‘One of our queens’

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This article was published 31/10/2020 (2133 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nancy Drake will receive her final honour, posthumously, at the Winnipeg Theatre Awards Monday night when she will be awarded a special Evie award under the category of career contributions.

“A regular at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre for decades, Nancy performed at every theatre company in Winnipeg, with her work being recognized and lauded on a national level,” the citation reads. “Her passion for theatre and devotion to the Winnipeg theatre community is legendary.”

The award is named for legendary local actor Evelyne Anderson, who died in 2019, and it is appropriate that it would be bestowed on Drake, says local actor-playwright Brian Richardson, who worked with Drake off and on since the 1970s.

“She really was one of our queens,” Richardson says. “We always talked about the three queens of Winnipeg, Evie (Anderson), Doreen Brownstone… and Nancy.”

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Nancy Jane Drake died of a virulent pneumonia Sept. 9 at the age of 77. She was born Nancy Johnston in Winnipeg, and spread her wings at age 19, seeking her fortune in London, England. She returned three years later, pregnant with her daughter Keri, and a new husband, Geoffrey.

“She was five months pregnant when they sailed back to Canada,” says daughter Emily, 49, the youngest of the Drake children. “And she was the only person on the boat who didn’t get seasick. She said she was the only person in the dining car while the waiters tried to serve her as best they could amidst the seasickness.”

The couple had Keri in Winnipeg before moving to Sydney, N.S., where they had three more children, Adam, Amanda and Emily. Drake worked in local radio and sang in folk clubs and taught drama in a youth arts program in Yarmouth. Her devotion to her brood of three girls and a boy was fierce, says Emily.

“When I was five years old, when we were in Nova Scotia, there was a hurricane. It was a big hurricane, a scary hurricane,” Emily says, recalling her mom telling her how she drove home to get to her kids that night through downed power lines.

“The way she told the story, she literally watched the lines dancing in the road, and her kids were on the other side,” Emily says. “So she basically drove as fast as she could through these dancing wires and got herself to our house, where we all slept the night in my sister Keri’s room, all five of us in one single bed.

“I thought it was the greatest thing. No. 1, there’s this great storm outside, and I love a good storm. Plus, we’re having this camp-out in my sister’s room. To me, it was this great thing that happened. But my mother chose that room because it was on the lee side of the house and if any of the trees were going to fall on the property, they would fall on the other side of the house. It was the most protected room in the house.

“So she took this incredibly dangerous situation and somehow, at least, her youngest kid thought this was the greatest thing ever. She was notorious for things like that.”

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Nancy Drake gained a reputation as being something of a force of nature herself when she returned to Winnipeg in 1976 to raise her four kids as a single mom, later adding a fifth child to the family, Rhea, with Winnipeg actor Harry Nelken.

“She made a decision when I was 11 to be a full-time actor at about the same time as she was invited to join Manitoba Theatre Centre company with (former MTC artistic director) Richard Ouzounian,” Emily says. “Up until then, she had a 9-to-5 job working for the public library system and was also working in the theatre at the same time.

“I remember being really proud of her for making the decision to do what she loved.”

Drake met Richardson in Halifax and renewed acquaintance with him in Winnipeg, where he says he gained an appreciation for her dramatic savvy the first time he directed her in a play.

“You didn’t direct Nancy, you ‘discussed’ with Nancy,” says Richardson, 75. “That’s the way it was, but it was a wonderful experience.

“She had a wide range of talent. She trained as a dancer at one time when she was young so she could handle choreography. And she had a tremendous acting talent. When she stepped into a role, she literally stepped into it.

“It was a living thing that she put onto the stage every single time. Very sharp focus. And she had a very clear sense of theatricality and what worked and what didn’t.”

Her work and her philosophy inspired other up-and-coming actors such as Sharon Bajer, who first worked with her on an MTC production of Romeo and Juliet in the mid-’90s, not long after Bajer landed in Winnipeg after graduating from Langara College’s Studio 58 in Vancouver.

“When I first moved here and I was getting to know the community, she certainly was a person that I really admired and wanted to emulate as an actor,” Bajer says. “I really looked up to her.”

Drake proved to be inspirational, too, when it came to balancing career skills and life skills, she says.

“I remember sharing dressing rooms with her and she liked to give advice,” Bajer says. “She would say it’s OK to not feel like you’re balancing your work and your ability to be a mother very well, because it’s difficult.

“Not a lot of people had little kids at home at the beginning of my career, but I did and so did she. I found her very inspiring in that way. It was hard to find a lot of female role models that were here in Winnipeg that knew about being a mom and being an actress at the same time.

“One of the things she always told me was it’s important not to lose your place as an artist just because you have children and, in fact, you can draw from the experiences of motherhood and put it into your work. I found her like a tough mom. She had some tough mom advice.

“I admired her honesty and strength even if her honesty rubbed you the wrong way, there was always some wisdom in it. She didn’t have time to mince words. She wasn’t gonna spend a lot of time softening hard truth.”

That honesty and experience also drew Winnipeg actor Cory Wojcik to Drake, even as her career was slowing down in the past few years. Wojcik, 42, first met Drake performing a play at Shakespeare in the Ruins in 2006.

“Later, my friends and I got into the fringe (festival) and we were talking about doing a show and working with somebody where we could learn something,” Wojcik says. “That’s why I asked Nancy. So that began our relationship. We work together, to improvise and also write a script that we did for the 2007 fringe and we did it again in 2009. And then we were friends ever since then.”

Even in her older years, Drake could be an electric presence on stage.

“She was… there,” Wojcik says. “You walk on stage with Nancy and if you have any anxiety about being on stage or you’re worried about anything, she had the power to make that disappear.

“That just came from her vast experience and training and her love for the thing. But there was a great safety. On stage and off stage, she would be there.”

Some actors just refuse to break character on stage. Drake was one, Wojcik says.

“I remember one show where we had a scene where she was playing my mom and we were supposed to stick a bar of soap in my mouth,” he recalls. “We had a plastic wrap around one end of the soap so that when I put it in my mouth, I wasn’t actually eating soap.

“But it fell off, and she saw it fall off and she’s looking at me and I’m looking at her like: ‘Well, I’m going to do it.’

“I put the soap in my mouth and I thought I was going to crack the great Nancy Drake on the stage. But I did not get her,” he says. “Afterwards she was like: ‘You know what? You almost got me.’

“That moment it really clarified the relationship with Nancy,” he says. “She had such great respect for the stage and respect for performance, but she also knew very well that it’s supposed to be fun.”

Through Wojcik, Drake touched yet another generation with her passion for theatre.

“My son Mackenzie, who is now attending the National Theatre School, would go over to her place after school and she would give him voice and diction lessons in exchange for taking out her recycling,” Wojcik says. “She was my friend, so of course she was doing it out of friendship.

“But I didn’t think it would be out of character for Nancy to do,” he says. “It was more about the fact that she could work with a young person. If you showed that you loved theatre you were her kind of person.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing