Putting a face to Jane Doe

By KEVIN WILLIAMSON -- Calgary Sun

Say what you will about the CBC, but Wendy Crewson conjures a convincing portrait of what The Many Trials of One Jane Doe would have looked like on a U.S. network.

"If it was American, she'd be this angel with sweeping hair, blowing back in the wind. She'd have wings and a halo," Crewson says.

"What I love about this is that they didn't do that. They didn't care if you liked her or not."

Airing Monday, the two-hour movie recounts the true story of Jane Doe (as she legally must be referred to), a woman who learns she was the fifth victim of a serial rapist committing his crimes in a two-block area surrounding her home.

When she discovers the police knew about the man yet decided not to warn the public, she feels that she and all the women in the neighbourhood were being used as bait. Eventually she launches a legal battle against the Toronto Police Department, who she charged was negligent.

"It's a difficult social issue worthy of discussion and maybe if there's enough discussion, that creates movement and maybe change," Crewson reasons, citing the startling statistics surrounding rape.

"Only six per cent of rapes are reported. That means 94 percent go unreported."

Still, it was Jane Doe herself, not the facts about the crime, that fascinated Crewson early on.

"I read something by a journalist who didn't like her and seemed irritated by her manner. And you think, what's to be against here? But the real Jane Doe, there is something about her that gets under your skin. But it is that very strength that gave her the armour to withstand the opposition she faced. That is an element of her personality that distinguished her from that 94%. She wasn't some poor, broken thing."

The role comes as particularly satisfying for Crewson, who finds compelling parts increasingly rare.

"It's a problem because all the roles for women my age are strong but vulnerable homogenous women.

"They're perfect and supportive. If there are better roles, they don't filter up to me. Maybe Julia Roberts has better luck," she says, laughing when asked if she's choosy about what jobs she takes. "No, I don't look for anything special, I'll take what comes!"

Opportunities in Canada are "consistently" better, she says, which makes it all the more frustrating when movies she's proud of, such as the romantic comedy Suddenly Naked, are slammed by Canadian critics.

"We don't have the budgets. We can't compare to American movies. But when we do something like Suddenly Naked with Anne Wheeler, which was this quirky, sexy comedy, we get trashed. In Germany, Anne Wheeler is a huge star ... The Toronto papers are notoriously-tough. Being from the hometown doesn't make it easier -- it's twice as hard. I don't know why. Maybe it's tall poppy syndrome -- lop off the head of the ones who get the highest."

Which isn't to suggest Crewson hasn't enjoyed success south of the border.

Her role as Harrison Ford's wife in Air Force One particularly gave her career currency that still benefits her today.

Other roles include acting opposite Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man and Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Sixth Day.

But it's in Canada that she's enjoyed the most acclaim. She's won two Geminis -- the first for a guest part on Due South in 1998 and then, a year later, for At the End of the Day: The Sue Rodriguez Story, in which she played a victim of Lou Gehrig's disease, who battled for the right to die.

Crewson has since become involved with fund-raising and is patron of the Calgary-based Betty's Run for ALS.

"It's been an interesting trip," she says of her involvement with the ALS community. "You don't go into a role thinking it will mean something lifelong, but that was the lucky part of it."

Wendy Crewson

Canadian Wendy Crewson has an impressive list of film and television roles to her credit. Recently, she reprised her role as Tim Allen's wife in The Santa Clause 2. She has also appeared with Sophia Loren in Between Strangers, Arnold Schwarzenegger in On The Sixth Day, Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man, Harrison Ford in What Lies Beneath and Air Force One, the late Tupac Shakur and James Belushi in Gang Related, Tim Allen in The Santa Clause and Michelle Pfeiffer and Peter Gallagher in To Gillian On Her 37th Birthday. Wendy also starred in and was one of the executive producers of Suddenly Naked. The film, which was directed by Anne Wheeler, screened at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival and at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival.

Crewson has also produced a series of television movies entitled Criminal Instinct: The Joanna Kilbourne Mysteries where she plays the lead role opposite Victor Garber. Her other recent television appearances include The Beast, From Earth to the Moon, directed by Sally Field, Hard Copy, Robert Altman's Tanner'88, The Piano Man's Daughter and The Last Brickmaker in America opposite Sidney Poitier.

One of Crewson's most extraordinary performances was her Gemini Award-winning portrayal in At The End of the Day: The Sue Rodriguez Story. Her television career has earned her an ACTRA Best Actress Award for Home Fires and nominations for I'll Never Get to Heaven, Getting Married in Buffalo Jump and The War Brides.

After reading the script for The Many Trials of One Jane Doe, Crewson spent a lot of time with the real Jane Doe and was surprised to learn she was completely different than what she'd imagined.

"I was struck by her intelligence. In the script, we see her as a character with this incredibly driven personality, but in real life she's so much more complex. My job in this film was to marry these two personalities and make a character people could understand."

Crewson had never worked with The Many Trials of One Jane Doe Director Jerry Ciccoritti before but had only praise for his work. "This has been one of the best working experiences of my career! Jerry is such a brilliant storyteller. He's never willing to let a scene ride by. To him, nothing lacks significance and he's always willing to try something different."

Crewson and her husband Michael Murphy recently moved from San Francisco to Toronto with their two children, Maggie and Jack.

FROM VICTIM TO FIGHTER
How one woman prevailed over the Toronto police

PATRICIA HLUCHY

ON AUG. 24, 1986, an arts administrator was sleeping in her second-floor Toronto apartment when a man broke in through the locked balcony door and raped her at knifepoint. "Jane Doe," then in her early 30s, became the fifth victim of the so-called Balcony Rapist. Six weeks later, police arrested Paul Douglas Callow, who was later sentenced to 20 years. But Doe's story continues from there. Convinced that police were reckless in failing to warn women about the rapist in their part of town, and that an underlying sexism led them to essentially use her and others as bait, she launched a $1.2-million negligence and discrimination lawsuit. Twelve years after the rape, city police were found to have been "grossly negligent" and ordered to pay her $220,000 in damages.

It's an amazing tale, one that was intensely covered by the media. But the taut, riveting TV movie The Many Trials of One Jane Doe brings it to life in a way the headlines and sound bites never could. The drama, airing on CBC on Jan. 20 at 8 p.m., is devastating, largely because of actress Wendy Crewson. She brings ferocious spirit and intelligence to the role of Jane, who's deeply traumatized by the crime but channels her anguish and anger into a crusade for justice -- not just for her, but for all females who are sexually assaulted. So, yes, The Many Trials of One Jane Doe is a quintessential women's movie. But it has a broader resonance: it shows how one incredibly tenacious human being can begin to change the seemingly unchangeable -- in this case, Toronto police protocols for dealing with sexual assault.

The drama opens with Jane calling police once her attacker has fled. A frantically paced segment depicts the violation that follows the crime: Jane's interrogation by aggressive, utterly insensitive cops. Days later she learns that she's the victim of a serial rapist striking only in the neighbourhood; when she threatens to warn local women about the criminal, a detective warns her she'll be arrested. She gets the word out anyway.

What follows is a legal drama which writer Karen Walton (Ginger Snaps), director Jerry Ciccoritti (Trudeau) and producer Bernard Zukerman (Savage Messiah) deftly punctuate with vignettes of Jane's personal and emotional life. As she becomes increasingly adamant that the police failure to "serve and protect" her represents a "systemic" problem, she becomes obsessive in her struggle to change the system, alienating people who want to help, including close friends.

Jane's crusade demonstrates that women who are raped don't have to be frozen in victimhood. "All the systems that come into play when you are raped encourage you to be passive, to let the good men fix what the bad man has done to you," Doe said in a telephone interview. "The stereotype of the raped woman is that she's so broken and traumatized she can't make intelligent decisions, she's not an agent. The battle is to have a voice, to be involved." Doe continues to assert her voice. In April, Random House will publish The Story of Jane Doe, which details her experience of rape and the legal system. And she continues to advocate for improvements in the way the Toronto police handle rape investigations. "One of the big tragedies I've experienced is that change hasn't taken place," she says. "But I've grown a lot in my work as Jane Doe -- even though it came to be through a horrific experience."

Playin' Jane

Friday, April 26, 2002
By PAT ST. GERMAIN
Winnipeg Sun

A couple of decades in sunny California gave actor Wendy Crewson a case of temporary weather amnesia. A few days in Winnipeg provided the cure during shooting on the CBC-TV movie The Many Trials of One Jane Doe.

Ah yes, springtime. Snow flurries, wind chill -- it all comes back.

"Oh wait, it's Winnipeg. I forgot," Crewson laughs during a break in her trailer at the St. Mary's Road movie set, a civic office decked out as a courtroom.

"My birthday's May 9 and I remember my dad out shoveling the driveway so the little girls could walk up the driveway and come to my birthday party."

Not that the Hamilton-born actor doesn't harbour warm memories of the city where she spent her teens. She brought high school year books for her first return visit since she moved to Montreal in the '70s, and she intended to cruise old haunts on her day off yesterday.

"I'm going to go back to Westwood Collegiate -- I have to go and look at the old school. Because really it was in Winnipeg that I started doing plays. We did The Wizard of Oz in ninth grade and in 10th grade when I went to high school we did The Boy Friend and I had a big part in that," she says.

"And it was like really the beginning of the end of my life, I was so taken with it. And Westwood did great musicals -- I hear they still do."

Jane Doe, a biopic based on Toronto's Balcony Rapist case, has kept her intensely busy, but before shooting wraps Monday, Crewson, 45, also wants to visit her former home on Frost Avenue and take a few pictures for her mother, who now lives in Guelph, Ont.

Crewson's the star of the CTV's Toronto-made Joanne Kilbourn mystery movie series, and her list of movie credits spans more than 20 years. It includes playing spouse to both Harrison Ford (Air Force One) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Sixth Day) and earning a Gemini Award for the title role in CBC biopic At the End of the Day: The Sue Rodriguez Story.

She and real-life husband Michael Murphy co-starred in 1998 CBC movie Sleeping Dogs Lie, in which their kids Jack and Maggie played orphans. After splitting their time between San Francisco and Canada for several years, the family moved to Toronto last summer, when Crewson shot upcoming drama Between Strangers, with Sophia Loren.

As for Jane Doe, she's jazzed about working with director Jerry Ciccoritti, who helmed the highly stylized CBC mini-series Trudeau.

The Many Trials of One Jane Doe traces a long legal battle with Toronto police. After she was raped in her home in 1986, Jane Doe sued the force, contending cops used women as bait to try to catch a serial rapist in the act.

Crewson says the real Jane Doe, who fit the rapist's victim profile, met with her several times and generously shared details of the ordeal and her motivations for pursuing the case.

"She was a very involved adult. She did a lot of volunteerism, there was a lot of social work in her life. She did it because it was the right thing to do as a responsible citizen."

Winnipegger Sarah Constible (Inertia) plays a lawyer in the movie, as do British actors Steven Mackintosh -- a familiar face from Insp. Morse and Poirot mysteries, the Guy Ritchie feature Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and recent period drama Lady Audley's Secret -- and Gary Lewis, who played the father in Billy Elliott.

"And how lucky for us because they're both fabulous actors," Crewson says.

Producer Bernard Zukerman (Conspiracy of Silence, Million Dollar Babies) says the movie co-produced by Winnipeg's Kim Todd (Original Pictures) also has a British co-producer. Under a funding agreement, 20% of the budget must be spent in England and in this case, much of that portion went to luring top-notch actors to the project.

Zukerman, whose upcoming CTV drama The Investigation is about the Clifford Olsen child-killer case, hasn't shot a movie in Winnipeg until now. But he does have a history with the city.

He got his first full-time broadcast job here in 1975, making documentaries for CBC-TV news before returning to Toronto to work on The Fifth Estate the same year.

And if April showers only bring May flurries, Zukerman doesn't mind. He needed only one warm, sunny day during the Jane Doe shoot and by chance, he got it.

Ah, yes, we remember it well.