Canadian Screen Awards 2015: Quick Cuts with Host Andrea Martin

In conversation with Canadian Screen Awards host Andrea Martin

She’s conquered Hollywood and Broadway, and recently lit up the literary world with her memoir Ladyparts. So, naturally, the next step in Andrea Martin’s pop culture takeover is a Canadian award show. Martin brings her trademark wit north of the border this Sunday to host the Canadian Screen Awards and, in anticipation, Mike Crisolago has compiled five of his favourite moments from their recent conversations.

Why Martin, born in Portland, Maine, is Canada’s “favourite illegitimate child”:

“There are many times when I think I’m a Canadian. You know, everything that was important in my life began in Canada. My career really started there, and I got married to a Canadian, and my kids were born in Toronto. I have a place there that I bought a few years ago, and I lived there [before that] for 18 years.”

How her courage came with age:

“I just feel that honest to God it’s never too late…When I turned 65 is I said to myself ‘You don’t have any more time to indulge in the kind of negative things that might have held you back.’ So I just decided to say yes, to everything, and to life. You know, things change on a dime when you say yes.”

Her honesty about late-in-life love, and her relationship with a man 29 years her junior:

“I honestly feel that it’s different for everyone, although I do speak to women who say there’s a certain group of women who need to be in relationships. They need to have a sexual outlet and that’s a priority for them. It isn’t a priority for me. I don’t think it’s that I’m worried about intimacy. But, I guess I had other priorities and at the end of the day I’m exhausted. I have a full career and I have a lot of friends and I’m involved with my sons and writing [her memoir, Lady Parts] and doing plays. I don’t know – it feels like my days are full. So I guess meeting someone has been low on my list of priorities.

“When I met Terry [who was 29 years younger], not for one minute was I even in the mindset of maybe this guy’s flirting with me. It never crossed my mind. But I think I was just so taken with his genuine persona – his authenticity. He was just such a kind, decent, real person. There was nothing manipulative about him, he didn’t want anything from me. I think it was just pure attraction, chemistry. It wasn’t even that it was so sexual – it was just a connection that we made that was so unlikely because of our age difference. And I’m not going to lie – it was certainly difficult when it was over. But I look at it as kind of a gift in my life, and I’m not looking to create another one like that. Maybe it was just one moment in time in my life. And that’s [how] I look at it – with enormous gratitude. And maybe something will happen like that again, just when you least expect it. A surprise. But honestly, I think people search for love in different ways and everybody’s different – they’re either in long term relationships, they’ve had long marriages, maybe they’re lonely and they’re joining a club so they can meet people, or maybe they’re just happy being single. I think everyone’s different.”

If she wrote a follow-up to her memoir in 10 years, what she hopes the next few chapters would contain:

“I’d hope that the fear and anxiety that I’ve lived with for so much of my life will have dissipated. I guess what I would want to write is that my concern for the past and my concern for the future no longer matter. That honestly, even though I’ve given lip service to staying in the moment, really 10 years from now I’m really living that. Because actually, I think that’s the only thing that really matters. It’s just how to discipline yourself to do it.”

Discovering why the word “retirement” isn’t in her vocabulary:

“I actually feel that I have much more of an ease and self-confidence in this chapter of my life and I want to utilize it while I’m feeling so fearless about what people think… I said ‘no’ many times in my career, and when I was saying no I believed I was saying no for creative purposes. When I look back I think I was saying no because I was scared. And now I thank God the opportunities are still there. So sometimes I guess I’m just open and things seem to be coming my way because every time I do something I’m just enjoying it much more than I might have in the past. Because in the past I was always fearful – what were people going to think – and now I don’t give a hoot.”

The Canadian Screen Awards airs Sunday, March 1, 2015, on CBC.