“It was a very brutal and delicate manoeuvre. Then, on the very last Sunday matinee, she hit the wall so hard she went through the wall,” MacIvor recalls. “It always felt like there was something really spontaneous and dangerous and unpredictable happening, but at the same time, she was in full control of what she was doing.”
In 2005, Wright earned praise for playing Nancy Herrington, a character who unknowingly gets wrapped up in an Internet romance with a six-year-old boy in Miranda July’s film Me and You and Everyone We Know.
Later in her career, Wright spent much of her time touring international experimental theatre festivals, and gave her last stage performance in Belgium in December of 2009. That same month she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Early in the New Year, on Jan. 3, she and McKellar were married at his parents’ home in Toronto.
Wright continued working into her final weeks, and McKellar said the nurses and doctors who attended her in hospital seemed mesmerized by her personality. She and McKellar were to have appeared together in a new play, TTTTg (Triple Trooper Trevor Trumpet Girl), at the Theatre Centre earlier this month, and she had hoped to perform a reading of Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo.
McDonald’s new film, This Movie is Broken, which opens Friday, also features Wright in a small cameo role.
She also acted in McDonald’s forthcoming film Trigger, which stands as a tribute to her colleagues’ fervent determination to give her one last turn in the spotlight, and which Farlinger describes as “one of the great miracles of our film careers.” After Wright became sick, Jonas and Farlinger rushed the film into production with their own money – and very little regard for where any further funding might come from. Nearly everyone involved volunteered their time and talents.
While filming Trigger, a tired and ill Wright performed an intense musical scene alongside co-star Molly Parker as a pair of rockers playing a benefit concert at The Mod Club in Toronto. Jonas and Farlinger said it endures as a standout moment.
“I couldn’t get over it,” Farlinger said. “She was flawless on a 27-page day – not one mistake. That’s pretty amazing.”
Wright is survived by her husband, Don McKellar, her father, Colin Wright, her brother Paul, sisters Gloria and Stephanie, parents-in-law John and Kay McKellar, and their families.
