Thursday, April 03, 2008

Last night Rosemary and I attended the opening of the Arts Club Theatre Company production of Michele Riml's Poster Boys at the Granville Island Stage. Scott Bellis, convincingly plays the older man who in his youth came out and dumped the ad agency executive bride at the altar and Luke Camilleri is the young man who without being ambivalent about his sexuality wants to be like his boss, the powerful ad agency executive played by Lois Anderson. Both Camilleri and Bellis are very good but they cannot compete with Anderson or Daniel Arnold who plays the younger man and the other woman in the play. Both Anderson and Arnold are superb dramatic actors, but they also shine as comedians. Below is a profile on Lois Anderson that has just appeared in the April issue of VLM (Vancouver Lifestyle Magazine).

What can I say about a magazine editor that responds to my, "Bob [Mercer] we need a profile on a fine actress," with, "Alex, do it."






Lois Anderson

My granddaughter Rebecca and I watched in 2002 the Leaky Heaven Circus’s not too reverential nativity play Birthday Boy. That’s when we discovered Lois Anderson’s playing St. Joseph to a black Virgin Mary. We laughed. Since then, I have watched Anderson in dramatic roles including last year’s Trout Stanley where she went from comedy to drama and ended up sexy. She won a Jessie Richardson Award (five Jessies in all), in 2007, playing a 17 year-old Salome in the Leaky Heaven Circus production of Salome. While Anderson denied that she is sexy, she did tell me during our photo session and interview in my studio, “I am 42 years old right now and I had to seduce King Herod as a 17 year-old. We pulled it off.”

Anderson is a sculptor of sorts. “I have been doing this since I was 24. I can sculpt my career. I can seek out comedy and drama. I love choosing the next part and having to do something that I have not done before. This is how I’ve lasted.” Besides sculpture, Anderson has toured France in a circus knife board act (on the receiving end) and lists circus silks and the trapeze as additional skills. Her two daughters, Anuska (13) and Elena (10) have had a trapeze in their room most of their life until the current landlord objected to making holes in the ceiling.


While Anderson played Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz in Grade 6 it wasn’t until she was at an archeological dig in the Negev Desert when she was 24 that she decided to pursue acting.

Lois Anderson will be appearing in the Arts Club Theatre Company’s production of Poster Boys directed by Andrew McIlroy which is based on the true story (written by Michele Riml) of two gay men who posed for a series of VanCity ads (that were meant to be gay) in the 90s in Vancouver. The play opens March 27 (until April 26) at the Granville Island Stage.

© 2008 VLM/Alex Waterhouse-Hayward