Local acting legend Joyce Doolittle appointed to Order of Canada

It was 1971. Joyce Doolittle was getting a ride from downtown to the University of Calgary when something caught her eye. It was an abandoned brick building, a water pumping station down by the Bow River.

"I went over and climbed through a broken window and looked at it and thought it had a lot of possibility," she said.

It was the Pumphouse Building. Thanks to the efforts of Doolittle, a Calgary actress and acting instructor at the university, the Pumphouse was rescued from a demolition order and transformed into a theatre space.

Doolittle, now 90, recalled the incident Monday on the Calgary Eyeopener where she spoke about being named a member of the Order of Canada, an honour she described as "unusual."

"I'm not used to having anything so highfalutin [happen to me]," Doolittle said.

Calgary theatre pioneer

Doolittle moved to Calgary from the United States in 1960, when there were no professional theatre companies here — and virtually no theatre space anywhere in the city.

"The only theatre built for putting on plays in 1960 was the Jubilee Auditorium, and it's not very good for an amateur company to try to put on a play with an audience that has more than a thousand seats in it," she said.

Now, 58 years later, there's loads of professional theatre, and so much theatre space that Doolittle can't keep track of it all.

"Now I see an ad [for a play] and I not only don't know what the show is, and who the company is, but I don't know where the theatre is," she said.

Queen Lear

Doolittle was beloved by theatre students at the U of C, and acted in various venues and productions all over the city for decades. But perhaps her crowning performance came in 2009, when, at the age of 81, she performed in Calgary playwright Eugene Stickland's Queen Lear, which he wrote as a belated birthday present to Doolittle.

The show was produced several times, premiering at the Joyce Doolittle Theatre inside the same Pumphouse Theatre that Doolittle helped create nearly 40 years earlier.

"It was just so exciting to play in a play that had been written for me in the little space in the Pumphouse that's named after me — Joyce in the Joyce," she said. "And we were sold out every night, because it was such a small space."

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With files from the Calgary Eyeopener