“She always thought after I got this Canadian thing out of my system, that I would go to New York.” Henry, who eventually became a Canadian citizen in 1970. “That broke my mother’s heart,” recalled Ms. She was hired in 1959 and took on landed immigrant status – much to Konnie’s dismay. As she would later say, she wanted to live in a country that had such a festival.Īfter graduating from Carnegie Tech, she hitched a ride to Toronto and auditioned for its seminal Crest Theatre. She remembered it as a revelatory experience. At 19, she’d made her first visit to Stratford, where she’d seen Hamlet performed by a magnetic young Canadian actor named Christopher Plummer. After high school, she studied drama at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and spent her summers in Canada, acting with the Sun Parlor Players in Leamington, Ont.īy then, she knew where she wanted to be. Growing up in Bloomfield Hills, in the greater Detroit area, young Martha was bookish and, after discovering some play scripts in her grandparents’ attic, became fascinated with theatre. Konnie), a touring nightclub musician, packed the little girl off to her maternal grandparents, with whom she lived for the next nine years. Her parents, Lloyd and Kathleen, separated when she was five years old and Kathleen (a.k.a. Henry was born Martha Kathleen Buhs on Feb. “But in addition to that, I can’t think of another artist, male or female, who has had a bigger influence on the Stratford Festival.” “She broke through the glass ceilings in this country,” he said. Henry set an example for other female theatre artists in her day. “She wasn’t simply an artist, she was a leader,” Stratford Festival artistic director Antoni Cimolino said. Henry’s fierce determination was emblematic of her character. She was cheeky and impudent and ferocious. “On that last day, she couldn’t have been happier. Henry gave an incandescent portrayal, right up to the very last performance. Although she was gravely ill and often in pain, Ms. Henry died on Thursday from cancer at the age of 83, just 12 days after closing out the show. “It was a rare and rarified journey,” said Lucy Peacock, who starred alongside Ms. In its revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, she portrayed the elderly, acidulous A – a devil of an old lady to neatly contrast with that angelic girl who first trod the Stratford boards. That came this year, when she closed out the scaled-back, pandemic version of the festival with one last great performance. After 45 seasons and more than 70 roles at the Stratford, Ont., theatre, it would be her Shakespearean swan song.
In 2018, at 80, she brought her Stratford acting career full circle, playing Prospero herself in The Tempest. Stratford legend Martha Henry on #MeToo and discovering that she short-changed Shakespeare Martha Henry, a Stratford Festival legend, shone till the end It wasn’t always a happy domicile – there was a bitter falling-out and a period of estrangement during the 1980s, but that ended in 1994 with her triumphant return in A Long Day’s Journey into Night. Although she worked at other theatres and acted memorably in films – she seemed a magnet for Genie Awards – her true home was Canada’s esteemed classical repertory company, where she came to be known as its first lady and, latterly, its grande dame. Henry would, in fact, become a towering figure at the festival, as an actor, director, teacher and mentor, for more than half a century. “Within moments of her first entrance it was clear that Stratford must grapple her to itself with hoops of steel for the next century or so.” “She looked, talked and moved like an angel,” gushed John Pettigrew, one of the festival’s early historians, when recounting her performance. In 1962, a 24-year-old Martha Henry made her Stratford Festival debut playing Miranda to William Hutt’s Prospero in a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.