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Illustration by Drew Shannon
My mother was not famous and yet she felt her son was kind of famous. My life path and career in film – inspired, encouraged and nurtured by her – resulted in what I believe was the blueprint for her longevity and the absence of any kind of generation gap between us. A blueprint others could learn from.
My mother and I were 35 years apart but we were always close. And when she died in January, it made me think. There was nothing about her approach to parenting that required psychoanalytic study (of which she was mostly leery anyway), it was her commitment to doing the work to be relevant and be part of her child’s journey that helped her avoid the brutalities of age until the last minute.
Faye’s story is not uncommon for someone born in 1929. She was brought up in a Depression-era household in Montreal as the only daughter of a butcher trying to support five young children and his wife Sadie during the Second World War, who himself had arrived 15 years earlier escaping religious persecution in Eastern Europe. There was no money for a fancy education or prestigious employment but miraculously her father introduced her to culture wherever it could be found in Montreal in the 1930s. From theatre and concerts to movies, she devoured it all. It would be her education and form the basis of her appreciation of my journey to be a filmmaker.
I am her second child and had the academic aptitude of a piece of drywall. My mother’s strategy for me was not that of her generation – she would not force me to be an accountant, lawyer or dentist. Her unconventional thinking was to immerse me into the arts early where the rules of academia might be less stringent. At eight years old, she was schlepping me to the Places Des Arts in Montreal to see Oscar Peterson in concert, Pearl Bailey perform in Hello, Dolly and we took annual trips to Ontario’s Stratford Festival where I was exposed to the brilliance of Christoper Plummer. On one of our annual fall trips to Broadway in New York, she introduced me A Chorus Line and Macbeth which would change my life forever. She somehow knew that by feeding me culture, not only would we stay connected for life but she was instilling a sense of confidence that insulated me from the scholastic issues and the pressure of watching my friends dreaming of being lawyers or corporate raiders.
What developed was the life lesson of how my mother erased the potential of any predictable generation gap that might have resulted in the typical friction of having a parent that might seem disconnected.
My career in show business involves making complex documentaries, directing and producing live television and interacting with cutthroat moguls. To most parents, this is foreign and unsavoury and hardly a stable living. But my mother wanted to know every detail of my shoots, contract deal points and story development. She would screen everything and give me candid notes, sometimes too candid. There were times she wanted to be part of the process and accompany me on film shoots. When I was shooting a film in England about Winston Churchill, she flew all night to meet me at Blenheim Palace to watch me film the Duke of Marlborough, who ended up hitting on her. She was 80 and he was 87. She took endless notes the next day observing me interview historian Margaret Macmillan at Oxford University. When we were not filming on that trip, we went to the theatre or saw films. The education continued, the bond grew stronger, the gap was dissipating.
In fact, the language of culture and her thirst to be prescient remained well into her 80s as we continued seeing Broadway shows and she voraciously consumed every Stratford Festival play I directed for film. She was enchanted by Christopher Plummer when she met him four decades later at a New York screening of The Tempest, which I had produced. She loved it when he called her out at a packed screening.
My mother’s final years were excruciating to watch. Age had ravaged her body but not her mind, though her curiosity and deep interest in my world were fading. Our long midnight conversations had come to an end. What I was left with beyond the sorrow of losing her was the triumph of a modern relationship designed by her that kept her young and connected to a child that would seem improbable to most.
Children are under so much pressure to find their path and many parents, understandably, want them to have the education or life that wasn’t available to them. But my mother understood that my life was not about her. My mother, like so many others, grew up with Old World values, and yet she abandoned all of it to close the generation gap. It served us well.
I will miss her.
Barry Avrich lives in Toronto.