Dinah Christie in 2021.Michelle Williams/Supplied
A stopwatch starts.
A woman makes a shape with her fingers. Eh? Actually, “A.”
It’s a televised game of charades, and Dinah Christie’s gestures are fast and furious. She feigns riding a horse that is rearing up on its hind legs. From this, her two teammates soon figure out the word is “dreary.” A hand swirl above her head suggests a headdress and then she rapidly forms a shape of a ball, thus, “fortune teller.” And 1 minute 10 seconds later, from a category described as “rhyme definition” the phrase is solved: “A dreary fortune teller is a disaster forecaster.”
The segment was from one of more than 800 episodes of Party Game, which ran for 11 years on Hamilton’s CHCH TV station and then lived on in reruns, and endeared Ms. Christie to generations of Canadians.
Ms. Christie, an entertainer, director, writer, environmentalist and fashion designer, died of complications of dementia on April 10 in Toronto’s Kensington Gardens long-term care facility. She was 83.
Her attraction to the spotlight had come easily. Her father, Robert Christie, and mother, Margot Syme Christie, were both prominent Canadian actors. Dinah Barbara Christie, their first child, was born in London, England on Dec. 29, 1942 and came to Canada with them when she was 2.
Ms. Christie was an entertainer, director, writer, environmentalist and fashion designer.Supplied
Robert joined the performing company at Ontario’s Stratford Festival in 1953, its inaugural season, later becoming an acclaimed director and teacher.
It was through her father that Ms. Christie first trod the boards. He was director at a summer-stock production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, in Gravenhurst, Ont., when she was 8. He needed a child actor.
“I was terrified. It scared the pants off me,” Ms. Christie said in a 1997 interview with Miriam Wolfe Ross for the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists, the entertainment union known as ACTRA. “That was a highly forgettable moment of my career on stage,” Ms. Christie added. But it gave her the acting bug.
She spent summers with her father in Stratford, and at 12 landed a job there as a “call boy” (someone who called the actors for their cues). A few years later, she did some stage managing before joining the company as an actor.
When her parents’ marriage broke up, her father presented her with a guitar. She taught herself to play and would carry a small Martin guitar with her for the next six decades. Ms. Christie attended high school at North Toronto Collegiate Institute during the day, and at night would go to clubs and coffee houses, where she would sing, play guitar and hang out with folk and jazz artists. Soon, she caught the eye of the CBC. “I got woven in,” she said in the 1997 interview. “If you were an actress and a musician, you just moved in between the milieus.”
Ms. Christie in 1971. She taught herself to play guitar and would often carry a small Martin.Robert Warren/Supplied
“She was a consummate entertainer,” said her half-sister, Fiona Christie, 67, of Toronto. “She was also drop-dead gorgeous and very aware of it.”
A job as a host and singer on CBC’s groundbreaking public-affairs program This Hour has Seven Days in the 1960s gave the telegenic Ms. Christie a jump on a TV career.
But it was Party Game – featuring Ms. Christie’s home team playing charades against a team of visiting celebrities, on a polyester-and-earth-toned set – that made her a bigger star. The show billed itself as “television’s zaniest half-hour.” It was low-budget, to be sure, taping five episodes a day, using a soundtrack of canned laughter and canned applause, but it ran from 1970 to 1981 in an era when regular performing gigs weren’t common for Canadian entertainers. It gave the quick-witted Ms. Christie a steady income and freedom to perform elsewhere.
From 1985 to 1988, she appeared on a CTV sitcom called Check It Out, which starred American comic actor Don Adams of Get Smart fame. “She hated that guy,” said Stacey Coker, 82, of Toronto, who was best friends with Ms. Christie since childhood. Ms. Christie won a Gemini Award in 1987 for her role on the show; Mr. Adams never did.
Ms. Christie’s Rolodex contained a who’s who of culture and entertainment. From Canada, friends Bruno Gerussi, Gordon Pinsent, Barbara Hamilton, Catherine McKinnon, Shirley Eikhard and Christopher Plummer, who taught her how to really feel the lyrics when she sang. And Pierre Trudeau. Ms. Christie wrote and recorded a lullaby (called Justin Pierre) when the prime minister’s son Justin was born; she sent Justin a copy 44 years later when he became prime minister.
Dinah Christie & Robert Warren in 1980.Robert Warren/Supplied
From the United States, Ms. Christie knew Harry Belafonte, who gave her tips on singing, and Bob Hope, whom she helped with fundraising shows. The latter would send her a Christmas card every year.
One of the most multitalented entertainers she met – and one with whom she frequently collaborated – was Tom Kneebone. The New Zealand-born Mr. Kneebone could sing, dance, compose and act. The two of them are credited with bringing cabaret-style shows to Toronto in the 1960s, and they toured North America with productions of songs by Noël Coward and Cole Porter as well as many of their own shows. In 1973, they recorded their popular adaptation of the musical The Apple Tree. They loved satire.
Mr. Kneebone and Ms. Christie were also pivotal in the early years of Smile Theatre, a non-profit Toronto production company whose mandate is to take professional-quality revues to people who couldn’t get out, such as hospital patients or residents of long-term care facilities. Mr. Kneebone was artistic director there for 16 years.
In 1981, Ms. Christie, won an ACTRA award for best variety performance for a TV special called D.C. And Friends. She and Mr. Kneebone won a 1984 ACTRA for best radio variety performance.
Ms. Christie took particular pride in creating plays and songs about Canadians, including Shooting Star, about Indigenous runner Tom Longboat, and Paddle Song, a one-woman show about Indigenous poet, performer and writer Pauline Johnson, played by the incomparable Cheri Maracle.
“[Ms. Christie’s] voice was smoky, sultry and sexy,” said Racheal McCaig, a Toronto photographer and writer who worked with her at Smile.
Not all of Ms. Christie’s life was devoted to the spotlight. In 1971, she bought Black Shadow Creek, a 40-hectare-farm with a 150-year-old log cabin near Mount Forest, Ont., about two hours northwest of Toronto, with her husband-to-be, Robert (Bob) Warren, a photographer, designer and shipwright.
Ms. Christie was never far from the stage.Courtesy of family
The farm “kept me sane,” Ms. Christie said. In the early years on the farm, chores included baling hay, keeping a pig named Wanda Sue Sow (who thought she was a canine; Ms. Christie wrote a song about it) and rescuing and caring for a herd of horses. The unflappable Ms. Christie once used only a broom and her voice to chase a skunk from Mr. Warren’s workshop. Ms. Christie also insisted the farm follow organic care and ecological management – no chemical fertilizers.
While at the farm, she became a master in the Japanese healing technique known as Reiki. “If she saw an animal in pain, she put her hands on it and cured the pain,” Ms. McCaig said.
In the 1990s, along with her sister, Cedar, Ms. Christie created a retail company called The Badd Sisters. They developed clothing and sold their products at outlets such as Tilley Endurables. The company was ahead of its time with an emphasis on environmentally responsible items.
But Ms. Christie was never far from the stage. In 1994, she hosted a gala for the opening of Theatre Orangeville. “She was a force of nature, a strong, vibrant performer,” said Jim Betts, Theatre Orangeville’s inaugural artistic director and a former artistic director of Smile. “She brought enthusiasm and joy to everything she did.”
She would also perform – mostly her own creations – at fundraisers across Ontario, including Toronto’s Performing Arts Lodge, AIDS benefits and The South Simcoe Theatre .
Ms. Christie was predeceased by her husband (the couple were together 43 years) and her sister, Cedar Townsend Christie. She leaves her half-brothers, Matthew Christie and David Christie, as well as her half-sister, Fiona Christie, and Fiona’s child, Gran Robinson.
Some of Ms. Christie’s papers, along with those of her father, are at the Clara Thomas Archives at York University. The rest are with her unofficial archivist, goddaughter Zoë Carter, 53, of Chesley, Ont., who has created a designated Dinah Christie Facebook page and Instagram account to keep her memory alive. “Later in life, she dropped the ‘god’ when she introduced me. I was her ‘daughter’,” Ms. Carter said.
Last month, a touring production company continued its five-decade theatre-outreach program with a visit to Kensington Gardens. It was Smile Theatre, performing Take The Eh Train. Among the attendees was Dinah Christie.
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