Donnelly Rhodes

A thing I have taken to doing is noting on my calendar who some of the more obscure people I’m writing about are and why I choose to write about them. This is to prevent lengthy blank stares at a name trying to remember what, exactly, I thought was worth spending five paragraphs on. With all these articles, the best thing I can have is a hook, a think that makes me say, “Ah, yes, this is the shape of the article going forward.” Finding my hook can take an embarrassingly long time if I can’t remember who the person is. For today, I had the bare name “Donnelly Rhodes,” a name I must admit I could not remember. Then I looked at the picture.

Because the face is familiar. Rhodes was, like so many people we’ve covered, a Canadian by birth, in his case from Winnipeg. He studied to be a warden of the National Park Service in Manitoba, and he was a member of the RCAF. Somehow, he made the shift to acting, studying at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Center (can’t help wondering if that’s supposed to be “Centre,” but that’s what IMDb says) and becoming a member of the first graduating class of the National Theatre School. He had a stint as Stanley Kowalski on the stage, a role I suspect he was very good at, and then became a contract player for Universal Pictures.

While he made movies—he was in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—you almost certainly recognize him from television. My initial reaction was, “Oh, Dutch,” having watched Soap all the way through before. Certainly that’s more than his five episodes of The Young and the Restless. Really, one of the things he specialized in was American shows that filmed in Canada, such as his two episodes of The X-Files. One of The Dead Zone. A whopping 37 of Battlestar Galactica. If you look it up and see that the show actually filmed in Vancouver, it’s likely he did a guest shot.

Of course, there’s no little just actual Canadian TV there, too. No Murdoch, shockingly. But he was second-billed on DaVinci’s Inquest and the lead on Danger Bay. (To my delight, one of his children on that show was played by an actor named Christopher Crabb and the other was Ocean Hellman.) He even did a guest slot on The Littlest Hobo. He looks to have returned home some time in the mid-’80s, and while there are American TV credits after that, some even filmed in the US—he’s two different characters in the Golden Girls Expanded Universe—he mostly lived and worked in British Columbia.

There’s something a little reassuring about actors like him. Ones where you know the face and know that he’s going to provide a quality, if not inspired, performance. Maybe he wasn’t the flashiest actor going. Even when he was hamming it up for Soap, he was never going to win for Most Acting. But he did solid acting as a working-class guy. You knew where you were when you saw Donnelly Rhodes appear, even if you never could quite remember his name.