USMIANI o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-10-11 published
Creator of Savage God
Theatre director was a Canadian nationalist, a fan of the avant
garde and a champion of playwright George Ryga. He was also seen
as a kook, a dilettante and a street fighter
By Tom HAWTHORN
Special to The Globe and Mail Saturday, October
11, 2003 - Page F9
John JULIANI was a provocateur in life as on stage. A man passionate
about the possibilities of theatre, he roused reverence in some,
antipathy in others.
His most infamous act was to challenge the Stratford Festival's
newly hired artistic director to a duel. Robin
PHILLIPS's offence
was that he is British when Mr.
JULIANI and others were certain
a land as grand as Canada was capable of producing a director
for its Shakespearean theatre.
What he called a "romantic gesture with tongue in cheek" earned
cheers from Canadian theatre directors and sneers from much of
the theatre establishment.
Mr. JULIANI, who has died at the age of 63, was an unabashed
Canadian nationalist, a dedicated fan of the avant garde, an
ardent defender of the right of actors to a decent living, a
champion of playwright George Ryga and a tireless figure so commanding
as to develop an intense loyalty among acolytes.
At the same time, he was seen as a kook, a dilettante and a street
fighter. One critic called him "the Tiger Williams of Canadian
theatre," his pugnacious approach earning him comparison to a
notorious hockey goon. In his defence, Mr.
JULIANI explained
that he was merely a "true believer" with opinions on controversial
subjects.
Mr. JULIANI's credits were long and varied, including spontaneous
Sixties street happenings such as the staging of his own wedding
as a theatrical performance and brief appearances on such 1990s
television dramas as The X-Files.
From 1982 until 1997, Mr.
JULIANI was executive producer of radio
drama for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio in Vancouver.
He helped to bring to air many celebrated productions, including
the brilliant and provocative Dim Sum Diaries by playwright Mark
LEIREN-
YOUNG.
Mr. JULIANI also possessed a head-turning beauty, with a profile
as striking as a Roman bust. Radio host Bill
RICHARDSON commented
on his handsomeness at a raucous memorial after his death, calling
him a "hunka hunka burnin' love." Some said he had the looks
and bearing of a Shakespearean king.
John Charles
JULIANI was born in Montreal on March 24, 1940.
Raised in a working-class neighbourhood, he attended Loyola College
and was an early graduate from the fledgling National Theatre
School.
He spent two seasons as an actor at Stratford before being hired
as a theatre teacher at Simon Fraser University in 1966. The
new university atop Burnaby Mountain east of Vancouver was a
hotbed of radicalism in politics and the arts. Mr.
JULIANI bristled
at an imposed curriculum and so infuriated the administration
that he was banned from the campus in 1969.
Mr. JULIANI was heavily influenced by the writing of Antonin
Artaud, a Surrealist who championed a theatre based on the imagination.
He long sought to erase the barrier between scripted text and
sensory impression, between performer and audience, to mixed
success.
After moving to the West Coast, Mr.
JULIANI launched a series
of experiments in theatre. He credited these productions to Savage
God, which was less a troupe in the traditional sense than a
title granted to any performance involving Mr.
JULIANI.
The name
came from William Butler Yeats's awestruck reaction to Alfred
Jarry's Ubu Roi: "After us, the Savage God?"
Savage God defied explanation, though many tried and even Mr.
JULIANI offered suggestions. Savage God was "an anthology of
question marks," he once said. (It was, after all, the 1960s.)
"Savage God is simply the Imagination," he told the Vancouver
Sun, "insatiable, unrelenting, fiercely energetic, wary of categorization,
fond of contradiction and inveterately iconoclastic."
In January, 1970, Mr.
JULIANI married dancer Donna
WONG, a ceremony
conducted as a Savage God performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
He repeated the process at the christening of his son. Ms.
WONG-
JULIANI
would be his domestic and drama partner for more than three decades.
In 1971, the streets of Vancouver were the scene of several spontaneous
and sometimes incomprehensible -- performances under the aegis
of PACET ("pilot alternative complement to existing theatre.")
The $18,000 project, funded by the federal government, incorporated
Gestalt therapy sessions in street performances.
Theatrical events took place willy-nilly across the city, including
malls, the airport, the library and Stanley Park. Admission was
not charged, nor did all spectators appreciate their role as
audience to avant-garde performance. A scene in which bicyclists
wearing gas masks pedalled along city streets left many scratching
their heads in puzzlement.
In 1974, Mr.
JULIANI moved to Toronto to set up a graduate theatre-studies
program at York University.
He called the program
PEAK ("
Performance,
Example,
Animation,
Katharsis") and perhaps should have found an acronym for
PEEK,
as the instructor and his class stripped naked to protest against
a lack of classroom space.
The challenge to the new Stratford artistic director in 1974
was written on a piece of parchment and delivered in London by
Don RUBIN, a York colleague. Alas, Mr.
RUBIN could not find a
proper gauntlet and wound up ceremoniously striking Mr.
PHILLIPS
with a red rubber glove, an absurd note to a theatrical protest.
In 1978, Mr.
JULIANI took the stage in a Toronto production of
Children of Night, portraying Janusz Korczak, a doctor and teacher
who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto. The critics were appalled.
Gina MALLET of the Toronto Star said Mr.
JULIANI's performance
sullied Dr. Korczak's memory. Jay
SCOTT of The Globe and Mail,
noting "the dreadfulness" of Mr.
JULIANI's acting, said the production
robbed the dead of their dignity.
From the stage, Mr.
JULIANI challenged the Star's critic to a
public debate on the aesthetics of theatre. He also wrote a letter
to the editor, noting that Holocaust survivors in the audience
had wholeheartedly embraced the production.
Mr. JULIANI wound up in Edmonton, where he continued to condemn
the "exorbitance, elitism and museum theatre" of the establishment.
In 1982, he directed and co-wrote Latitude 55°, a feature film
with just two characters -- a slick woman from the city and a
Polish potato farmer -- set in a snowbound cabin. "It is filled
with a passionate conviction that evaporates in pretentious pronouncements,"
The
Globe's
Carole
CORBEIL wrote, "filled with truthful moments
that evaporate in the desire to use every narcissistic trick
in the book."
In a 1983 book examining the alternative theatre movement in
Canada, author Renate
USMIANI devoted most of a chapter to Mr.
JULIANI, a decision that got her a scathing rebuke from a reviewer
who considered him worthy of little more than a footnote.
"His works are curiosities; at best, they are worthy experiments
in Artaudian theory," Boyd
NEIL wrote in a Globe review. "But
they are neither popular... nor influential."
Mr. JULIANI's years at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio
in Vancouver were both productive and successful. Among the many
projects he directed was a three-part adaptation of Margaret
Laurence's
The
Diviners; King Lear, starring John
COLICOS; a
13-part series titled, Disaster! Acts of God or Acts of Man?"
and, famously, Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, with Leonard
GEORGE
portraying a role once assumed on stage by his late father, Chief
Dan GEORGE.
The surprise selection of Mr.
GEORGE was typical
of Mr. JULIANI's often brilliant casting.
Mr. JULIANI directed a 1989 production of The Glass Menagerie
at the Vancouver Playhouse with Jennifer Phipps and Morris Panych.
Globe reviewer Liam
LACEY praised a production that "opens up
the play like an old treasure chest, and lets in some fresh air
without rearranging or disturbing the work's original grandeurs
and caprices."
Four years later, Mr.
JULIANI was directing a production of the
mystery thriller Sleepwalker when actor Peter
HAWORTH took sick
shortly before opening night. The director suddenly found himself
as the male lead. "Not even the most colossal egotist would want
to do this," he said.
Dim Sum Diaries, a series of monologues written by Mr.
LEIREN-
YOUNG,
received protests when aired by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Radio in 1991. One episode, entitled The Sequoia, in which the
white vendor of a luxury home launches a tirade against the Hong
Kong immigrant who cuts down two rare and spectacular trees on
the property, was accused of being racist. The playwright's well-intentioned
exploration of stereotyping was charged with fostering those
very prejudices.
After directing Dim Sum Diaries, Mr.
JULIANI urged the playwright
to tackle an issue that was dividing his church. Mr.
LEIREN-
YOUNG
remembers replying: "You're talking same-sex marriage in the
Anglican church and you want a straight Jewish guy to write this?"
The resulting play, titled Articles of Faith: The Battle of St.
Alban's, was staged at Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Vancouver
to great acclaim.
The collaborations between young playwright and veteran director
succeeded in achieving Mr.
JULIANI's goal of inspiring dialogue
through theatre.
Mr. JULIANI had a reputation as a demanding taskmaster for novice
and veteran actors alike. Rehearsals were jokingly called "Savage
God Boot Camp."
He maintained a breakneck pace, both in the theatre and in the
boardroom. He was artistic co-director of Opera Breve, a small
company dedicated to nurturing young singers; president of the
Union of British Columbia Performers (Alliance of Canadian Cinema,
Television and Radio Artists); and, a former national president
of the Directors Guild of Canada, among many boards on which
he served.
Feeling fatigued in early August, Mr.
JULIANI was diagnosed with
liver cancer. The end came swiftly. He died on August 21 at Lions
Gate Hospital in North Vancouver.
He leaves his wife of 33 years, Donna
WONG-
JULIANI, and a son,
Alessandro
JULIANI, an actor. He also leaves brothers Richard
and Norman.
(Wit was long a part of the
JULIANI mystique. The family pet,
a canine named Beau Beau, was referred to in the family's paid
obituary notice as a Savage Dog.)
For one who roused such passions, Mr.
JULIANI felt that he led
a conservative life. "I have always been a square," he once said.
A theatrical farewell to Mr.
JULIANI attracted hundreds to St.
Andrew's Wesley Church in Vancouver on Labour Day, a Monday and
traditionally a quiet date on the theatre calendar. Those in
attendance were encouraged to write remembrances on Post-It notes,
which were then stuck to the church's pillars.
The City of Vancouver has declared next March 24, which would
have been Mr.
JULIANI's 64th birthday, to be Savage God Day.
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USTINOV o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-05 published
Quebec actress gave up international career
Canadian Press, Friday, December 5, 2003 - Page R15
Montreal -- Quebec actress Suzanne
CLOUTIER/CLOUTHIER, who developed an
international film and stage career, has died of liver cancer.
She was 76.
Born in Ottawa in 1927,
CLOUTIER/CLOUTHIER's most famous role was as Desdemona,
opposite Orson Welles in Othello in 1952. A year later she starred
with British actor Peter
USTINOV in the play No Sign of the Dove.
The couple fell in love and married in 1954. They had three children
before divorcing in 1971.
Known as a wide-eyed beauty with flawless, chiselled features,
Ms. CLOUTIER/CLOUTHIER made her debut as a 19-year-old in the 1949 film
Temptation. She moved to the stage the following year for one
season in New York then joined the Jean Daste Comédie Française
Touring Company in Paris. She moved back to Quebec 15 years ago.
Parisian sculptor Igor
USTINOV said his mother showed courage
through her life and death. "The fact that she hid her illness
from us is added proof of her big heart," he said. "My mother
always wanted to protect us. She wanted to do it until the end."
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