Nuala Fitzgerald Cowan is shown with her husband, Edgar Cowan, and their dog, Alec. The pair met in Toronto when Ms. Fitzgerald was working on the children's TV series Randy Dandy, and when Mr. Cowan shared a house with singer Ian Tyson.James Lewcun/The Globe and Mail
She was an Irish beauty, strong willed and unconventional, who forged a path through the Canadian theatre world after arriving in Halifax as a young wife of a naval officer after the Second World War, only 19 years old and knowing no one.
In Dublin, Nuala Cassidy, as she was then known, attended Loreto Abbey School, a girls’ school taught by nuns, and after graduating she worked as a top model in that city. “They were called mannequins then,” recalled her younger sister, Elizabeth Boardman, who now lives in Red Deer, Alta. “She was elegant, and she had the greenest eyes.” In a Dublin newspaper, a photo of her was used to illustrate a story about how to have “lovely lips.”
Later in Canada, Nuala (pronounced Noola) Fitzgerald realized that green eyes and lovely lips can take you only so far and she turned herself into a thorough professional as an actor, performing as readily in a daytime TV melodrama or at a dinner theatre as in a children’s show or at the Shaw Festival. She was willing to take almost any role in movies or plays, however unpleasant. In David Cronenberg’s 1979 horror film The Brood, she played the mother of Hollywood star Samantha Eggar’s character; the mother ends by being beaten to death by a dwarf.
Ms. Fitzgerald appeared in several films and TV shows, and she won plaudits for her roles at the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake.Supplied
Kevin Sullivan directed her in 2003 in the TV movie version of Timothy Findley’s The Piano Man’s Daughter, set among Irish settlers in Ontario struggling with epilepsy passed down in the family.
“She played the grandmother of the lead character, a complex role because the granddaughter was played by different actors at different ages and she had to adjust to that,” Mr. Sullivan recalled in an interview. “I was looking for someone really Irish who could play a 19th-century character and Nuala looked superb on camera. She had an ethereal quality. She really was a sophisticated actress.”
He used her also as the snobby Mrs. Pringle in his 1986 miniseries Anne of Avonlea, who looks down on the orphaned Anne. “We were looking for someone aloof and icy, but with a tender side, because Anne eventually wins her over. Nuala pulled it off. She could be cold and mean as well as warm and genuine.”
Ms. Fitzgerald died with medical assistance on July 31 at Kensington Hospice in Toronto, aged 87. She had been diagnosed with cancer and was paralyzed after surgery. Remarkably, she arranged her own wake to precede, not follow her death, directing her friends in the performing arts to sing her favourite songs or recite poetry of her choice. “She asked me to sing The Rocky Road to Dublin, and she said ‘That’s my song,’ her friend Desmond Ellis recalled. “There were a lot of tears and a lot of laughter.”
She was born in Dublin on Sept. 16, 1935, to Patrick and Eileen (née Curtis) Cassidy, their third child and first daughter after two much older boys. Her father was the country’s receiver-general, collecting the customs and excise taxes for what was then called the Irish Free State (it became Ireland two years later.)
The teenage Nuala was working as a model when she met the dashing Michael Penrose-Fitzgerald, who was a member of the Royal Canadian Navy and a university friend of her elder brother Patrick. In 1952, Rock Hudson, then at the height of his fame, was in a movie shooting in Dublin called Captain Lightfoot, in which the glamorous courting couple appeared as extras, dancing the minuet.
At the conclusion of filming, they announced their engagement at a party at the Cassidy home attended by Rock Hudson, causing much excitement in the neighbourhood.
In 1954, after their wedding the Fitzgeralds were off to Halifax, where Michael took on duties related to officer training. The couple soon had two boys – Brian and Timothy – and Nuala was often alone with them while her husband was out at sea. She began to feel increasingly unhappy. “In her letters, she talked about her boys and about the snow,” her sister Elizabeth recalled. “Halifax was quite stuffy at that time. It was clique-y on the naval base.”
She was drawn to the acting world and discovered a small production company that was making a children’s TV program called Randy Dandy in Halifax. She created a character for the series called the Magic Lady. When the production moved to central Canada, she took her boys and left first for Montreal, then Toronto. Randy Dandy ran on CHCH-TV in Hamilton and Ms. Fitzgerald (she retained her married name) continued her Magic Lady role until the production company went bankrupt.
In Toronto, she soon met a lively group of performers including the singer Ian Tyson, who shared a house with Ed Cowan, a talented young ad man working for McLaren Advertising. Mr. Tyson introduced them and they soon became a couple.
Mr. Cowan went on to found a large public relations firm, became publisher of Toronto Life and Saturday Night magazine, and founded C-Channel, a pay TV arts network that ultimately failed. Their home on Walmer Road after their marriage was the site of raucous parties attended by a mix of actors, directors, politicians and musicians. The boys went back and forth for a time on court-ordered visits with their father, who eventually left the navy.
The blended Cowan family welcomed another son – Noah – while Ms. Fitzgerald continued to be in demand on stage and screen. She played a nurse on TV in Dr. Simon Locke and a patient in Paul Bernard, Psychiatrist. For her role as a thrice-divorced floozy on the daytime soap opera High Hopes she earned an ACTRA award nomination.
She won plaudits, too, for her roles at the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, including Leonora in the cunning character study Ladies in Retirement, in which she appeared in 1995. She performed at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, La Poudrière in Montreal, Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre and the Sudbury Theatre Centre among other places.
She had the opportunity to work with famed Irish actress Siobhan McKenna when Ms McKenna directed John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea in Toronto in 1972. And she devised a one-woman show she called Cupla Focal (Gaelic for “a few words”) for university audiences, consisting of poetry and prose excerpts from great Irish writers.
Among her films were thrillers such as Obsession, Deadly Harvest and Silent Partner; in the latter, Elliott Gould played a bank manager and she, a flirtatious customer.
Ms. Fitzgerald was a regular on the TV quiz show What’s My Line, where she became fast friends with fellow panelist Larry Solway, a big personality who helped introduce talk radio to Toronto. Mr. Solway had started out as an actor in the 1950s and the two friends teamed up to mount a series of lighthearted productions, mostly of Neil Simon two-handers such as Plaza Suite at the Teller’s Cage in Toronto and other dinner theatre venues. Eventually they opened the Marigold Dinner Theatre in Whitby, with Ms. Fitzgerald overseeing the menu (she was an excellent cook) as well as acting the female parts with Mr. Solway. They mounted 17 productions in 3½ years.
The Toronto Star wrote of the two theatrical entrepreneurs in 1979 that the pair were “not exactly like [Spencer] Tracy and [Katharine] Hepburn, but close.”
As she got older, parts started to dry up and the energetic Ms. Fitzgerald along with her husband started a guest house at Niagara-on-the-Lake. They later bought a house in County Kerry in Ireland where they spent their winters and made many new friends.
Their talented son Noah, who as a teenage film buff talked his way into a job at the Toronto International Film Festival, became a much respected programmer before he developed a fatal brain cancer. He died earlier this year, leaving the family devastated.
Ms. Fitzgerald leaves her elder sons, Brian, who owns a lighting business, and Timothy, a classical musician; as well as her sister, Ms. Boardman; her husband, Mr. Cowan; and five grandchildren. Her brothers, Patrick and Brian, predeceased her.