Actor Louis Negin, at his Toronto home in 2007, approached acting with fearless tenacity and an audacious flair that solidified him as a queer icon over his 70-plus years in the film and theatre industry.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
Louis Negin, a Canadian theatre artist, character actor and muse who performed at Stratford for seven seasons and bared it all on the London stage before appearing late in life in 12 films by director Guy Maddin, died in Montreal on Dec. 2. He was 93.
Mr. Negin approached acting with the same fearless tenacity he had for living across his 70-plus years in the film and theatre industry. With an audacious flair that solidified him as a queer icon (John Waters was a fan), Mr. Negin had a considerable gift for storytelling that saw him cast as Truman Capote twice – first in a 1996 Canadian remount of the Broadway play Tru directed by Robert Morse and second in the 1998 Hollywood biopic 54.
Mr. Negin died at the CHSLD Vigi Mont-Royal long-term care home after having three strokes from September to November this year.
Shortly after his birth, on Oct. 20, 1929 in London, England to Jewish parents Doris (née Lupinsky) and Jack Negin, his family moved to an area now known as Little Italy, in the west end of Toronto. Down the street lived the Cronenberg family, who owned a bookstore where a young Louis would often go to read books recommended by the owner, Milton Cronenberg, father of David, the future film director.
When Louis was 13, his father died unexpectedly, leaving him to be raised by his widowed mother, Doris. A trailblazer even as a tween, Louis received glowing notices from his classmates during a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at Harbord Collegiate where he performed the role of Olivia in drag. Having been tormented by his classmates for a queerness he couldn’t hide, he credited the teacher who cast him for saving his life.
“When you think about how an actor works his whole life for maybe a few minutes of success … you have to bask in it,” said Mr. Negin in a 2013 audio documentary recorded for Sook-Yin Lee’s CBC series Definitely Not the Opera. “To me, applause has always been the audience saying ‘We love you.’”
Mr. Negin as Truman Capote in Tru at the St. Lawrence Centre in Toronto on June 1996.Michael Cooper
In 1955, Mr. Negin joined the ensemble of the Stratford Festival where he would stay for seven seasons. In 1967, after relocating in London, England, he made national headlines when he became the first actor to perform with full-frontal nudity in an onstage production of John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes on the West End.
In a 2013 interview with Fugues Magazine, Mr. Negin recalled: “There I am in the nude onstage and my mom stands up in the audience and says, ‘Louis, put your pants back on!’ I thought I would faint on the spot. The story ran in newspapers around the world. My mom did interviews and there were paparazzi camped outside the house!”
It was in London that Mr. Negin met a 19-year-old Charles Dunlop, then an emerging production designer. After a shy, slow courtship, the couple fell in with a glamorous crowd that included encounters with Marlene Dietrich, Noël Coward, Marilyn Monroe and Joan Collins, which Mr. Negin later dramatized in his 2007 semi-autobiographical one-man show The Glass Eye.
In 1976, the couple returned to Toronto where they settled in Cabbagetown to care for Mr. Negin’s elderly mother. Throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s, Mr. Negin appeared in many Canadian plays as well as film and television productions, including The Littlest Hobo, Louis Del Grande’s 1980s CBC series Seeing Things and in Rabid, directed by his former childhood neighbour, Mr. Cronenberg.
When he was in his 70s, an age when many people slow down, the busiest years of Mr. Negin’s career were only beginning. After striking up a friendship with Mr. Maddin while performing in a Winnipeg production of M. Butterfly, Mr. Negin became an unlikely muse for the experimental auteur.
From 2003 to 2015, Mr. Negin appeared in 12 of Mr. Maddin’s short films and features, including My Winnipeg, The Saddest Music in the World and The Forbidden Room. He acted opposite castmates that included Isabella Rossellini, Udo Kier and Kevin McDonald and was photographed typically shirtless or in the nude. Joked Mr. Maddin, “His mother had passed by now, so no one could tell him to put his pants back on.”
“I’d always wanted my own Marlene Dietrich,” Mr. Maddin said. “Louis wasn’t what anyone would consider a conventional muse, but he was it for me. His face just had the greatest contours and of course, his eyes … He always said he was compared to Peter Lorre when he was young.”
The city of Montreal had always maintained a psychic hold on Mr. Negin, who kept a pied-à-terre on Carré St.-Louis. In their golden years, he and his partner permanently relocated to the Plateau where Mr. Negin developed friendships with a whole new wave of artists, including Quebec theatre artist Marie Brassard, director Robert Lepage and filmmakers Ryan McKenna and Matthew Rankin who directed Mr. Negin in his final two performances. These collaborations, which included The Glass Eye developed with Ms. Brassard and roles in Mr. Rankin’s films Mynarski Death Plummet and The Twentieth Century, earned Mr. Negin some of the biggest notices of his career.
Mr. Negin in the 2011 film Keyhole.Courtesy of eOne Films
At the age of 90, Mr. Negin earned his first film acting nomination for Best Supporting Actor in a Canadian Film by the Vancouver Critics Circle. He was in drag again, playing the mother of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King in The Twentieth Century. It would be his second-last role on screen.
“All the things that can conventionally fade out in an unhappy life, like libido or will to work, had not faded in Louis,” Mr. Maddin said. “I remember Udo Kier was complaining to me a few years ago: ‘Louis called me and asked who he should send his headshots to in Hollywood. He’s 90 years old, what does he think he’s doing?’ I said, ‘Well, he’s trying to get some work!’”
For Ms. Brassard, who acted as a joint caregiver for Louis and Charles, it was Louis’s commitment to friendship that defined his life.
“He would always say, ‘Marie, when you have friends, you have to take care and you have to write to make them know that you’re thinking about them,” Ms. Brassard said.
“We threw Louis a birthday party a few months before he died and he was so excited, he was like a child. All his friends came. It was difficult not to love him, especially as he grew older. He got even better.”
Seconds Mr. Rankin, “I always felt like Louis was even younger than me, even though he was over 50 years my senior. He loved people, and was endlessly curious and that kept him extremely youthful, right to the end of his long life.”
In 2016, Shaun Brodie asked Mr. Negin to present two songs in a show specifically geared toward the experiences of “queer elders,” which would be performed live by the Queer Songbook Orchestra in Montreal.
Wrote Mr. Brodie in an e-mail: “Two of the songs he chose to frame his stories that evening were: I Hate Men by Cole Porter (from Kiss Me, Kate) – no explanation needed haha – and The Party’s Over by Nat King Cole, which Louis chose in reference to the effect the AIDS crisis had on the community in the 80s. Louis was, of course, a huge hit at the show and the audience loved him.”
The next day Mr. Negin responded: “I am running around like a lunatic and I wanted to write a long thank you, which I will when I get home but I am still in an emotional state and I’ve had emails from various people who have loved the show, which I will show you. Let’s figure out when we can meet. Love you Shaun and thank you for showing me that hearts can still be opened if you have the proper keys!”
Mr. Negin leaves Mr. Dunlop, who held his hand during his final moments, and a wide circle of friends and admirers.