Cranbrook’s Brent Carver has been bestowed with a 2014 Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement (Theatre).

One of Canada’s most versatile actors, Brent Carver is known for the sensitivity, emotional honesty and charisma he brings to every role, from Shakespeare classics to new Canadian works, and from intimate cabaret performances to blockbuster musicals. In a career spanning over 40 years he has dazzled audiences and critics across Canada, the United States and the UK.

Mr. Carver was born in 1951 in Cranbrook. While singing in church and school choirs, he made his acting debut as the lead in a Grade 5 production of Dick Whittington and His Cat. He studied theatre at the University of British Columbia, and in 1972 joined the Vancouver Playhouse school touring company and was cast as a swing in the Vancouver Arts Club’s production of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.

“On my 21st birthday I did five shows,” he recalls, “three school shows during the day, and two evening performances at the Arts Club. It was great! It was exactly what I wanted to be doing.”

Selected stage credits include, in Toronto: Don Carlos (inaugural season, Soulpepper); High Life (Crow’s Theatre); Tartuffe, The Story of My Life, Vigil, Larry’s Party, The Elephant Man (Canadian Stage); elsewhere, Cyrano de Bergerac, Richard III (The Citadel, Edmonton); Comedians (Arts Club, Vancouver); Man of La Mancha (Neptune Theatre, Halifax); As You Like It, Jesus Christ Superstar, Fiddler on the Roof, Elizabeth Rex, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Foxfire, The Pirates of Penzance, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Stratford); My Life with Albertine (Playwrights Horizons, New York); The Tempest (Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles); and on Broadway, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Parade, Kiss of the Spider Woman (Toronto, London and New York). His cabaret show, Brent Carver in Concert, sold out at Soulpepper’s 2013 Winter at the Young series. He is a founding artist (2011) of Toronto’s Theatre 20.

Film and TV appearances include Lilies, The Tale of Teeka, Ararat, The Event, Deeply, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Elizabeth Rex, Young at Heart, Twice in a Lifetime, and The Wars.

Brent Carver’s awards and honours include a Toronto Arts Award, Tony Award, two New York Drama Desk Awards, Theatre World Award (New York), four Dora Mavor Moore Awards, two Genie and four Gemini Awards, ACTRA Toronto Award, Sterling Award (Edmonton), and City of Cranbrook Award.

Click to see all Award recipients

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