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Gordon Pinsent, Canadian acting icon, dead at 92 – CBC.ca

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Gordon Pinsent, one of Canada’s most prolific and iconic actors, has died. He was 92.

“Gordon Pinsent’s daughters Leah and Beverly, and his son Barry, would like to announce the passing of their father peacefully in sleep today with his family at his side,” said a note released late Saturday, written on behalf of Pinsent’s family by his son-in-law, actor Peter Keleghan.

“Gordon passionately loved this country and its people, purpose, and culture to his last breath.”

The Grand Falls, N.L., native and Canadian household name had a storied acting career spanning dozens of films and TV projects over six decades, including Due South, The Red Green Show, Babar and the Adventures of Badou, The Grand Seduction and The Shipping News.

Focusing on CBC programs alone, one could add The Forest Rangers, Quentin Durgens, M.P., the original Street Legal and Republic of Doyle, among others.

In the U.S., where he lived in Los Angeles for six years, it was such TV series and movies as It Takes A Thief, Silence of the North, Young Prosecutors, Banacek, and the feature film The Thomas Crown Affair.

“My whole career has depended on the happiness that I get when asked to do something,” Pinsent said in a 2010 Toronto Life interview. “Pick up the phone and say ‘yes.’ I do that a lot.”

Comedian and actor Mark Critch, a fellow Newfoundlander, said he will miss Pinsent as a mentor, friend, hero and “giant colossus of Canadian entertainment.”

Actors in Canada are following “on a path that [Pinsent] cut through a forest,” Critch said.

Born on July 12, 1930, Pinsent was the youngest of six children born to Stephen Pinsent, a paper mill worker and cobbler, and his wife, Flossie.

Pinsent said he was a shy, awkward child who once suffered from rickets but found freedom in acting, starting in the 1940s at the age of 17.

In the early 1950s, Pinsent took a break from acting and joined the Canadian Army, serving for about four years. But acting was his true love.

More than 150 roles

Pinsent joined the Stratford Festival in 1962 with roles in MacbethThe Taming of the ShrewThe Tempest and Cyrano de Bergerac, and he returned to Stratford in the mid-’70s as a leading player.

He had more than 150 TV and movie acting credits to his name, with his Internet Movie Database resumé spanning from a 1957 TV movie to a cartoon voice in 2021.

A companion of the Order of Canada and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Pinsent also received the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, the Earle Grey Award for lifetime achievement in television, and a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame.

He won every major acting prize in the country, including the Genie for best actor in 2001’s The Shipping News, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Annie Proulx.

Five years later, Pinsent won best actor Genie and ACTRA awards for his internationally recognized work in Sarah Polley’s Away From Her.

WATCH | Pinsent ‘was like the Newfoundland Pope,’ Mark Critch says: 

Gordon Pinsent was the beacon of N.L. arts, says friend and actor Mark Critch

11 hours ago

Duration 9:57

Canadian acting legend Gordan Pinsent, whose award-winning career spanned six decades, has died at 92. His friend, fellow actor and comedian Mark Critch said Pinsent was thoughtful, young-spirited and deeply loved by his fans and peers.

‘Extraordinary’ performance

In the 2016 documentary about his life, The River of My Dreams — a film where a reflective, sometimes impish Pinsent speaks in eloquent paragraphs infused with his Newfoundland accenthe says his wife, the actress Charmion King, suggested he take the role, which turned out to be the high-water mark for his career.

Canadian director Norman Jewison said in the same doc that Pinsent’s performance in Away From Her of a man losing his wife (Julie Christie) to Alzheimer’s disease was “extraordinary.”

“It was so simple, yet so powerful and so moving,” Jewison said of Pinsent. “And I think a lot of it was because you believed him.”

Those types of kudos tickled the modest Pinsent.

“Now you see, I don’t talk that way about myself, so I was pleased — it was just terrific,” he said about similar praise at the time from English actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

WATCH | Gordon Pinsent speaks about Away From Her 16 years ago: 

Gordon Pinsent on ‘Away From Her’

16 years ago

Duration 11:19

Venerable Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent talks about the critically acclaimed film Away From Her.

Amid the plaudits, Pinsent had a tragedy in his personal life as the film was being released: King, his wife of 45 years, died in January 2007 after a long struggle with emphysema.

“It was something I wasn’t necessarily drawing on except in the general sense of how anyone must feel at a certain time of life after spending so many years with a partner,” an emotional Pinsent said then.

“It’s almost impossible to grasp … how do you prepare? Where does love go? Where do you go, the leftover?”

King and Pinsent had one child together, actress Leah Pinsent. He also had two children from an earlier marriage, Barry and Beverly.

A Renaissance man

Pinsent was also a painter, a writer, a playwright and a director. Two of his Newfoundland-set novels, The Rowdyman and John and the Missus, were turned into feature films. Pinsent starred in the former and both directed and acted in the latter. 

His memoirs, By the Way, were published in 1994.

Though he struggled with chronic pain in his later years, Pinsent remained prolific, with about 20 acting credits during the 2010s.

At age 80, he went viral on CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes by reading 16-year-old Justin Bieber’s memoir with mock gravitas.

Pinsent reads Justin Bieber’s memoir: 

YouTube video


And at 81, he put out an album of his own poetry set to rock music by Greg Keelor of Blue Rodeo and Travis Good of The Sadies.

In 2016, he released a short film he wrote and self-funded called Martin’s Hagge, about a middle-aged writer burdened by a personified version of anxiety and depression.

He said he kept working because each new project felt like getting away with something he didn’t quite deserve.

“I ran fast before they could catch me and say, ‘No, no, acting is for silly people!'” he told CBC News in 2010.

WATCH | George Stroumboulopoulos speaks with Pinsent in 2011: 

Gordon Pinsent

12 years ago

Duration 15:39

George speaks with Canadian acting great Gordon Pinsent about his life and career in the film and theatre industry.

Canadian actor R.H. Thomson, who has been almost as prolific as Pinsent, said in the 2016 documentary that artists have an enormous role in how a country’s “cloth is woven.”

“And artists like Gordon … [have] pulled that thread back and forth, as Canada’s loom has made this cloth of who we are and where we’ve been and where we’re going to,” he said.

“And that colour of Gordon Pinsent going through and through the tapestry is now inevitably part of any story of Canada for me.”

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As sports betting addiction takes hold in Brazil, the government moves to crack down

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SAO PAULO (AP) — “King” doesn’t disclose his real name. Even clients of his Sao Paulo newsstand have to call him by his moniker. The Brazilian online sports gambling addict lowered his profile after a loan shark threatened to put bullets in his head if he didn’t pay up.

Broke and embarrassed, King sought treatment and support earlier this year.

“I was once addicted to slot machines, but then sports betting was so easy that I changed. I got carried away all the time,” he told The Associated Press.

King’s story is that of many vulnerable Brazilians in recent years. The country has become the third-biggest market in the world for sports betting, following the U.S. and the U.K., a report by data analysis company Comscore said last year. But unlike those countries, rampant advertising and sponsorship have been coupled with an unregulated market. The government is now — belatedly, some say — striving to get a handle on the epidemic.

On a recent evening, King’s Gamblers Anonymous meeting took place in an improvised classroom inside a church, with coffee and cookies to keep everyone awake, and supportive messages scrawled onto the blackboard. One that’s become ubiquitous in Brazil and beyond: “Only for today I will avoid the first bet.”

King and other attendees, all Christian, started a prayer and the meeting began.

King said his financial problems arose from his addiction to online sports betting, chiefly on soccer.

“I miss the adrenaline rush when I don’t bet,” he said before the gathering. “I have managed to stop for a couple of months, but I know that if I do it once again, even a small bet, it will all come back.”

Driven by the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic was a key driver for Brazilians embracing sports betting. King said he transformed almost every sale during that time into a bet. His hook was the non-stop advertising on TV, radio, social media as well as sponsorship of local soccer teams’ jerseys. He asked for bank loans to pay his gambling debts and then, to cover those, went to the moneylender. His total debt now amounts to 85,000 reais ($15,000) — impossible to pay off with his monthly income of 8,000 reais.

Digging oneself out of debt in Brazil is especially daunting with its sky-high interest rates. Loans from Brazilian banks could add interest of almost 8% per month to the borrowed sum, and from loan sharks could be even more.

Four Gamblers Anonymous meetings attended by the AP in October featured discussions about difficulties paying down debts, forcing working-class members to postpone housing payments and cancel family vacations.

Some members of impoverished Brazilian families have used welfare money for betting instead of paying for groceries and housing, official data suggests. In August, beneficiaries of Brazil’s flagship program Bolsa Familia spent 3 billion reais ($530 million) on sports betting, according to a report from the central bank. That was more than 20% of the program’s total outlay in the month.

A host of gambling related problems

Sports betting was made legal in 2018 in a bill signed by former President Michel Temer. The subsequent turmoil has recently been setting off alarm bells, with addicts venting on social media and media reports of people losing huge sums.

On Oct. 1, the economy ministry prevented more than 2,000 betting companies from operating in Brazil for having failed to provide all the required documents. Soccer-loving President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said in an interview on Oct. 17 that he will shut down the entire market in Brazil if his administration’s new regulations — presented at the end of July— fail to work. And Brazil’s Senate on Oct. 25 opened an investigation into betting companies, focusing on crime and addiction.

“There’s tax evasion, money laundering of organized crime, the use of influencers to trick people into betting. These companies need to be audited,” Sen. Soraya Thronicke, who proposed the inquiry, told journalists in Brasilia.

Sérgio Peixoto, a ride-sharing app driver in Rio, is one of many lower-middle-income Brazilians who have reduced their spending due to sports betting debt. Peixoto’s debt currently amounts to 25,000 reais ($4,400). His monthly income is four times less than that.

“It stopped being a game, it wasn’t fun. I just wanted to get the money back, so I lost even more,” said Peixoto, 26. “I could have invested that money. It would surely have given me more benefits.

Pressure to bet

Pressure on people to gamble is everywhere. Current and former soccer players, including Vinicius Júnior, Ronaldo Nazário and Roberto Rivellino, are among the poster boys for local and foreign brands. All but one of the top-tier soccer clubs have betting companies among their main sponsors, with their name and logo emblazoned on their kits. There have been cases of kids and teenagers setting up accounts using their parents’ personal information and money, multiple local media outlets have reported.

Brazil’s economy ministry estimates that Brazil’s sports betting market had $21 billion in transactions last year, a 71% increase compared with the first year of the pandemic, 2020.

The ministry’s newly presented regulations include facial recognition systems for gamblers to bet, the identification of a single bank account for transactions involving sports betting, new protections against hackers and the government-authorized domain, bet.br, which will host all betting sites that are legal in Brazil. Once they are in place, come January, between 100 and 150 betting companies will continue to operate in the South American nation.

The changes in Brazil have prompted some companies to take preemptive action. A report by Yield Sec, a technical intelligence platform for online marketplaces, said several betting companies voluntarily restricted their operations in different places after the latest editions of the European Championships and Copa America in the hopes of presenting “the best possible license application face to the Brazilian authorities.”

Magnho José Santos de Sousa, the president of the Legal Gambling Institute, a betting think tank, said Brazil is currently “invaded by illegal websites that have licenses in Malta, Curação, Gibraltar and the United Kingdom.”

De Sousa expressed hope that the new regulations for advertising, responsible gambling and qualification of sports betting companies will transform the country’s deregulated arena into a more serious one that doesn’t exploit the vulnerable.

“The whole operation could turn from water into wine,” he said.

Gamblers Anonymous in high demand

Meantime, the demand for Gamblers Anonymous meetings in Sao Paulo has grown so much in recent years that the weekly gathering, in place since the 1990s, was no longer enough. Many groups have added a second day in the week to help new people recover, mostly sports bettors.

Earlier in October, a group on Sao Paulo’s northern edge admitted a man who was struggling with sports betting and card games. The 13 other people in the room stressed that he wasn’t alone.

“Welcome,” one long-time attendee said, in a greeting that has become a regular for the group. “Today, you are the most important person here.”

___

Dumphreys reported from Rio de Janeiro.



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Saskatchewan’s Jason Ackerman improves to 6-0 at mixed curling nationals

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SAINT CATHARINES, Ont. – Saskatchewan’s Jason Ackerman remained undefeated on Wednesday with a 7-4 win over Newfoundland and Labrador’s Trent Skanes at the Canadian mixed curling championship.

After going down 3-1 through four ends, Ackerman (6-0) outscored Skanes (3-3) 6-1 the rest of the way, including three points in the seventh end.

Alberta’s Kurt Alan Balderston also earned a win, defeating New Brunswick’s Charlie Sullivan 9-2 in another matchup in the final draw.

The win improved Balderston’s record to 4-2 and sits in third in Pool B.

The top four teams from each pool will play four more games against the survivors from the other pool. The remaining three teams from the pool will play three more seeding games to help set the rankings for next year’s event.

The championship final is scheduled for Saturday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 6, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.



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Oilers fall 4-2 to Golden Knights in McDavid’s return from injury

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EDMONTON – Noah Hanifin had a pair of goals as the Vegas Golden Knights won their first road game of the season, coming from behind to shock the Edmonton Oilers 4-2 on Wednesday.

Jack Eichel had a goal and two assists and Mark Stone also scored for the Golden Knights (9-3-1), who have won two in a row and six of their last seven. The Knights entered the game 0-3-1 on the road this year.

Brett Kulak and Zach Hyman replied for the Oilers (6-7-1), who have lost two straight despite getting captain Connor McDavid back from injury earlier than expected for the game.

Adin Hill made 27 saves for Vegas, while Stuart Skinner managed 31 stops for Edmonton.

Takeaways

Golden Knights: With an assist on the Knights’ second goal, William Karlsson has recorded at least a point in all five games he has played this season (two goals, four assists).

Oilers: McDavid was a surprise starter for the Oilers, coming back just nine days after suffering an ankle injury in Columbus and initially being expected to miss two to three weeks. The star forward came into the contest with 11 points (three goals, eight assists) during a six-game point streak versus the Golden Knights, but was held pointless on the night.

Key moment

With just 48.4 seconds left to play, the Golden Knights won a race to the corner and Ivan Barbashev was able to send it out to a hard-charging Hanifin, who sent a shot glove-side that beat Skinner for his second goal of the third period and third of the season.

Key stat

It was Hyman’s third goal in the last four games after the veteran forward went scoreless in his first 10 games this season following a 54-goal campaign last year. Hyman now has five goals in his last six games against Vegas.

Up next

Golden Knights: Head to Seattle to face the Kraken on Friday.

Oilers: Travel to Vancouver on a quick one-game trip to clash with the Canucks on Saturday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 6, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.



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