William Hutt

A classically trained stage actor who spend the majority of his career in the theater, Canadian William Hutt gained recognition as one of the founding members of the famous Stratford Festival. As a participant in that annual event, Hutt immersed himself in an estimated 130 productions, in both dramatic and directorial capacities. Hutt also performed occasionally on Broadway, as in the 1964 production of Edward Albee's Tiny Alice.

Born in Toronto in 1920, Hutt later served in World War II. He returned home and enrolled in the University of Toronto, then graduated from Trinity, one of its colleges, in 1949. Hutt initially launched his dramatic career by working summer stock and signing on as an associate director for the Canadian Repertory Theatre.

Though the importance and number of Hutt's theatrical roles far outweigh his cinematic contributions, he did appear onscreen from time to time, from the late '50s up through the time of his death in 2007 -- often with lengthy periods of time in between roles. His early parts were thinly disguised cinematic renderings of stage plays, such as Tyrone Guthrie's 1957 Oedipus Rex and George Schaefer's 1960 made-for-television Macbeth. After Hutt's portrayal of a czar in John Frankenheimer's period drama The Fixer (1968), he spent almost an entire decade offscreen, but for some reason opted to appear in a series of extremely low-grade Canadian pictures in the early '80s. These included Covergirl, The Wars, and The Kid Who Couldn't Miss (all 1983). In 2006, about a year before his death from leukemia, Hutt appeared on television as a gruff and irascible Shakespearean master in the TV series Slings & Arrows.

~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide