Harry Gulkin

Harry Gulkin was a Canadian film and theater producer born on November 14, 1927 in Montreal, Quebec. Born to Russian Jewish immigrants who had been involved in the Russian Revolution, Gulkin dropped out from Baron Byng High School at age 16 in order to join World War II as a merchant marine. When he returned to Montreal, he began social advocacy work before joining the staff of the communist weekly Canadian Tribune as an art critic and business manager. However, Gulkin renounced communism in 1956 after the atrocities committed in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin's regime were acknowledged. Ironically, he turned to capital as a marketing executive for the now-defunct Canadian supermarket chain Steinberg's. In 1970, though, Gulkin decided he wanted to try and produce movies. He did so in a big way when he produced the critically acclaimed drama "Lies My Father Told Me" (1975). It received a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Film. Its screenplay was written by the author of the story on which the film was based, Ted Allan, and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Gulkin's following films would not achieve the same success or critical acclaim, but they followed his commitment to Montreal and Quebec talent. Gulkin produced "Two Solitudes" (1978) and "Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang" (1978) before becoming the director of the Saidye Bronfman Centre of the Arts, now the Segal Centre for the Performing Arts. Gulkin worked there from 1983 to 1987, and produced his last film, "Bayo," in 1985. But he would still have a hand in the genesis of Quebec and Canadian films for about 20 years as a project manager at the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles, a government agency that promotes and supports Quebec culture. He was profiled in a documentary commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada, "Harry Gulkin: Red Dawn on Main Street" (2004). But Gulkin came to his highest prominence since the 1970s with his appearance in "Stories We Tell" (2012), directed by actress and writer Sarah Polley. In exploring her family's stories and secrets, Polley revealed that Gulkin was her biological father through an affair he had with her mother, actress and casting director Diane Polley. Born in 1979, Polley would go on to great success in the film and television industries, and her film was listed as the tenth best Canadian film of all time by the Toronto International Film Festival and the 70th best film since 2000 in a 2016 BBC poll. Gulkin had been married to Ruth Penner, with whom he had two children, Cathy and Jim Gulkin. He was also married to Marie Murphy. He died from pneumonia on July 23, 2018 at age 90.