Local character actor McIntyre made initial mark in improv Obituary
By: Ben Waldman Posted: 5:52 PM CDT Friday, May. 10, 2024

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Stephen Eric McIntyre, a beloved presence in Winnipeg’s theatre, film and television scenes, as well as a pioneer of local improv comedy, died Thursday at age 63.

McIntyre performed for more than 40 years, appearing in dozens of local stage productions and eventually onscreen with similarly magnetic, intense actors such as Robin Williams, John Turturro, Michael Fassbender and Bob Odenkirk, alongside whom McIntyre played a grizzled veteran in the 2021 shoot-‘em-up Nobody.

Born in Regina in 1960 and raised in Winnipeg from the age of eight, McIntyre first explored theatre while at the University of Winnipeg, where after a messy audition for a lead, he was cast as a sword-carrier in a student production of Twelfth Night.

“I had one line,” he recalled on an episode of The Manitoba Moneyshot Podcast recorded in 2020. “(It was) ‘Your young nephew Titus,’ … but every time I went to say it, I would say ‘nung nephew’ over and over again, because I was so nervous about having a line. Can you imagine if I’d gotten Arsenio?”

After one term in university, McIntyre voluntarily withdrew. “Education is not my thing,” McIntyre told the Free Press in 1988. “I dropped out of university and started hanging around and auditioning.”

In 1982, McIntyre showed up to audition for an improv troupe called Theatre X.

“Rob Slade and I were the only two guys who showed up,” he said on the podcast.

He and Slade were roommates, living in an oil-heated “shack” in St. James, where the pair hosted parties for their growing community of theatre and improv players. They paid their rent in part by taking empties to the beer vendor.

“Steve was most people’s first person they met in the Winnipeg theatre scene,” recalls Wayne Buss, who performed with McIntyre, Slade, and a who’s-who of other Winnipeg luminaries during Saturday night improv sessions at Prairie Theatre Exchange, in those days on Princess Street.

Shortly after McIntyre enlisted, Theatre X — which included Jeff Hirschfield, Brian Hartt, Mariam Bernstein, Sheldon Fink, Joy Beauchamp, Ellen Peterson and Ann Hodges, according to McIntyre’s interview — produced a sketch collection called The Choking Puppet, performed at the Planetarium.

McIntyre played Bob, a back-alley denizen who entertained himself with twist-tie figurines and shadow puppets.

After the show, covered in ketchup, McIntyre went to clean himself up and bumped into Reg Skene, a key builder of the University of Winnipeg’s theatre and film department.

“He said it was the best acting performance he’d seen in years,” McIntyre recalled on the podcast; not long before, Skene was the one trying to get McIntyre to nail his pronunciation of “young nephew.” The compliment was enough to keep McIntyre from quitting and encourage him to audition for a show called David & Lisa.

“I went to the audition as a joke,” he recounted, remembering trying out with actual theatre students. “They were all so wound up about it. I’m like, ‘You guys! Just get up and say the words.’” He got the role.

When the original Theatre X leadership disbanded, the remaining crowd established a home base at the Gas Station Theatre (now Art Centre), which opened in Osborne Village in 1983.

(Later in life, McIntyre worked at the Gas Station; his visage is painted on a street-facing mural. In 2008, he was awarded a Safer Community Award for his work restoring the courtyard in front of the theatre and his initiation of a program for local youth to create art on the walls and planters.)

The troupe did shows with other companies, including Second City. “We ended up at the Royal Albert with Mike Myers crying into his Standard because he thought, ‘How in the world?’ They were Second City from Toronto, they came to Winnipeg, they do a show with us, and we kick their ass.”

By 1988, when the first Winnipeg Fringe Festival was held, McIntyre was a known entity. At that inaugural event, McIntyre starred in Mind of the Iguana, which he wrote with Brian Drader; it was considered the hit of the festival.

“Steve played the iguana. As he crawled on the stage, he dragged his legs behind him and never said a word, but you couldn’t stop looking at him. He was so incredibly focused. It was magic,” recalls Buss, who directed the show.

McIntyre became one of the most called-upon leading men on city stages from Manitoba Theatre for Young People to Shakespeare in the Ruins.

“He was the tamer to my shrew,” recalls Michelle Boulet, a founding member of SIR. “He delivered Shakespeare lines like no other. Anyone who heard him say, ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme grows’ will agree.”

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, McIntyre moved toward film and television roles, frequently cast in westerns (High Noon, Lonesome Dove) and crime dramas requiring a dose of gritty, blue-eyed menace, such as History Channel’s Gangland Undercover.

Those roles included appearances in a number of Winnipeg-shot pictures, including The Big White, starring Robin Williams, Woody Harrelson and Holly Hunter; The Lookout, starring Joseph Gordon Levitt and Jeff Daniels; and the 2009 heist flick High Life, directed by Gary Yates and starring McIntyre alongside Timothy Olyphant.

“Stephen Eric McIntyre is suitably out-there as Bug, a repressed gay cowboy visited by stallions when he’s high,” wrote Stephen Cole in a solid Globe and Mail review of the film, which played TIFF and at the 2009 edition of the Berlinale.

All this after McIntyre arrived to theatre only as an unsuspecting wheelman.

“I had no interest in the theatre, but one day I drove (Robert Slade) to an audition at the university and decided to audition for the fun of it,” McIntyre told the Free Press in 1988. “I got the part. I was quite surprised. I had no training. I really enjoyed myself.”

McIntyre is survived by a wide circle of friends and family, including two children and two grandchildren. The cause of his death was not confirmed by press time.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com