Patricia Gage

From Glasgow to the Stages of Ontario

Patricia Gage was born in Glasgow in 1940 under a gray sky that soon gave way to the lights of Canada. Her training was no accident of fate. She studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama before crossing the pond to settle in Toronto. There, she sought a place in Canadian theater with almost military discipline.

And she made it happen.

During the 1960s, she honed her craft on stages across the country. She wasn't chasing the quick fame of the magazines but the rigor of classical theater. She took part in numerous seasons at the Stratford Festival, where she performed Shakespeare with a restraint that caught the attention of casting directors of the time.

An Encounter with Body Horror

In 1977, David Cronenberg called her to take part in Rabid. Gage played Louise, a character who served as a human counterpoint in a plot of mutations and blood. She worked alongside Marilyn Chambers on a shoot that many analysts of the time considered a low-budget oddity. Still, the film took in more than one million dollars on its opening run in Canada alone.

Gage saw film as an extension of theater. Genre didn't matter to her as long as the script had a solid structure. For her, acting meant solving narrative problems in front of the camera.

During the 1980s, her voice became ubiquitous in homes across half the world. She lent her measured tone to animated series characters such as The Care Bears and Babar. It was technical work that allowed her to fund her stays at classical theater festivals.

She was a quiet, method-style actress.

The Mother of a Divisive Character

International audiences widely recognized her starting in 2000. In the series Queer as Folk, she played Dr. Eleanor Montgomery, the mother of the lead character Brian Kinney. She appeared in key episodes until 2005. Her performance avoided the sentimentality typical of family dramas from the early 2000s.

In 2002, she took part in the production American Psycho 2 alongside Mila Kunis. It was a project panned by specialist critics, which Gage defended purely for the joy of working. She shot her scenes in just a few days, showing a technical precision that saved thousands of dollars in production hours for the crew.

But her health began to decline years later.

She kept taking television roles, with appearances in The L Word during 2006 and in several suspense TV movies. She never let her illness dictate her shooting schedule until it became physically impossible for her to stand. Patricia Gage died in Niagara-on-the-Lake on January 31, 2010, from pancreatic cancer. She was 69 years old at the time of her death. Her last credited on-screen appearance was in the short film The Dinner Party.