2018 Prime of Life Achievement Award

Dr. Henry Woolf has been an actor, director, teacher and a writer, for over 60 years. He has worked with top chaps like Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, Peter O’Toole, Harold Pinter and many more. In 1957, he persuaded Harold Pinter to write his first play, “The Room” and directed and acted in it himself. However, it has to be said that teaching drama at the University of Saskatchewan for fourteen years was easily the most enjoyable phase of his career. “The students kept me young”, he has always said. In 1994 he received the Master Teacher Award in recognition of his excellence in that area.

He retired as Head of the Drama Department in 1997. In 1990, Henry took over as Artistic Director of the Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan Festival, another favourite job, leaving in the year 2000. “The great thing about acting”, he says, “is that you never have to retire until they start throwing eggs”. The eggs have not yet been projected at his stage. Henry Is Professor Emeritus of Drama and received an honorary Doctor of Laws Degree in 2001; he was inducted into the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 2015.