Hutt, William Ian Dewitt

  • From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: See full biography at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hutt_(actor)
  • Wiki profile notes:
    • William Ian DeWitt Hutt, CC, OOnt, MM (May 2, 1920 – June 27, 2007) was a Canadian actor of stage, television and film. Hutt’s distinguished career spanned over 50 years and won him many accolades and awards. While his base throughout his career remained at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, he appeared on the stage in London, New York and across Canada.
    • Hutt was born in Toronto, Ontario, the second of three children. A graduate of Toronto’s Vaughan Road Collegiate Institute (now Vaughan Road Academy), he served five years as a medic during World War II, receiving a Military Medal for “bravery in the field”. After the war, he received his BA in 1948 from Trinity College at the University of Toronto, and subsequently joined the Stratford Festival of Canada for its first season in 1953.
    • About his early life, theatre director Richard Nielsen said, “As a young man, he was openly gay at a time when being openly gay was a very dangerous identity. He shunned violence, but he volunteered as a medic in the Second World War, and he later won the Military Medal for his services; and this I found most fascinating: he committed to a career in theatre when such a thing as the ‘Canadian theatre’ simply did not exist.
    • In 1969 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada and in 1992 he was awarded the Order of Ontario. He also received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, in October 1997, and in 2000 was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. Hutt was a recipient of a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award in 1992. He was awarded the 1996 Sam Wanamaker Prize. One of the very few people in North America to have appeared on a postage stamp while still alive, he appeared on a stamp that celebrated the Stratford Festival’s anniversary and showed him in character as Prospero.
    • In 2000, a bridge on Waterloo Street North that crosses the Avon River in downtown Stratford, Ontario, was named the “William Hutt Bridge” in his honour. The bridge lies a few metres away from the house in which Hutt had lived for many years
  • Third Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=4132
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/20127794/william-hutt