Jennifer Dale is one of Canada's most popular actors. Her American equivalent would be Lindsay Wagner or Stefanie Powers: women who have done many guest appearances on many TV shows and have had their own TV series.
Check out "John Woo's Once A Thief" on your local Baton station. Jennifer has a lot of fun in a supporting role as the director of a secret agency. Each episode she says or does something double-entendre or sexually suggestive.
This is an odd film by Atom Egoyan about an insurance adjuster who has sex with his clients, female and male. Jennifer plays Arianne whose house has burned down.
http://www.the-beaches.com/arts/cast.htm
Beatrice Hastings
British poet and critic, an anti-feminist, feminist theosophist who was a colleague of Catherine Mansfield and the celebrated Bloomsbury group. She clung to Modigliani for for love and success, battled with him to work and how to orchestrate his career, and would steal and suffer with and for him. Their relationship was a violent and passionate affair. She finally realizes her own emancipation.
![[Jennifer Dale]](modig2.jpg)
Odd Couple: Kenneth McGregor plays mad alcoholic artist and Jennifer Dale portrays woman who loves him in shambling production that never comes to grips with its subject.
By Dennis McIntyre. Direction, set and lighting by Kenneth McGregor. Costumes by Marni Collins. Original music by Igor Vrabak. Until May 4 at the Beach Arts Centre,1852 Queen St. E. * *
BY GEOFF CHAPMAN DRAMA CRITIC
When the contours of Jennifer Dale strike a bigger chord with the audience than the contours of mad painter Modigliani's elongated portraits of Parisians and his railing about recognition for artists, you are forced to ask some serious questions about a play that features all of the above.
Modigliani, now in its premiere Canadian production at a new theatrical venue in the Beaches, is an ambitious but shambling effort that never really comes to grips with its subject.
It's the story of the boastful, boozing Italian painter who came to Paris and was in stiff competition with fellow artists such as Picasso and Rivera during the French capital's artistic frenzies during World War I. Modigliani was not a success until after his death at 36, from self-inflicted alcohol wounds, in 1920.
You meet him (played by Kenneth McGregor) pleading for money from any source, a fugitive from police (after he'd mooned a French general and crashed through a restaurant window), a rambunctious spirit who believes the world owes him a living and is foolish for not recognizing his genius.
Only Dale as Beatrice, his lover of two years, cares enough to try to organize his life and make him a success. But they seem an odd couple, indeed, and there's no indication at all of why they're a match.
He whines and wheedles, murmurs and mutters, suffers from delirium tremens, carouses endlessly with equally frustrated artists - Utrillo (Martin Lapierre), known as Maumau, and Soutine (Ron Obadaia), a pair of losers on the verge of insanity - and implores his useless agent, Zborowski (Kevin Sheard), to make sales magic.
It's a thankless task for Dale to create the structure of a credible relationship, though she exploits all her wiles in a performance that makes a little sense and helps the story's coherence.
McGregor works furiously hard to make Modigliani a sympathetic character, but he's defeated by a text that makes him a compulsive liar and a self-centred monster of dictatorial opinion.
Others in the cast are mostly glib characterizations.
The stage space in this former bowling alley and self-help centre is exploited efficiently to suggest an artist's studio, a cafe, an office and the crunch of riverside streets.
Long mirrors alongside the audience add an interesting perspective to the action and there's some original music provided by a quartet that suggests the period, unlike much else in the play. Humor is minimal, pace ponderous, voice levels often drop and some of the dialogue simply disappears. There's a paucity of well-directed passion, too.
If organizers expect patrons to pay $24 to sit on hard chairs while watching this show, they should think hard and at once about ways to polish it.
Toronto Star April 20, 1997
Jennifer Dale has not taken the easy route to her first stage appearance in more than a dozen years.
The veteran movie and TV actor, who last trod the boards opposite Brent Carver in a 1984 production of Sam Shepard's Fool For Love at Toronto Free Theatre, is making her return to live theatre in an unknown play in an untried theatre.
She has the female lead opposite Kenneth McGregor in Dennis McIntyre's Modigliani, a stage biography of the self-destructive, Italian-born painter and sculptor. It has its world premiere tonight at the newly opened Beach Arts Centre, 1852 Queen St. E.
"It's very scary the way it's all coming together for me," says Dale. "I'm in a state of terror constantly. But I'm at a point in my life where I'm ready to face into the terror of various situations."
Dale attended the National Theatre School and apprenticed for two years at the Stratford Festival in the late'70s, before grabbing a share of the national spotlight in the 1979 movie Suzanne, produced by her future ex-husband Robert Lantos.
This was followed four years later by CBC-TV's Empire Inc., in which she played the daughter of Martha Henry and Kenneth Welsh. Dale, whose sister Cynthia performs in Camelot at the Stratford Festival this summer, has retained her affinity with the camera, including a starring role in the forthcoming John Woo series Once A Thief.
"I always had a sense that there would be a time in my life when I would come back to the theatre, even though I haven't pursued it," Dale says. "It's a great gift for me."
In Modigliani, set in cafe society of World War I Paris, Dale plays Beatrice Hasting, the painter's mistress and muse, as well as a poet in her own right.
"The play is pertinent to our time," says Dale, "because it's about artists who are frustrated and potentially destroyed by the inability to have their work noticed. We all know of people who are trying to make their work happen in a political climate where funding for the arts is so drastically inept."
Toronto Star April 17, 1997
Theatre Notes
Vit Wagner
This is a new book out from Oxford University Press that features anecdotes from Canadian actors. Jennifer Dale describes a little incident that happened when she did a guest appearance on E.N.G., a drama that takes place at a TV station. She had a bedroom scene with the male lead so the two of them were showing some skin. The crew took time off for lunch. Unfortunately security also took lunch at the same time so visitors to the set got a chance to see the two of them in a revealing situation.
I don't remember this show very well. My guess would be that those visitors didn't see very much considering E.N.G. was a TV show not a movie.
In showbiz since they were small children, the Dales say they're only beginning to peak now
BY SID ADILMAN
In 1965, sisters Jennifer Dale, then 9, and Cynthia Dale, then 5, went to their first audition - together - got the job and have been in show business ever since.
Jennifer played Baby June in Gypsy at the Royal Alexandra Theatre; Cynthia was in the chorus.
Though sometimes mixed up in the media, they have only appeared together on TV twice: The first time, appropriately, as sisters in the flop CTV series, Taking The Falls that co-starred Cynthia, and now jointly profiled on Life & Times, Sunday at 10 p.m. on chs. 5 and 12.
"It's inevitable that we were mistaken for each other (in the press), not so much now " Jennifer says in in an interview.
"There were similarities. We are in the same business and we looked like each other. We make a joke about it and take credit for each other's work. But people who matter know"
Life & Times affectionately lays out their different careers and some striking similarities in their personal lives.
Cynthia had appeared in over 75 TV commercials by the time she was 12, made her movie debut in the Canadian slasher flick, My Bloody Valentine, and danced her way aerobically through Heavenly Bodies.
After several years singing and dancing in stage musicals (two of them at the Stratford Festival) and winning a Dora Award, she became bitch Olivia and nationally famous on Street Legal.
Jennifer at 18 co-starred with magician Doug Henning in his magic show, Spellbound, at the Royal Alex, studied at the National Theatre School and joined the Stratford Festival company. After two seasons, artistic director Robin Phillips let her go and suggested she concentrate on movies and TV She auditioned, unsuccessfully, for producer Robert Lantos, who on Life & Times admits, "She swept me off my feet and I thought I could fall in love with this woman." He did.
Her next audition for him clicked: She starred in his movie, Suzanne, for which she won praise. A promising movie career loomed. Then pregnant with his child, she stopped working. They married and had two children, a son now 17 and a daughter now 13.
After appearing, usually bare-breasted opposite import actors, including Richard Harris in several of Lantos' tax-shelter era movies, they divorced: Clashing careers, Lantos explains. They remain friends.
At the same time Jennifer went through the pain of divorce, Cynthia was doing so as well. Her brief marriage also had crumbled. They comforted each other.
Jennifer then starred to acclaim as a turn-of-the-century con woman in CBC-TV's miniseries, Love And Larceny and seven years later in its sequel, Grand Larceny. CBC enlisted her and several actresses to develop dramas in which they might star then pulled out with nothing to show.
(pictures) The young Dales (from left, Jennifer, Cynthia and Loretta; above, Cynthia and Jenniffer, together on camera for the second time in their lives In Life & Times, Sun., 10 p.m. on chs. 5, 12
Today Jennifer is single and Cynthia lives with news anchor Peter Mansbridge, who does not appear on Life & Times but is shown photographed with Cynthia. She, notes that they rigorously keep their off-screen life private.
So does Jennifer But one of her secrets is outed on the program. She is skilled in the tango and other Latin dances and goes to dance clubs. On camera, Cynthia tells her she could not go out and dance with strangers, In response, Jennifer giggles. There are a lot of giggles as the two discuss their lives.
Cynthia recently completed her first headline Stratford season, starring in Camelot, returns there next season in Man Of LaMancha and soon will front a CBC TV variety special whose negotiations went off track four years ago.
Jennifer plays what she calls her most enjoyable role, the stern dominatrix boss of do-gooder killers on CTV's Once A Thief (like Cynthia's Taking The Falls, produced by the Lantos-headed Alliance Communications). CTV last month dropped Once A Thief after eight episodes because of low ratings.
Production continues in Toronto and, says Jennifer, the series "will return to CTV in the New Year after a relaunch."
She is 41 and Cynthia is 37. "Why does mentioning our age matter?" snaps Jennifer. "Does anyone say Robert DeNiro, age whatever?"
And she adds, both sisters feel "we're just peaking."
STARWEEK magazine
December 6 to 13, 1997
BY LAURA LIND
When my editor told me that actresses Jennifer and Cynthia Dale would be the subjects of CBC's Life & Times biography this Sunday, I thought for a second that I'd missed some celebrity carnage. First Versace, then Princess Di, then John Denver, then Michael Hutchence -- and now Canada's own Dale sisters?
No, that's not it. The CBC Life & Times doesn't just feature stiffs -- they also do biographies of people whose careers are seemingly on hold. Last week Karen Kain, this week the Dales.
At the moment both Dale sisters are gainfully employed, but, I guess the CBC doesn't think they'll be around much longer since Jen and Cyn have been typecast for sexpot roles, and there aren't many of those for women over 35.
Is it too early to bid a fond adieux to these two?
In a country where all the vixens, Pamela Lee, Jennifer Tilley, etc., hop on the Greyhound to L.A. 24 hours after the high school prom, the Dale sisters are the nation's equivalent of Mary Pickford (who, er, actually is Canadian, but never mind).
They were pioneers, they were the only stars in a country bereft of glamor. They had public marriage break-ups and broke up marriages publicly. They wore slinky dresses on national TV. They had the guts to appear topless in movies made with amateur lighting technicians.
And for the last 32 years they have worked fairly steadily as actresses in Canada. No mean feat for two little Italian girls from Etobicoke. Here are some highlights from three decades of glamor.
THE '60S Jennifer and Cynthia are both cast in musicals at the Royal Alex. Cynthia was a Tommy Hunter Show regular. The show went off the air. Was it her fault -- who knows?
THE '70S Cynthia and Jennifer worked modelling knit ponchos and were teased in school. Quite rightly, if you ask me, because when I was in Grade 4 my aunt knit me a tri-color poncho and my mother forced me to wear it in public. I was scarred for life. (No Christmas present for you! -- Knitting ed.)
THE '80S Following a brief sojourn at Stratford, Jennifer is cast as the lead in the film Suzanne, a film that reduces the French/English linguistic chasm to the story of a girl who was called Suzi by her Anglo boyfriend and Suzanne by her Francophone paramour.
After renting the film and then watching producer Robert Lantos describe Jennifer's first audition, I had to wonder if the whole Canadian movie tax break system mainly served to get producers dates with comely young actresses.
Lantos says, "She walked into the room and she looked fantastic. She did a marvelous audition. She was way too young, there was no chance she was going to be in the film. But... she swept me off my feet. I thought I could fall in love with this woman.
"...The whole idea of actually making a film was so heady. There were champagne bubbles in the air. ...It was an intense and delirious time. Fairly early on in the process the personal and professional got intermingled."
1981 Cynthia lands her first major role, in My Bloody Valentine, a film about a psycho miner pissed because he missed a Valentine's Day dance.
1984 Cynthia lands her last major film role, in Heavenly Bodies, as a jazzercise instructor who works out for nine hours to save her gym.
1986 Cynthia is cast in Street Legal as Olivia Novack, one of the most ruthless characters on Canadian TV. The biography implies that it was this nasty femme fatale role that led Cynthia (in real life) to the arms of Peter Mansbridge, Wendy Mesley's then-husband. So, does that mean Mesley should have sued the Street Legal writers for causing her divorce?
1994 Jennifer appears topless in Whale Music -- another Lantos film.
1997 Cynthia is lauded for her role as Guinevere in Stratford's Camelot (although if you ask me, she's more like Merlin, living Jennifer's life backwards) and Jennifer is cast in John Woo's Once a Thief as a dominatrix that could turn her into a Canadian Joan Collins.
Anyway, the bio ends with Cyn and Jen sparring about whether they should work together and I say, "Of course!" I think Lantos owes them both starring roles in a movie. One where they're not half-dressed or badly lit or dancing to Muzak. In an era where hack-stars like Burt Reynolds, Bruce Willis and John Travolta are being rejuvenated by directors with imagination, I'd like to see Cynthia and Jennifer pull an Alanis Morrisette and be real on screen for an hour and a half. They've paid the emotional dues to do a remake of The Turning Point. It's either that or wait 20 years and try Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
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