Actor loved family, never forgot where he came from

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This article was published 09/01/2018 (2857 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Donnelly Rhodes had a busy acting career, playing a police officer on Da Vinci’s Inquest, an escaped con in Soap and a doctor on the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, but he always found time to visit family in his hometown of Winnipeg.

Rhodes, who died in Maple Ridge, B.C., on Monday at the age of 80, was born and raised in Winnipeg with his mother, sister and brother.

“He was a very good person,” Loa Henry, Rhodes’s sister, said Tuesday. “He was a very good father.”

Henry said the family lived in Fort Rouge when she and her brothers were children.

“We were raised by our mother and he took on the role of the father of our family. He was a very generous man and a very fine human being.”

Henry said her brother left Winnipeg when he was 18 and never lived here again.

“He would come here at Christmas and to different events and to the lake,” she said.

“Our family was always quite close.”

Rhodes’s mother was Ann Henry, a reporter and columnist at the Winnipeg Tribune, who was the first female reporter to cover the Winnipeg Police Court and the Manitoba legislature. She was also a playwright whose work Lulu Street, about the Winnipeg General Strike, was the first play by a Manitoba writer to grace the stage of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. She died in 2000.

Rhodes’s sister was the founding member and director of the Winnipeg Labour Choir while his brother, Tim Henry, is an actor who was in the movie Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem.

Rhodes graduated from the National Theatre School of Canada and was rarely out of work after that. Other television shows he guest-starred in included Bonanza, Mission Impossible, Cheers, The Golden Girls and The X-Files. He also had roles in the movies Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Gunfight in Abilene.

Rhodes won a Gemini Award for best actor in 2002 for his role in Da Vinci’s Inquest. He was also honoured with the Geminis’ Earle Grey Award for lifetime achievement in 2006.

He was married four times, once to Martha Henry, a theatre school classmate, longtime member of the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, and companion of the Order of Canada. She took the last name of his mother when they married.

Besides his sister and brother, Rhodes is survived by his wife, Sarah, a daughter and a son.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca