‘A wonder of an actor’: in Julien Arnold, we’ve lost one of our finest, and most loved, theatre artists

Julien Arnold as Bob Cratchit, 2018. Photo supplied by Citadel Theatre.

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

We — the ‘we’ across the country — woke up this morning to the most heartbreaking and tragic theatre news.

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The untimely passing of Julien Arnold at 60, felled by a heart attack at the Citadel during Sunday night’s preview performance of A Christmas Carol, robs us of one of our finest, and most beloved, actors. In this year’s production of Edmonton’s seasonal hit Arnold had returned to the dual roles of Jacob Marley and the irresistibly ebullient Christmas party host Mr. Fezziwig, as well as joining the ensemble and the band.     

And the theatre community and its audiences are remembering, in an outpouring of sadness and huge affection, a theatre artist who was intensely committed, expert and easeful in his craft onstage, and thoroughly delightful, kind, and funny offstage. When Arnold’s theatre school classmate Ashley Wright was directing a production of Twelfth Night at the U of A, as he told .ca, his note to the student actors in the cast was “just watch Julien….”   

There will be many more “Jules” stories to come, of course; this is just the start — the tip of a rich vein of our collective theatre history where this artist will continue to live. Arnold, after all, brought his charisma and skill to theatre companies and indies of every size and shape. He was a co-founder with his U of A classmates of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival in 1989; we got to see him onstage out in the park, in a huge range of parts. He started his own Atlas Theatre Collective when he returned to the U of A for a master’s degree in directing in 2008.

Julien Arnold, Richard Lee Hsi in Mesa, Atlas Theatre Collective. Photo by Mat Busby.

The range of theatrical real estate between, say, Martin McDonagh’s very black comedy A Skull in Connemara and the giddiness of Spamalot, or The Merchant of Venice and Stewart Lemoine’s real-time cocktail party Cocktails at Pam’s, is, to say the least, vast. All easily within Arnold’s compass. You needed a character to play the guitar, the banjo, the violin … Arnold could do that too.

First, and last, was Teatro La Quindicina. His final mainstage performance, as it turns out, was in Andrew Ritchie’s production of the two-hander goth thriller The Woman in Black that opened the Teatro Live! season in October — as an elderly solicitor, who also plays everyone his younger self meets in a journey into a dark, secret past.

The start of Arnold’s professional career was at Teatro, too. The young actor, who emerged with a BFA in acting from U of A theatre school in 1989, immediately caught the eye of the home company of Stewart Lemoine’s original comedies, and was snapped up as a Teatro star, a leading member of the ensemble — which he remained. In 1990, his first year out of school, he starred in Lemoine’s The Glittering Heart, as a husband who’s taken aback when his wife announces she’s up and moving to Venice to become a famous courtesan.

“He was such a good speaker,” says Lemoine remembering the young Arnold’s unusual dexterity with words, a skill particularly to be cherished in literate, witty comedies with smart characters. “And so versatile. He  spoke with such authority, such a grounded presence onstage. In his delivery he was so connected in his words and thoughts.…”

“He was always super-prepared; his scripts were always in tatters,” says Lemoine. He remembers Arnold hauling out his signed Equity contract, all ragged round the edges, and the amazed stage manger would ask ‘what happened to this’?

The Teatro archive is full of memorable Arnold performances in nuanced, often wistful comedies, Shocker’s Delight, Happy Toes, The Ambassador’s Wives. They tested the elastic boundaries of comedy, and Arnold naturally found layers and depths in laughter. The last role Lemoine created specially for Arnold was in The Finest of Strangers in 2018.

Lemoine’s favourite Arnold moment? The final image of Shocker’s Delight, a comedy of three-way collegiate friendship, heartbreak, and resilience, leaves Arnold, alone in a rowboat: “I am at peace, and so I float.” That is a thought to hang onto today.

Arnold and Shakespeare got along brilliantly, from the moment the Free Will Players took to the stage in the park every summer. I remember his Petruchio, the swaggering suitor of the “shrew,” roaring up to the stage on his motorcycle.

James MacDonald, the first Freewill artistic director (now the artistic director of Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops) says of his close friend, who got married to Punctuate! Theatre managing director Sheiny Satanove last summer, that “he was a wonder of an actor, with the agility to break your heart and have you in stitches within a moment. I loved directing him because he always found the depth in his comedic roles, as easily as he found the humour in the dramatic roles. And he made everyone around him better….”

“He found incredible depth and humour as the Fool in Lear, as Feste in Twelfth Night, and as Petruchio twice! Where he was unafraid to be dislikable and charming at the same time. And he stole the show as the Harpo-inspired Pistol in The Merry Wives of Windsor.”

Julien Arnold as Bottom, archival photos of the dress rehearsal for A Midsummer Nights Dream at the Citadel Theatre, 2012 Photo by Ian Jackson, epic photography.

He was in Shakespeare at the Citadel, too. I remember his hilariously lovable comic turn as Bottom, the bossy weaver and over-eager amateur thesp, in the Citadel’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2012. Always, there was heart to Arnold’s comedy; he had great comic chops and timing, certainly, but comedy was never a callow affair with him.

With his warmth and cordiality Arnold was a marvellous, quintessential, Bob Cratchit in the Citadel’s production of A Christmas Carol for the two decades of the Tom Wood adaptation. And he and MacDonald shared the stage when the latter played Scrooge for five Christmases. “I have a million memories, but right now what stands out is the final moment between as Scrooge and Cratchit, sharing a merry Christmas greeting (the day after the fateful visitation by the ghosts). He did it for 20 years with as much truth and honesty as on day 1.” He must be the only Cratchit in history to also play, very against type, Scrooge.

Kate Ryan, Arnold’s Mrs. Cratchit, says “life was fragile and beautiful to him. He lived every moment. Being in A Christmas Carol was such a special part of his life and he loved it fully…. (Just now) I saw a child ride a unicycle past my window on the way to school…. The spirit of Julien lives on in the youth’s love of life. He was like the Peter Pan of Edmonton.”

During COVID I asked Arnold, and other theatre artists, what roles they’d always wanted to play but never had the chance. His answer, with typically Arnold, typically unexpected: Dogberry, the bumbling Keystone clown in Much Ado About Nothing;  the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, the grave digger in Hamlet. Ah,, and Salieri, the much-aggrieved lesser light to Mozart in Amadeus.   

The image that that’s grabbed hold of my memory on this sorrowful day is Arnold’s Bob Cratchit, catching sight of Tiny Tim and Mrs. Cratchit outside the bleak offices of Scrooge and Marley. “Hello, my little cock robin!” he cries. His face lights up in wonder; he sheds before our very eyes the drudgery of his life in the warm of human connection.

Arnold knew everything about that kind of magic. “There is so much Happy to remember,” as Lemoine says. This is just the start of that.