Harry Gulkin

Harry Gulkin was a Canadian movie producer and theatre director who helped to raise the international profile of Canadian literature and film. The son of Russian immigrants, Gulkin was born and raised in Montreal, and dropped out of high school at age 16 to join the Merchant Marines. Following World War Two, he became a union activist and worked for a communist newspaper, but abandoned communism when the genocide of Stalin's regime became apparent. He then used his talent in marketing to completely switch careers, and obtained executive positions in a supermarket chain. He started producing films in the 1970s with the aim of adapting Canadian fiction to the screen. One of his earliest films (Lies My Father Told Me (1975)) won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Film in 1976, and also received Academy Award nominations for Best Writing and Best Original Screenplay. He was Executive and Artistic Director of the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts in Montreal (now the Segal Centre for Performing Arts) from 1983 to 1987, and later was an analyst for a Quebec film agency that helped fund prominent French Canadian films such as Jesus of Montreal (1989) and The Barbarian Invasions (2003). The National Film Board documentary Harry Gulkin: Red Dawn on Main Street (2004) is a biography of his life and work. In 2008, he received a special Genie Award from the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television for being "a person of outstanding vision and merit, who has built through his love of film a stronger and more vibrant film community". He was married to Ruth Penner and Marie Murphy, and had two children with Penner. It was revealed in Stories We Tell (2012) that he was also the biological father of actress and director Sarah Polley.