Beau Starr

No, no, no—they’ve got all these horses. Beautiful black horses all criss-crossing with their tails and manes and battle lances. Takes your breath away. [they stare at him] I was a kid. It haunted me. —Due South, “All the Queen’s Horses”

Six weeks ago, I thought he had the IQ of a salad bar. His only interest in life was to make people sick. If my mother came to dinner, he would give the dog a third eye or an extra leg. Because of him, we stopped having kids. You can imagine the feeling when I saw him studying. The wife and I almost burst into tears. —Summer School

Given how often I watch both of these, it took me astonishingly long to realize that these two speeches were delivered by the same actor. I suppose it’s the disconnect between the Canadian TV pipeline and an ‘80s teen comedy. It was easier to connect Lieutenant Welsh with a Men With Brooms character, because that’s the same world, and it’s easier to connect his Night Court appearance as the husband of an ex of Harry’s to Summer School and Chainsaw’s father. I have no idea how he first came to the attention of Paul Haggis, creator of Due South, but we’re all fortunate he did.

Beau Starr is actually a former football player. Including playing for the CFL, so maybe that’s where they know him. He also played for the Jets. I know nothing about his career, and no one much wants to tell me, but he does have that Beefy Guy look of a former football player. From there, he went into acting. He had a pretty standard career for a lot of years. An episode of Knight Rider. Cagney and Lacey. Remington Steele. A whopping three of Hill Street Blues, all as the same character. About the only surprising point of his career until 1987 is Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. Maybe V.

1987 is, however, the year of Summer School. Mr Gremp is a minor character. We know he’s a butcher—his own father, in fact, was a meat packer—but he really only gets one scene. It’s hard for him to steal it, because it’s such a packed scene, but he’s great in it. From there, he went on to Halloween 4. Which is, you know, something. He still did a lot of regular TV, including two Perry Mason movies and two episodes of Murder, She Wrote, but he was starting to do movies, too—he’s in Born on the Fourth of July and is Henry’s father in GoodFellas. (His brother plays Frenchy!) Still mostly either minor characters or minor films, but every once in a while something interesting.

Then, however it happened, Lieutenant Welsh. And one of the things I like about Due South is that they give the character room to grow. He’s not just the surly lieutenant who wonders how he ended up stuck with the Mountie in his precinct. There’s his love of the RCMP Musical Ride, for one. He’s shown to have a dry sense of humour that he’ll use on either Ray at provocation. We see compassion from him sometimes. He’s never the focus of an episode, but he could be easily and it wouldn’t feel inappropriate. We don’t know much about him, but what we do know is fun.

His career after that hasn’t been all I could hope. A bit of Nero Wolfe. An episode of Psych. An episode of The Dead Zone. Honestly, that episode of Psych is the last thing on his IMDb page, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s retired. He’s eighty now, and there aren’t enormous numbers of roles for Elderly Beefy Guys. If he even wants them. I’m sure he’s getting residuals, enough to live on if nothing else, and he’s certainly old enough to have just chosen to retire. But we’ll always have Lieutenant Welsh.