Louis Negin

Louis Negin (20 October 1929 – 2 December 2022) was a British-born Canadian actor who built a career spanning stage, film, and television across more than six decades. Born in London, England, he was raised in Toronto, Ontario, and became widely recognized in later life for his work in the films of director Guy Maddin.

Negin's earliest screen appearances came in the 1950s through the Canadian dramatic anthology series First Performance. He also appeared as a chorus member in Tyrone Guthrie's 1957 film of the Stratford Festival production of Oedipus Rex. His Broadway career ran from 1956 to 1959 and included three productions: the melodrama Tamburlaine the Great, which originated as a Stratford Festival production; Much Ado About Everything; and Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan. He subsequently appeared in London productions of Fortune and Men's Eyes, in which he became one of the first actors to appear fully nude on stage in England, and his own play Love and Maple Syrup.

His film work from the 1960s through the 1980s included The Ernie Game, Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, Ooh… You Are Awful, Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, David Cronenberg's Rabid, Two Solitudes, and Highpoint. During the same period he appeared in television series including Brett, Mousey, The Zoo Gang, King of Kensington, and The Littlest Hobo. In the 1980s he held a recurring role on Seeing Things and acted in the television films Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, Freddie the Freeloader's Christmas Dinner, and Charlie Grant's War.

Negin took on several notable stage roles in the 1990s. In 1994 he played Mrs. White in drag in a Toronto production of John Wimbs and Christopher Richards' play Molly Wood. He portrayed Truman Capote in a 1996 Toronto stage production of Tru and again in the film 54. In 1998 he played Noël Coward in Linda Griffiths' play The Duchess at Theatre Passe Muraille. In 2008 he performed The Glass Eye, a semi-autobiographical play he wrote in collaboration with Marie Brassard, in Montreal and Toronto.

His association with Guy Maddin produced some of his most prominent later work. He appeared in Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee, Sissy Boy Slap Party, The Saddest Music in the World, Keyhole, and The Forbidden Room, and narrated Maddin's semi-documentary films Brand Upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg. He also appeared in guest roles on the television series Lord Have Mercy!, Mona the Vampire, ReGenesis, and Slings and Arrows, as well as in Bruce McDonald's film Pontypool. In 2019 he appeared in Matthew Rankin's The Twentieth Century, playing in drag the mother of Prime Minister Mackenzie King, a performance that earned him a Vancouver Film Critics Circle nomination for Best Supporting Actor in a Canadian Film.

Negin was gay and was the partner of television and film designer Charles Dunlop. He died on 2 December 2022 in Montreal at the age of 93, with his death announced the following day by Guy Maddin on Instagram.