Dec 21, 2004 03:11 AM
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"I have worked with the two greatest theatre companies in North America, performing the work of the two greatest playwrights in the world. I count myself a lucky man."That was how Tony van Bridge summed up his life in an interview with the Star in 2001. Van Bridge died in Niagara-on-the-Lake yesterday at the age of 87.It was the Stratford Festival that was his first lasting home in Canada and he remained there for 15 seasons, but he will perhaps be better remembered for his work at the Shaw Festival, where he worked for a period of 30 years.He was born Valentine Anthony Neil Bridge in the Battersea district of London in 1917.He first appeared as a child actor at the age of 10, then later enrolled at 19 in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. He made his professional debut in a play called Anthony and Anna in 1938.World War II interrupted what he once termed "a journeyman's career" and by the early 1950s, he had married, divorced, remarried and fathered three children.But unemployment motivated him to leave his native land and emigrate to Canada with his family in 1954. As he told The Star, "I sold up everything and we came over on the boat. When I think about it now, I break out in a cold sweat."He quickly found employment with Douglas Campbell's Canadian players, touring the country with the classics. He recalls performing Saint Joan one night in Moosonee, where the notice said "Curtain time 8 p.m. or one hour after the train arrives."By 1955, van Bridge had settled in at Stratford, arriving in time to perform in the original tent, which he described as "quite alarming. You really thought the whole thing was going to fall on you sometime. A lot of people were sentimental about the tent, but I thought it was a good job we got rid of it."During his years at Stratford, he worked with the festival's founding artistic director Tyrone Guthrie — whom he described as "a born showman" — and his successor, Michael Langham, characterized as "calm, methodical, precise and maybe a bit frosty."His major triumph was his performance as Sir John Falstaff in the 1965 productions of Henry IV, Part I & II, which was hailed by numerous international critics as "the best Falstaff I have ever seen."Van Bridge was equally at home as a director, and he was frequently employed in that capacity by numerous regional theatres in Canada and the United States.Paxton Whitehead brought him to the Shaw Festival and he even assumed the reins of artistic directorship during a one-season sabbatical Whitehead took in 1974-5.Besides his numerous appearances at Shaw over the years, van Bridge made a lasting impression on CBC-TV audiences with his three seasons on the air as the crustily lovable title character of the series Judge, for which he won an ACTRA Award.He was also nationally acclaimed for his one-man show as G.K. Chesterton, which he played across North America.His second wife, Betty, died in 1980 and he later remarried Stacey Curtis, who had been one of his directors on Judge. He published his autobiography in 1995, with the typically self-effacing title Also In The Cast.The final years of his life were spent in tranquility in Niagara-on-the-Lake, where he rode his bicycle everywhere and always stopped at the same place for his breakfast each morning."I think they keep me as a mascot," is how he described his relationship at the end with the Shaw Festival company, but, in truth, he was widely respected, admired and loved by all who knew him.The accolades for van Bridge didn't dry up in recent years. In 2000, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada."There's a lot of insecurity, always a sliver of anxiety, in being an actor," he told The Star. "You've got to be a tightrope-walker who knows that it's a thin line that's being trod."But no one trod it with more brilliance or grace than Tony van Bridge.
