stages, whether on Broadway, in a one-woman autobio- graphical show or even “in a frickin’ barn.” (That would be the lead role in Sweet Charity, performed in Jackson’s Point, Ont.)
She was performance-mad from an early age, encouraged along with her actress sister, Jennifer, by their mother. “My Italian father was like, ‘What the hell?’ But my mom was a bit of a Mama Rose, took the kids to everything.” One of those things was an audition for the musical Finian’s Rainbow at the Royal Alexandra theatre in Toronto. Dale was cast, at age five, alongside another future star, jazz great Molly Johnson. She remembers noticing from the stage how cute the drummer in the orchestra pit was.
By the time she was 10, she had a new stage name – Dale – and more than 50 commercials to her name. She was a fixture on CBC shows like The Wayne & Shuster Show and The Tommy Hunter Show. Which was great for her resumé but not so wonderful for her social life back at school in Etobicoke.
“I was a weird kid,” she says. “I was bullied and made fun of in grade school, and it was a horrendous time for me. But in the industry, it was fantastic.”
Through it all, she had the support of her mother, who did not find her daughter’s ambition weird. Barbara Ciurluini died in 2017 at the age of 84. Anyone who has lost a parent will understand when Dale says, “It’s been more than a year, but it’s yesterday actually.”
Dale has been writing a bit of nonfiction since then – “When mothers die, it pushes everything to the forefront” – to accompany her other hobbies, painting and reading. Although saying reading is a hobby for her might be a bit of an understatement. It’s more of a vocation. A civic duty. She reads everything – novels and non-fiction, newspapers and magazines.
“People ask, ‘What’s your winter sport?’ and I say mine is reading,” Dale says with a laugh but then grows serious and passionate when the subject turns to current events and the abysmal thumping that factual news is taking these days.
“I think it’s your job now to be informed. There is no more time to stick your head in the sand and to not believe facts.” She points her finger for emphasis. “Facts. We’re in really scary times, and there’s no more time for coasting or not wanting to know the truth about stuff.”
She takes a deep breath and laughs again. “Maybe this is why people say I’m too opinionated.” But I think she knows the very opposite is true. There is no such thing as being too opinionated; if anything, the world needs to hear more from women who have been through it all and who aren’t ready to give up because they have a lot more to give.
That would describe Olivia “whose only crime is that she doesn’t give a damn” and also the woman who portrays her, who swallowed her fears to step back into Olivia’s shoes. When Cynthia Dale says she doesn’t want to be quiet or invisible, she’s speaking for a great many women of her age who are feeling the same freedom. A slightly terrifying, mostly exhilarating freedom. “Buckle up your seatbelts, honey,” she says. “The world is changing. And the people who aren’t ready have to step aside. We are evolving and we’re stepping into all our wrinkles and complexities and voice. We know our power now.”