Winnipeg actor Evelyne Anderson leaves behind an impressive legacy

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This article was published 21/02/2019 (1890 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Actress and Winnipeg theatre legend Evelyne Anderson died Wednesday at the age of 89.

Anderson leaves an impressive legacy in Winnipeg theatre. She starred in the inaugural Rainbow Stage production — Brigadoon — in 1955 and made her Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre debut five years later in a production of Look Back in Anger.

In 2017, she had the Winnipeg Theatre Awards renamed the Evies in her honour after receiving the organization’s first Lifetime Achievement Award.

In a 2010 interview with the Free Press, Anderson tallied her personal achievements with her professional ones, which included 52 appearances on the Royal MTC stage and 25 at Rainbow Stage.

“Don’t forget three children,” she said. “I had it all.”

Anderson’s career, which took in more than half a century, tallied more than 100 performances and took her from Young Street in Winnipeg’s West End to London’s West End, where she starred in the musical Fresh As Air opposite brash up-and-comer Peter O’Toole in 1957.

“We thought he drank too much and was too reckless to be a star,” she told the Free Press.

Anderson was the first Winnipegger to study theatre in England — at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school — and she returned to the Winnipeg stage to work consistently over a long and celebrated career.

Her 2010 interview with the Free Press took place before she was honoured by her fellow thespians at a 2010 event in the lobby of the Royal MTC.

Anderson aspired to be the next Deanna Durbin — another Winnipegger — when she graduated from Gordon Bell High School in 1948, her vocal talent groomed by her father, a noted composer and choral conductor.

With her English training, she leapt into the musical canon at both Rainbow and the Royal MTC stage, playing Anna in The King and I four times, and Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.

While she performed on stages across the country, she stayed true to her Winnipeg roots. When Royal MTC founder John Hirsch invited her to join the Stratford Festival company in the early 1980s, she refused.

“You couldn’t say no to John, but I did then,” Anderson told the Free Press. “My family came first.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @FreepKing