I have, a few times, gotten the parent out of the way because I knew I’d want to write about the child sooner or later, though I mostly then haven’t gotten around to the children yet. I freely admit that my choices of who to write about in any given week are erratic and only follow the vaguest of patterns. On the other hand, this is still the first time I’ve written about a person first because I knew I was going to want to eventually write about the person who played his son. Even though I have seen both in a wide array of other things, and indeed I wish Gordon Pinsent had been nominated for an Oscar for something completely unconnected to Due South, I still think of him as “the Mountie’s dad” as often as not.
Of course, his career goes back long before Due South. Long before his fifty-five episodes of The Red Green Show. In 1962, he was in a TV production of Cyrano de Bergerac; he plays a guy who gets killed in a duel by Cyrano. In 1968, he was in the original Thomas Crown Affair and in 1970, Colossus: The Forbin Project. I’m not entirely sure he’s ever even risen to Hey, It’s That Guy status unless you’re Canadian, but he’s been doing steady, consistent work for a very long time. He’s a Canadian character actor, and Canada has a lot of those. Still, if you want stolid man who’s probably spent a lot of decades outside, Pinsent is your man.
Which is why I really feel he should have been nominated for the best version of that role I think I’ve ever seen. I don’t mean he should have won; that was the year of Daniel Day Lewis and There Will Be Blood and it wasn’t going to happen. But it’s also the year Johnny Depp got nominated for Sweeney Todd, and that shouldn’t have happened; maybe the Academy was just surprised that he didn’t completely disgrace himself with the songs. But that was also the year Pinsent was the lead in Away From Her. Julie Christie got a lot of attention for the film; that’s fine. It’s not undeserved. Her portrayal of an Alzheimer’s patient is sensitive and gripping.
It’s just that Pinsent carries the show. She got a lead nomination, but it’s a supporting performance. Pinsent is the lead. He’s playing, in many ways, the same kind of bluff, no-nonsense fellow he plays in a lot of the things I’ve seen him in, but there’s an additional weight on top of it. He was miscast but fascinating in Pillars of the Earth, but here, he actually has the gravitas he was intended to have there. He’s lost, because the center of his life is lost. He can’t solve this by going snowshoeing.
Still, though, he’s Bob Fraser to me. Probably a lot of people know him as the hyperbolic Hap Shaughnessy from Red Green. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he’s the voice of Babar to a fair number of people. But in my head, he’s always a ghost. Probably my favourite of his episodes is the one where he’s staunchly advising his son to leave “the Yank” behind in the woods, because Ray is only dead weight. Despite the fact that a head injury has left his son blind and paralyzed from the waist down. It takes a special kind of actor to pull that part off and still leave you believing he was capable of tying his own shoes, much less bringing in his man.
