RIP Janet Wright
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/janet-wright-actress-mccabe-mrs-miller-corner-gas-225935992.html
Janet Wright, the actress best known to Canadians as the long-suffering matriarch Emma Leroy in the WGN America comedy Corner Gas, has died. She was 71.
Canadian broadcaster CTV, which developed and aired the long-running Corner Gas sitcom in Canada, confirmed Wright's death to the Hollywood Reporter. No cause of death was given, but Wright had been ill for some time before she passed away on Monday morning in Vancouver.
"Janet was like no other person I've ever met. She had a giant wit, a giant heart, and was one of the strongest human beings to ever stride around this planet," Brent Butt, creator and executive producer of Corner Gas, a comedy about a host of oddball rubes at a gas station in fictional Dog River, Saskatchewan, said Monday in a statement.
Born in England on March 8, 1945, Wright moved as a child along with her family to Canada, where they first settled in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her early credits included small roles in Robert Altman's 1971 drama McCabe and Mrs Miller and Sidney Lumet's The Wiz (1978).
After playing Miss Mervin in the 1974 Canadian indie comedy Wolfpen Principle, Wright appeared in a slew of popular Canadian TV shows like King of Kensington, The Beachcombers, Danger Bay, Street Legal and Due South.
She also performed in many stage productions, including for the Vancouver Arts Club Theater, the Stratford Festival and the Persephone Theater In Saskatoon, which she co-founded in 1974.
"Janet was an artist on an uncompromising search for the truth in all its unvarnished beauty," Stratford Festival artistic director Antoni Cimolino, who directed Wright as Ma Joad in the 2011 production of The Grapes of Wrath, added in his own statement.
Wright's other movie credits included John McTiernan's Rollerball, and Wolfgang Petersen's The Perfect Storm.
I remember renting AMERICAN GOTHIC (1988) as a kid. I even bought that same VHS copy, which sadly is now junk. I did get it on DVD, though.
I didn't watch "Corner Gas" much, but I eventually realized the mom was played by the same woman who played Fanny.
http://www.freewebs.com/demonictoys/ share