[Candrama] John Wright 1951 - 2025

[Day, Moira]

John Wright 1951-2025

It is with great sadness that I report the passing of another great light in the Edmonton Theatre community. On January 26, 2025, we lost John Wright to kidney disease after a fifty-year career in the Canadian theatre. John reached national and international audiences through his film and TV work, and was a familiar face on regional stages across the country as well. However, many of us remember him best as a constant, powerful presence on the Edmonton stage where Shakespeare and Ibsen, contemporary British and American plays, and new and classical Canadian work alike were all grist to his brilliant, versatile mill.
As Anne Nothof records in her entry on John Wright in the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia, John, along with his partner and fellow theatre artist, Marianne Copithorne,  appeared in over fifty productions of Shakespeare’s plays with Edmonton’s Free Will Players between 1995 and 2017. In terms of Canadian drama, he premiered or performed in work by W.O. Mitchell, Eugene Strickland, Judith Thompson, Michael Healey, Collin Doyle, Paul Ledoux and David Young, David Belke, Katherine Koller, and Michael Melski. In recognition of the sustained quality and quantity of his contribution to the theatre, he won three Elizabeth Sterling Haynes (Sterling) awards for acting, and was recognized in 2015 with a special lifetime award, “In Recognition of a Career of Extraordinary Performances.”
One of my earliest and most definitive memories of John was his appearance on the Persephone stage in Saskatoon in early 1992. The city was timely. His parents, Jack and Ruth Wright, lived in the community, and John received his early education at the University of Saskatchewan, where he played the pivotal role of Alan Stang in the 1977 Greystone Theatre production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus. The theatre was also timely. He was one of the distinguished Wright family of actors which included his sisters, Janet (1945-2016), Susan (1947-1991) and Anne (1957-2023); Janet and Susan co-founded Persephone Theatre, along with Brian Richmond in 1974, and John and his Anne appeared together in one of the theatre’s first “hits”, Ken Mitchell’s Cruel Tears, in 1975. However, in this instance, John was appearing not in a play, but as part of a memorial service for his sister, Susan, and for their parents who had died in a tragic house fire in Stratford in late December, 1991. None of us who were there will forget his ability to put an unspeakable tragedy into words of restrained power, resonance, and meaning that stayed with all of us afterwards.
I call the moment definitive, because for me, that same quality defined the best of John’s stage work. As Anne Nothof suggests, his strong sense of wry, ironic wit helped him excel “in idiosyncratic roles – the curmudgeonly, irascible, anti-social individual” but he also had a gift for finding the heart and humanity buried underneath the surface absurdity, gruffness and crustiness of the character. While John officially retired from the stage because of poor health in 2015, he could not resist returning to the Free Will Players one last time in 2017 to movingly reprise his 2004 role as Shylock. Similarly, while he frequently appeared on the same stages as the late Julien Arnold, it was often in quite different roles. John, like Julien, may have been a long-term cast member of the Citadel’s annual Christmas Carol in the Tom Wood adaptation, but where Julien, for many, was the definitive Bob Cratchit, John (2003-2012) was the definitive Scrooge. While both of them appeared in the Free Will Players’ 2013 production of King Lear, Julien was the decent, but hapless Gloucester, while John was - Lear.

To have lost both of these brilliant, generous actors  within months of each other is an incalculable loss for both the local and the larger theatre community in Canada: to paraphrase another Shakespeare play, we “shall not look upon [their] like again.” Deepest sympathy to Marianne Copithorne, John’s long-term partner and collaborator both in life and art, and to the many family, friends and colleagues who will miss him.



Dr. MOIRA DAY
Professor Emerita
Department of Drama
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, SK
S7N 5E2

780 466 8957 (message)
moira.day at usask.ca
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