Actress Barbara Chilcott, on Dec. 9, 1953.John Boyd/The Globe and Mail
As the story goes, J.B. Priestley, the distinguished British playwright and novelist, popped into Toronto during a North American book-promotion tour in the spring of 1956. He was being feted with a private dinner at the University Club when three late arrivals made their stunning entrance. Actor Barbara Chilcott, flanked by her brothers, actors Murray and Donald Davis, swept into the club like Canada’s version of the fabled Barrymores.
Darkly attractive, imperial of bearing, they were Toronto royalty of a sort – the three were known for having started the Crest, the city’s latest and most audacious attempt at a professional repertory theatre. Their bold company would later become legendary as a launching pad for a generation of Canadian theatre artists.
Mr. Priestley was so enchanted by the vibrant trio that he decided to write a play just for them. The Glass Cage, a drama in which they starred as the black sheep of a turn-of-the-century Toronto family, would premiere at the Crest Theatre in 1957 and subsequently transfer to London’s Piccadilly Theatre – making it the first all-Canadian production to play in the West End. The British critics were won over by the actors, if not the play, and touted Ms. Chilcott as an exciting discovery.
Ms. Chilcott, who died on Jan. 1 in Toronto at the age of 99, was known for beguiling, not just Mr. Priestley and the press, but many an audience member. Young actors, too. William Shatner, future Star Trek icon, once confessed to having a huge crush on her during their time in a 1950s Broadway production of Tamburlaine the Great – but was too intimidated to ask her out on a date. When Ms. Chilcott learned of it, belatedly, in her 80s, she laughed and said, “Well, you can tell him I’m not doing anything tonight!”
With her brooding intensity, Ms. Chilcott seemed born to play tragic heroines, from Shakespeare’s Cleopatra to Jean Anouilh’s Antigone – both roles that she performed at the Crest. Later in life, she was the domineering mother Volumnia in a Stratford Festival Coriolanus and Queen Hecuba in The Trojan Women at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre. She retained her regal aura offstage.
“She was a bit like Lady Bracknell,” said her good friend, director and teacher William Scoular, comparing her to the formidable aunt in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. “If she walked down the street, little boys and dogs would automatically move out of her way.”
With her brooding intensity, Ms. Chilcott seemed born to play tragic heroines, from Shakespeare’s Cleopatra to Jean Anouilh’s Antigone.JOHN STEELE
In fact, Mr. Scoular said, she wasn’t stern in the least. “Fundamentally, she was a very shy person. But she had a wicked sense of humour.” Ms. Chilcott was game to do comedy whenever she got the chance, whether appearing in the outrageous satires of Christopher Durang or camping it up as a slovenly housewife in a performance of Frank Zappa’s The Perfect Stranger by Toronto’s Esprit Orchestra.
To her family, she was beloved. “She was very approachable, very kind and generous,” Carroll Manol, a close relative, remembered warmly. “She’d take anybody in, give you the shirt off her back.”
Barbara Chilcott Davis was born on Sept. 10, 1922, in Newmarket, Ont., the oldest of the four children of Dorothy Watts (née Chilcott), who taught elocution and dancing, and Elihu James Davis Jr., one of the owners of the Davis Leather Co. The Davises were United Empire Loyalists of Welsh ancestry, while the Chilcotts were first-generation British immigrants of Romani stock who first lived in a camp by Toronto’s lakeshore. Barbara was proud of her roots but would recall how her Chilcott relatives endured racism in the predominantly white Toronto of the time.
The Davises, however, were part of the WASP elite. They were one of Newmarket’s leading families and Barbara and her siblings enjoyed a privileged childhood. It included private drama camps at the family’s Muskoka cottage, overseen by Toronto actor Josephine Barrington, where the Davis kids got their first taste of Shakespeare.
In the early 1960s, Ms. Chilcott formed the Crest Hour Company, which toured Shakespeare to Ontario schools at a time when such an initiative was a rarity.Supplied
After a year at the University of Toronto, Ms. Chilcott joined Meet the Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy’s touring musical revue, which entertained the troops during the Second World War. The show took her across Canada, to Britain and to Europe. She stayed abroad after the war, studying at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, but had trouble getting acting jobs in England – her dark beauty proved a liability for an ingenue.
“I was always being sidelined because of my appearance,” she told fellow actor R.H. Thomson in a 2011 video interview for Theatre Museum Canada. Not being the pallid “English rose” in demand at the time, she was often typecast as “exotic” Latin or even African characters.
Ms. Chilcott’s younger brothers, Murray and Donald Davis, had also taken up acting and eventually lured her back to Canada to be a part of their theatre projects. They were enterprising young men who had trained at the U of T’s Hart House Theatre and were determined to make work for themselves and their fellow alumni. Their first venture was the Straw Hat Players, a summer stock company founded in 1948 and based in the Muskoka area. It performed a playbill of light classics in Gravenhurst and Port Carling and toured as well. Ms. Chilcott made her Straw Hat debut in 1951, playing the title role in the George Bernard Shaw comedy Candida.
Sister and brother in real life, Toronto actors Ms. Chilcott and Donald Davis appear on stage at the Crest Theatre in Toronto, Jan. 28, 1954.John Boyd/The Globe and Mail
Buoyed by their Straw Hat success, the Davis brothers set out to give Toronto its first professional theatre company with its own playhouse. They leased an old cinema on Mount Pleasant Road and converted it into a live theatre.
An 830-seat house with a tiny stage and no backstage space, it was not an ideal venue. “You had to work miracles,” Marie Day, the Crest’s resident designer, recalled. “But we did our best.” Whatever its shortcomings, over 13 seasons the theatre would become famous as a showcase for many of Canada’s rising stars, among them Martha Henry, Richard Monette, Gordon Pinsent and Kate Reid.
The Crest opened its doors in January, 1954. Just six months earlier, the Stratford Festival had launched in Stratford, Ont., and its first artistic director, Tyrone Guthrie, was soon drawing on the Crest’s talent pool for his Shakespearean productions. In the summer of 1954, Ms. Chilcott made her festival debut, starring as Kate in Mr. Guthrie’s Wild West staging of The Taming of the Shrew. She spent two seasons at the festival and participated in its first touring show, co-starring alongside imported British star Anthony Quayle in Mr. Guthrie’s spectacular 1956 staging of Christopher Marlowe’s gory historical pageant Tamburlaine the Great.
Gordon Pinsent, William Brydon and Ms. Chilcott in Roots.ROBERT C. RAGSDALE
The massive show, which played Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre before transferring to New York’s Winter Garden, boasted a cast of 76, including such Stratford up-and-comers as Mr. Shatner, Douglas Rain and William Hutt. Reviewing it, The Globe and Mail critic Herbert Whittaker reserved his highest praise for Ms. Chilcott in the role of Tamburlaine’s Egyptian wife, Zenocrate. “A womanly heart shines from a countenance that suggests what Cleopatra’s must have been,” Mr. Whittaker wrote.
Happily, Ms. Chilcott’s smouldering power can still be appreciated, in a much different role, in a 1955 television adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler for the CBC’s Folio (now available on YouTube). Ms. Chilcott frequently acted in the televised plays that were a staple of 1950s TV, both in Canada and Britain. Among them was a 1959 telecast of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible for ITV’s Play of the Week, in which she played opposite a young, pre-James Bond Sean Connery.
The Crest was, in many ways, the model of the regional theatres that would spring up across English-speaking Canada a decade later. It produced primarily British and American fare but also took a risk premiering new Canadian plays by the likes of Robertson Davies. Yet even with the classics it struggled to find an audience and would eventually be done in by deficits.
It wasn’t for want of outreach. In the early 1960s, Ms. Chilcott formed the Crest Hour Co., which toured Shakespeare to Ontario schools at a time when such an initiative was a rarity.
Ms. Chilcott as Volumnia and Lynne Griffin as Virgilia in Coriolanus at the Stratford Festival, June 1981.ROBERT C. RAGSDALE
After the Crest’s demise in 1966, Ms. Chilcott had trouble finding theatre work. During that fallow period she experimented with LSD and took up Transcendental Meditation, studying with the guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India. She also found her second husband, composer Harry Somers of Louis Riel fame. Ms. Chilcott had previously been married, in 1952, to Australian actor Max Helpmann, but they’d lived apart for years, and she divorced him to marry Mr. Somers.
Ms. Chilcott’s career picked up again beginning in the 1970s. She starred on stages across the country, from Halifax’s Neptune Theatre to Theatre Calgary, and appeared in films – notably the 1975 Golden Globe winner Lies My Father Told Me. She finally returned to Stratford in 1981 to play Volumnia to Len Cariou’s Coriolanus. At the Blyth Festival, she originated the role of Hagar Shipley in the stage adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel.
In the 2000s, Ms. Chilcott was instrumental in getting a history of the Crest published (Glass Cage: The Crest Theatre Story by Paul Illidge) and, after Mr. Somers’s death in 1999, collecting his letters and journals for publication. Mr. Scoular edited the latter. He also kept her busy acting in her old age. She performed at the annual Focus Festival of the Arts, produced at St. Andrew’s College in Aurora, Ont., where Mr. Scoular is the head of drama. “She loved young actors and was always ready to give them a helping hand,” he said. She played her last stage role there, as the First Witch in a production of Macbeth, at the age of 89. “She frightened everybody,” Mr. Scoular said, “including her fellow witches!”
Ms. Chilcott, who had no children, remained in her own home until the last seven months of her life, when a caregiving couple kindly moved her into their condo. She died peacefully in her sleep. She was predeceased by her brothers, Murray and Donald Davis, and her sister, Virginia Hamerski. She leaves two nieces and their children.