If Canada had a star system, does anyone doubt that Tony Nardi would be as well known as, say, Nicolas Cage?
Of course not. Not with two Genie awards for film acting and two other Genie nominations, two Dora Award nominations for playwriting and an unbroken 20-year string of impressive film, television and stage credits.
The comparison to Cage is relevant not only because America's cultural juggernaut has made the Hollywood actor far better known to Canadians than Nardi, sadly, may ever be.
There's a larger issue here, as well. Whatever his roots, almost no one thinks of Cage (born Coppola) as an Italian-American. The same is largely true of his uncle, film director Francis Coppola, and actor Robert De Niro and director Martin Scorsese. They're Americans of Italian descent, evidence of the broad assimilationist tendencies of American culture.
But in Canada, no one would think of Antonio Luigi Nardi, 42-year-old son of a Calabrian labourer, as anything other than an Italian-Canadian. Nor would Nardi himself. His Italian-ness is an inseparable part of his identity.
When he wrote his first play, La Storia dell'Emigrante, at the age of 20, he wrote, produced and directed it in Montreal in his native Calabrese dialect. So was his second play, A Modo Suo (A Fable),staged in Toronto and Montreal in 1990.
"Here was a whole community who had never had a cultural mirror," Nardi said the other day, before preparing to appear in the Soulpepper Theatre production of Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear at Toronto's Elgin Theatre. "I wanted to write, and will always write, in the language of people who don't get a chance to see themselves on-stage."
Clearly, the demand was there. When La Storia opened in Montreal in 1979, the performances were oversold and tickets were scalped for double and triple their face value.
In both his writing and acting, some of Nardi's finest work has dealt directly with aspects of the immigrant experience. Paul Tana's 1980 film La Sarrasine,for which Nardi won his first Genie, is based on a true story of false murder charges brought against a Sicilian immigrant in turn-of-the century Montreal.
In My Father's Angel,for which he won his second Genie six weeks ago, Nardi plays Ahmed, a Muslim immigrant from Yugoslavia trying to cope with the ancient tribal hatreds of the Old World and the enormous cultural pressures of the New.
And in La Déroute (1998), another Tana-directed feature in which Nardi starred, and which he co-wrote, the plot turns on how a now-established community of Italian-Canadians reacts to the presence of "the Other" -- newer immigrants of other cultures.
Nardi's understanding of these issues is rooted in his immigrant reality. Speaking neither English nor French, he arrived here in 1965, at the age of 6, and quickly picked up two new languages. He intended first to become a priest (he was an altar boy for nine years) and then a lawyer, but changed his mind after watching a production of Fortune and Men's Eyes when he was 18. His father had serious reservations about his decision.
In his 1990 play, A Modo Suo,the son tells his parents that he wants to become an artist.
"Let's just say that that kind of thing is not a normal profession for our kind of people," says the mother.
"Profession?" exclaims the father. "Where men are women and women are men, if you know what I mean? . . . Think again!"
His own father, Nardi says, nurtured similar views and feared that the theatre would be all-consuming. "I don't know where he got these ideas, considering that he was a labourer all his life and right now, at 82, if it's snowing in Montreal, would be out shovelling not only his own sidewalk but the whole block."
But Nardi remembers "a conversation in which I told him that the kind of risks he perceived me as taking were very much like the kind of risks he took -- going to Belgium to work in the coal mines when there was no work in Calabria and then coming to Canada at the age of 46 with $1,500 and no real assets."
Trained in Montreal and Toronto under such directors as Tibor Feheregyhazi, Alex Hausvater and John Van Burek, Nardi quickly established himself in the theatrical community. That he could work with equal facility in three languages did not hurt.
Van Burek, who directed him in Johnny Mangano and his Astonishing Dogs,"has all that Italian intensity and precision," says Nardi. "He's very demanding of himself. Everything is rooted in integrity and honesty. It's got to be right. He doesn't fake things well."
After one season at Stratford, where he won the Tyrone Guthrie apprenticeship award, Nardi moved in 1985 to Rome to work and study the improvisational art of commedia with Italian director Alberto Fortuzzi. Its influence can be seen in all his work, but nowhere more hilariously than in Soulpepper's Flea,where gives the best performance in the 14-member cast.
There's an artistic economy and cohesion to everything Nardi does on-stage -- moving and standing like a matador, his eyes bright with murderous intent. What makes it so effective as comedy is Nardi's ability to project an absolute sense of conviction. Several other actors in this production want the audience to know they're only pretending to pretend. With farce, that doesn't work.
"We knew as soon as we decided to stage the play that this role was for Tony," says Soulpepper artistic director Albert Schultz. "Stylistically, he just knew what the part required, and from the first day of rehearsals he was just in it. But Tony also has incredibly deep reserves of emotion, a sense of danger. He can make you terrified of what he'll do next."
In fact, Soulpepper has retained Nardi for two more seasons, including an appearance this summer in Arthur Schnitzler's 1897 sexually charged play La Ronde.
Offstage, involved in a six-year relationship with Vancouver-based actor Janne Mortil, Nardi is said to be a great cook, raconteur and sharp mimic, playfully skewering directors, producers and fellow actors.
Although he feels drawn to Italy and would work there again, he accepts Salman Rushdie's view that migration is the great theme of the 20th century and that the immigrant, by definition, always lives the rest of his life "somewhere in between" -- unable to return and never fully absorbed in the new country. "You can't fight that state," Nardi says. "You just have to accept that reality."