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MEMORIES: "My dad was a miner and before he got married he had a bad accident and was blinded," says Stephen McHattie, who uses his father as the model for his Cousin Jimmy character on CBC-TV's Emily Of New Moon. "He had half his face blown off, a glass eye and a dent in his head where they put a metal plate in."

A father's quiet lessons
Actor puts stones in shoes and remembers...

By SID ADILMAN
ENTERTAINMENT COLUMNIST

The Toronto Star ~ October 10th., 1998

TYNE VALLEY, P.E.I. -When Stephen McHattie films scenes as the mentally limited but kindly Cousin Jimmy on TV's Emily Of New Moon, the cow-pie covered shoes he wears are filled with stones.

And playing the role, McHattie reaches back to memories of his late, physically scarred and blind father in rural Nova Scotia.

"Stones in the shoes, just to remind myself that as Jimmy, I always have to limp, so I don't have to think about it," he said recently on the set of the family series that's back for a second season on CBC, airing Sundays at 7 p.m.

Some days, he says, his hips ache after walking on the stones for up to five hours at a stretch.

"But there are more important things I like to think about - the way characters talk to each other and the way they look at each other."

With Emily Of New Moon, the 48-year-old McHattie is enjoying a remarkable turnabout in his 25 - year career.

He usually plays villains and has portrayed vicious killers in scores of U.S. TV shows and movies.

For the first time, now, McHattie is lovable on the screen - and the producers say he receives the most fan mail of any Emily cast member.

The winner of a 1995 best-actor Gemini for playing a savage wife-beater in the TV movie Life With Billy, he recently received another Gemini nomination for Cousin Jimmy but lost to Traders' Patrick McKenna.

Perhaps McHattie is wary of media interviews because he has been required to give few of them in the past or maybe he's just unwilling to share his life with the public.

Whatever the reason, most interview questions are met with a cold, hard stare. When he smiles it's like a sudden rainbow, but smiles are rare in McHattie interviews.

"Private person here," his body language seems to be saying. "Don't dare invade."

But one question cracks the icy exterior: On whom has he based his portrayal of Cousin Jimmy, who as child was thrown into a well and is left with limited mental capacity and a limp?

McHattie's response, surprisingly, comes in complete sentences - not the terse bursts of words that characterize many of his Emily Of New Moon interviews.

"It's embarrassing to say this, but it comes from my dad," he reveals for the first time publicly.

"I grew up on a farm in Guysborough County. My dad was a miner and before he got married he had a bad accident and was blinded.

"He had half his face blown off, a glass eye and a dent in his head where they put a metal plate in. But I had no idea he was blind until I was 5 or 6 years old because he ran everything on the farm.

"Schools weren't working out for my older brothers, so my mother moved us to Wolfville, a college town.

"Then, I suddenly looked at my father the way other people were seeing him. To them, he looked like a monster and I was torn: Do I listen to them or do I go where my heart was?"

Blind dad talked of movies as though he could see them

Like Cousin Jimmy, McHattie says, "my dad was just the sweetest guy. Nothing that had happened to him seemed to bother him.

"We lived just outside town and used to go to movies every Friday night and he would get as big a kick out of them as I did and talk about his favourite actors as though he was seeing them."

McHattie describes Cousin Jimmy's accent as a "a Maritime curve that the more rural people used to put on but no longer do.

"It almost sounded Southern. When we moved to Wolfville, people looked at me weird because of the way I talked. Not quite like Jimmv does, but a little more Scottish."

At age 16, McHattie acted in local amateur plays and wanted more. He was rejected several times by the National Theatre School.

"And at the time, Toronto seemed daunting; New York seemed friendlier."

He finally left Nova Scotia -"I had to get out because it was like a straight jacket; you weren't encouraged to be different or to point to yourself" - and studied acting at New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

McHattie's first professional role came in producer Joseph Papp's Central Park production of Henry IV and he spent the next 15 years appearing onstage in New York (plays that include Heartbreak House, Mensch Meier and Ghetto, the latter two of which won him Off-Broadway best-actor awards.

He then moved to Los Angeles, where his acting credits include Beauty And The Beast, Roughnecks and Beverly Hills Cop III.

In the second season, Cousin Jimmy no longer relates only to children and animals.

He has a lady friend who is also somewhat limited mentally and whom he rescues "from dangerous circumstance."

The character is played by McHattie's real-life wife, actor Lisa Houle, the mother of the couple's three children (including twins born this week).

He's now filming Emily Of New Moon's third season, to begin airng in late 1999, but McHattie has not yet signed on for more.

Does he want to continue? His answer is succinct: "Would be nice."

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