Actress (Part One)

Inside Television 549

Publication Date: 4-15-11

By: Hubert O'Hearn

Lisa Marie DiGiacinto

Actress. I've never understood why the all-encompassing term Actor ever came into use for both men and women. It has to make life awkward for anglophone women named Jean auditioning in Quebec and francophone men finding similar work in Alberta. I find nothing discriminatory about the word actress; therefore I continue to use it.

This and the following two weeks' columns are about one actress. You see, we tend to concentrate on those that have made it, or lost it, or are in the position as producers of media products of making it for others. Life looks easy for them when viewed from a distance: pools and pool parties, more champagne darling, and isn't the beach lovely this time of year?

Yet acting is the hardest work, the hardest career you can pick because talent doesn't necessarily rise like cream or champagne bubbles. Actors and actresses work and scrimp and haul tired bodies into empty theatres lit by one bulb so that they can look fresh and sparkly and just what some shadowy face sat at a table is looking for. Except they aren't looking for someone 5'7 with chestnut hair - no, we really want 5'8 and auburn thank you for coming leave your pictures at the desk.

I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine that I haven't seen in more than ten years who is right there, right at that moment when the hundredth key has been placed in the lock and turned and - lo and behold - it clicked. She is about to become one of the exalted ones. May we have a round of applause for Lisa DiGiacinto.

Lisa has just secured her first major role, the female lead in Quiver; a feature film that begins shooting in Thunder Bay next month. Lisa is from Thunder Bay originally and it is a splendid irony that she moved first to Calgary and then Vancouver to receive her break in Thunder Bay. But that's acting for you. If you don't have a sense of irony going in, don't worry, it will seek you out.

I want to take you on the path Lisa followed to where she is today. I first met her in 1999. For a very brief time, there was a theatre production group at Lakehead University, where Lisa was a student. I know that theatre group well because I headed it. Dr. Fred Gilbert, the President of LU was kind enough to give me a desk in the basement of the Agora and we put on one show, Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. There was no funding, so it all drifted apart like the mists of a Russian dawn, but for a few minutes it was brilliant.

Lisa played Nina, the female lead. She was twenty then, very pretty and equally unpolished but you could see that she really - really - wanted to act. I remember during rehearsal she broke into tears behind the curtain on the stage right side of the Bora Laskin Auditorium, next to a giant clanking lighting board that looked like a set piece from Wolfgang Petersen's film Das Boot. I don't remember now what I said, but it must have worked.

On opening night she gave a performance that is - yes - my favourite of 105 opening nights I have attended as actor or director or writer. Lisa electrified. In the closing mad scene she was consumed and consumed and fed the audience with all the shock and perfect horror of her character. She became an Actress in that moment.

I wondered over the intervening decade what had become of her, knowing in my heart that if she pursued it, she might breathe the rare air of stardom. Thanks to Facebook, we re-connected.

Next week: Packing, Pubs and Parts - the story continues.