Richard McMillan

Richard McMillan (also known as Richard MacMillan; March 20, 1951 – February 19, 2017) was a Canadian actor whose work spanned film, television, and stage, including a Broadway appearance in 1987 in The Hot Mikado. Born in Beaverton, Ontario, he was adopted as an infant by Frank and Mary McMillan, who operated the Beaverton Hotel and raised him alongside his younger brother, Frank, known as "Cooch." In adulthood, McMillan sought out his biological mother, who declined to recognize him as her son. His wife, actress Anne Louise Bannon, later noted that this experience left a deep impression on him and shaped the emotional quality of his stage work.

After completing high school, McMillan relocated to Toronto and enrolled in the theater program at Ryerson University, which he left before graduating to join the Stratford Festival as a young performer. His career gained significant momentum in 1982 when he took on the role of Pooh-Bah, Lord High Everything Else, in Brian MacDonald's adaptation of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Mikado. That production formed the basis for The Hot Mikado, in which McMillan appeared on Broadway in 1987. During the 1980s and 1990s, he was also a prominent presence at the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival, hosted by the University of Pittsburgh, performing Shakespearean roles and other stage productions in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It was in Pittsburgh, in 1989, that McMillan met Anne Bannon, then a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, while the two were performing together — she as Ophelia and he as Hamlet. They married in 1991 in her hometown of Windsor, Ontario, and in 1993 welcomed a daughter, Maggie. Alongside his Pittsburgh engagements, McMillan continued to work in Toronto, including a featured role in Inexpressible Island, a three-act dramatic play by David Young, in 1997. In 2000, he portrayed Scar in the Canadian production of The Lion King at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto, a staging modeled on the Broadway version. He subsequently played the wizard Saruman in a production of Lord of the Rings.

Over the course of his career, McMillan received multiple Dora Mavor Moore Awards, a Canadian Screen Award, and a Toronto Theatre Critics Award. Outside of performing, he pursued painting, piano, and kayaking, and held a private pilot's license. McMillan was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2009 and, following a period of remission, died of the disease on February 19, 2017, at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto at the age of 65.