Post City Magazines | June 2008, Jayne Eastwood by Alexandra Innes

Jayne Eastwood

North Toronto’s reigning queen of comedy on the founding of Second City, her family and the silliest way to throw a pie

by Alexandra Innes

MEETING WITH JAYNE Eastwood feels like getting together with an old friend. She’s a familiar face who has made you laugh, probably made you weep, and throughout her 40-year career — from founding member of Second City to her upcoming role on Little Mosque on the Prairie — she’s earned unconditional respect for her accomplishments.

Not that respect is easy to come by in this city, in her industry.

Eastwood is hilarious, something gin-soaked contrarian Christopher Hitchens deemed highly improbable. In a recent issue of Vanity Fair, Hitchens wrote, “Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny?”

Fortunately for Eastwood (and us) she is in fact funny, and to prove it, she and four other “not funny” females joined forces to crush that idea.

In 2004, Eastwood got together with Kathryn Greenwood, Robin Duke, Deb McGrath and Teresa Pavlinek for a one-off fundraiser performance for an anti-violence charity. Since then, Women Fully Clothed has played all over Canada, and in Edinburgh, Scotland. Their brand of humour tackles the challenges of daily life with an attitude refreshingly devoid of rudeness. A Globe and Mail critic gushed in 2005, “If there’s a group of finer comediennes working these days, I’m not aware of them.”

The quick-witted quintet is currently writing a new show, slated for launching at the new Richmond Hill Theatre, in November. There’s even talk of taking the show on tour in the States next year.

“I don’t think there’s anything more wonderful than making people laugh because of the joy that emanates from it,” Eastwood declares. “I love drama, too. I did ’Night Mother [in 2001] and the audience was sobbing. But I was starting to feel guilty about depressing them so much!”

But as this famously candid quipster admits, none of her success would have been possible if she hadn’t grown up in North Toronto.

“It saved my life,” says Eastwood of her first days at Northern Secondary School. “A lot of the people there in the arts course were total rejects from the other superstraight high schools. We were so glad to be together and to be there, we just clung on to each other. I still see some of the people that I went to art school with. And the teachers were brilliant,” she adds. “They treated us like human beings.”

After Northern, Eastwood seemed destined to focus on the visual arts — a childhood passion she still enjoys today — until a friend from school suggested she participate in a community theatre play. With this fateful decision, the stars aligned in her favour. One thing led smoothly to another until Eastwood found herself with a major role in what would become the classic Canadian road movie, 1970’s Goin’ Down the Road.

In the early ’70s she became a cast member of the legendary musical Godspell. That lineup included such future stars as Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Martin Short and Andrea Martin. The same crew who would go on to form the core of the seminal Second City Theatre Troupe, a year later in 1973.

Second City not only played an important role in the development of her career, but she also met fellow cast member Joe Flaherty’s brother David, her future husband. Eastwood and Flaherty, who teaches comedy writing at Humber College, live in Ancaster, Ont. They have three children, Olivia, 29; Alicia, 27; and Dave, 23.

In 1975, Eastwood won the Canadian Film Award in the Best Actress category for an episode of CBC’s The Collaborators. The following year, her emotional portrayal of a cancer victim in the CBC production Last of the Four Letter Words earned her ACTRA’s Earle Grey Award for Best Actress. In 1998 she received the Best Supporting Actress Gemini Award for her portrayal of a downtrodden mother in the CBC drama Dangerous Offender. Then 1999 saw her bag the Earle Grey Lifetime Achievement Award, for her body of work, as well as a Gemini Award for Best Performance in a Preschool Program, for playing the colourful, larger-than-life Aunt Agatha in Noddy and Friends (PBS/CBC/TVO).

It’s an unimpeachable resumé that should guarantee more work … right?

“It should,” she says. “And in Hollywood it does. But up here it doesn’t because there just isn’t enough work.”

“Hollywood’s a money machine, but the Toronto film and television industry isn’t a money-motivated machine. It’s us desperately trying to hang on to our culture and do some great stuff. So it has that wonderful side to it, but it’s just not enough,” Eastwood laments.

And don’t get her started on the subject of Canadian TV.

“It’s so wrong. We’re completely losing our culture in television,” says Eastwood. She was working in the courtroom comedy-drama This Is Wonderland when the CBC cancelled it in 2006, despite a public petition signed by more than 4,000 people opposed to the shutdown.

“I’ve had my heart broken too many times,” she says. “This Is Wonderland was in Toronto. It reflected the kind of people who live here. It showcased the best actors around. And the CBC pulled the plug. I’m really angry about it. I’ve had plugs pulled many times, but this one really pissed me off. George F. Walker (co-writer and producer) is a brilliant writer — I mean, give me a break. They don’t know when they have something good.”

Last year, Eastwood found something good when she landed a role in Real Time, the first feature film produced by Ari Lantos, son of Robert and also a Northern S.S. grad.

And that’s probably an underrated aspect of living and working in Toronto. Shared experiences count for something and often lead to great work (and more work).

Raised in the York Mills Valley when it was all fields and ravines with just a few houses here and there, Eastwood lived at 26 Donino Ave.

She remembers taking the streetcar by herself at nine years old to go to the library at Yonge and Lawrence or taking a bus to the Willowdale library. “Libraries are one of my favourite places,” she affirms. “I loved walking into the youth section where the books were. I love the smell of books. I adore reading.”

Winters meant skating at the Jolly Miller. “Everybody from the Valley would meet at ‘the Jolly,’” she enthuses. “It had a beautiful old outdoor rink, with this massive elm tree in the middle of it, with benches all around it, and classical music. People would hold hands and skate. We spent the whole day there.” Inside, the Jolly Miller’s two levels were both equipped with cast-iron pot-bellied stoves. “You’d warm your mittens on the pot-bellied stove, and you’d buy hot chocolate and hot dogs and Cokes and fries. That was our life.”

Then there were the trips up to “the city limits” to buy fries. “I’d say, ‘Mum, I’m going up to the city limits,’ and we’d walk up Donwoods Drive. It was really a long haul up that hill,” she recalls. Fridays were movie nights, either at the Capitol Theatre or the closer Fairlawn, which used to stand at Yonge and Snowdon Avenue.

“I’d kill to live in North Toronto now. That whole area between north of Eglinton and Yonge and Lawrence, I love that area,” Eastwood says. “I’m a North Toronto girl.”

Now 61, Eastwood has told her new agent to submit her for 75-year-old roles. “There’s been a fair amount of work in that category because a lot of girls give up when they’re 75,” she says with characteristic matterof– factness. In an often ego-obsessed business, Eastwood just wants to work. In 2002 she played Jason Alexander’s mother in The Man Who Saved Christmas although she’s only 13 years older than he is. In 2006 she played Sigourney Weaver’s mother in the movie Snow Cake, with barely three years difference between them.

“It’s fine with me. I don’t care. It’s a good thing.” She shrugs.

“I think one of the reasons I keep working is because I’ll do anything, basically. I’m not too fussy. Unless it’s porno.” And there’s that throaty laugh again. “It’s a crazy, up-and-down business, but as long as you know that, you can handle it.”