Heath Lamberts

Heath Lamberts (December 15, 1941 – February 22, 2005) was a Canadian actor born James Lancaster in Toronto, Ontario, the eldest child of Cyril and Patricia Langcaster, a factory worker and retail clerk respectively. He had two brothers, John and Raymond, with whom he performed pantomime shows for senior citizens and Kiwanis groups during his childhood. As a student, Lamberts won school singing contests that earned him performance opportunities with Toronto's Opera Festival Association. After taking a two-year art course in high school, he left to pursue acting, completing an apprenticeship at Vineyard Theatre near Niagara Falls, where he worked alongside performers including Tallulah Bankhead and Jack Carter. In 1960 he was admitted to the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, graduating in 1963. While still a student there, he came under the direction of George Bloomfield, who cast him in The Red Eye of Love in Toronto in 1962. He also studied mime in Paris at Le Coq d'Or. Upon committing to a professional acting career, he adopted the name Heath Lamberts.

Lamberts built an extensive stage career across Canada, with notable work at both the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Festival, where he developed a reputation as a comedic actor in farces including Rookery Nook and One for the Pot. He also took on the title role of Cyrano de Bergerac, which he played from 1982 to 1983. His Broadway career spanned 1994 to 1996 and included two musicals: The Sleeping Beauty and the Beast and Once Upon a Mattress. His longest Broadway role was as Cogsworth in the original cast of Beauty and the Beast. In later years he performed numerous roles in Pittsburgh theatre, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette named him Performer of the Year in 2000 for his central role in Quills at the Pittsburgh Playhouse.

Beyond the stage, Lamberts accumulated more than twenty credits in theatrical and made-for-television films, among them A Great Big Thing (1968), Where's Pete (1986), and Sam & Me (1991). His television appearances included roles on Counterstrike (1991), Law & Order (1996), and Remember WENN (1998).

Among his honors, Lamberts was inducted as a Member of the Order of Canada in 1987 by Queen Elizabeth II and the Governor General of Canada in recognition of his distinction as an actor. He received a Dora Mavor Moore Award for his role in the 1996 Toronto revival of One for the Pot.

In his personal life, Lamberts was briefly married to Carole Macomber, a stage manager at the Shaw Festival, during the 1980s, and later had an eight-year relationship with Pittsburgh artist Louise Silk. He was a recovering alcoholic with a twenty-three-year membership in Alcoholics Anonymous. Lamberts died on February 22, 2005, at UPMC Shadyside in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from cancer.