The theatre community lost two artists this week. Brian Bedford, appearing as Malvolio in Twelfth Night in 1975, and Bill Needles, died at the ages of 80 and 97, respectively.
It has been a week of sad losses for the performing arts. David Bowie, Alan Rickman – and, at the Stratford Festival, two beloved long-time company members, Brian Bedford and Bill Needles. The deaths of each of these men has instilled profound sadness, even among people who did not know them personally.
For me, of course, the loss of Bill and Brian is personal. These were my friends. I grew up with them, professionally speaking, and was mentored by them both. At every single difficult moment in my own work as an artist, Bill would offer me some kind and important words, a bigger picture, a larger perspective. Brian – whose early work at the Festival made me want to be an actor – was first a role model, then a thoughtful mentor and then a dear friend. Our discussions and explorations of the plays I worked on with him were inspiring. He took these famous and ancient words and made them modern and familiar and completely his own. He lived and breathed the theatre.
Though Bill and Brian were two very different men, they were united by their profound love for the theatre, their strong sense of responsibility to develop young talent and, above all, by their passion for the Festival, their creative home.
Bill joined the Festival in our first year, 1953. At that time, the term "Canadian actor" was an oxymoron: If you lived in Canada, pursuing an acting career meant leaving the country. But then the Stratford tent rose like a rocket from the landscape. A group of the most gifted actors from across Canada were recruited by the great director Tyrone Guthrie; they formed a nucleus that would grow and bring a uniquely Canadian theatrical voice to the world.
This was especially important to someone like Bill, who had to fight to be an actor. He came from an important family: his father, Ira Needles, was president of BF Goodrich Canada and a co-founder of the University of Waterloo. Bill told me that his father made it clear that the family would pay to send him to business school – but if he studied acting, he would be on his own.
Bill made the brave choice, and became part of a different kind of "company" from his father's. He was one of the pioneers who shaped not just the fledgling Festival but also our country's hitherto largely unformed theatrical landscape.
Brian Bedford came from quite a different background: a poor family in Yorkshire. To him, theatre was a welcome escape. His talent quickly propelled him to work with the greats. He went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art with Peter O'Toole, Alan Bates and Albert Finney. He was a protégé of John Gielgud and Peter Brook. He was a friend and colleague of Noel Coward.
When he first came to us in 1975, he already had a flourishing career in the West End and on Broadway; a season in Southwestern Ontario could easily have been just a one-time diversion for him.
But instead, Brian told me, the first time he entered the Festival Theatre, the beauty of that stage literally took his breath away. And it was on that same stage that he gave some of his greatest performances. And it was in Stratford that his artistry matured, as he worked with such artistic partners as Maggie Smith, Robin Phillips, and other members of the Stratford company, forming relationships that would last a lifetime.
So the loss of these two artists hurts. We feel gutted by it – there is no other word. I will miss Brian and Bill – their humour, their support, their optimism, undiminished at the ages of 80 and 97, respectively. I am deeply saddened to think that I will never again encounter Brian's quizzical gaze at a suggestion of which he whimsically disapproves, and to think that this will be the first season since our Festival began that Bill Needles will not be there to see every single one of our productions.
Artists work a kind of magic on us, so losing them makes us feel we have lost a bit of ourselves.
And in the ephemeral medium of the theatre, the loss may seem to be irretrievable. The magic of a great performance must inevitably vanish into air. And so when we lose the magicians themselves, we feel that we have somehow lost our connection to their power, that our direct links to these artists have been severed by death. But then I catch myself and remember yet another beloved Festival actor gone too soon: Nicholas Pennell, who was able to track his professional theatrical lineage back to William Shakespeare through six actors. And so in the years ahead we will be able to trace our connection to Bill and Brian, and to Guthrie and Gielgud and Coward.
As Tennyson says, "I am a part of all that I have met."
Antoni Cimolino is the artistic director of the Stratford Festival.