If the content you are seeing is presented as unstyled HTML your browser is an older version that cannot support cascading style sheets. If you wish to upgrade your browser you may download Mozilla or Internet Explorer for Windows.

Cadeau, Lally

Lally Cadea
Lally Cadea

Accomplished character actor born in Burlington, Ontario in 1948. She first studied acting at the Loretto Academy in Hamilton. Since her acting debut at age ten in community theatre, she has had a distinguished career in film, radio, television and on the stage. ACTRA named her best newcomer in 1981. She is perhaps best known for her performance as Janet King in CBC's Road to Avonlea.

She began a professional acting career in 1974 at the Arts Club Theatre, where she played Helene in a translation of Michel Tremblay's En pieces detachées (Broken Pieces). Since then, she has performed in most of the major theatre venues in Canada including twelve seasons at the Stratford Festival, where she played the lead in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1998), the title roles in Filumena and Juno and the Paycock (1997), Pride and Prejudice (1999), The Diary of Anne Frank (2000), The Seagull (2001), Ruth Draper on Tour (2005), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (2005). Other memorable performance include: Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, Of the Fields, Lately, Saturday, Sunday, Monday at Canadian Stage (Dora Mavor Moore Award); The Woman at the Shaw Festival; The Taming of the Shrew at Theatre New Brunswick and Pride and Prejudice at the Citadel Theatre (2008). She also performed in the New York production of John Krizanc's Tamara.

CTE photo
L.to R. Amanda LeBlanc and Lally Cadeau in Pride and Prejudice,Banff Centre for the Arts 2008.
Photo by Don Lee.

In 2006, she played the solo role in Rose by Martin Sherman, the story of an octogenarian Holocaust survivor, in the inaugural season for the Harold Green Jewish Theatre , winning a Dora Mavor Moore Award. She reprised the role ten years later. In 2017, she returned to Hamilton to perform in the Theatre Aquarius production of On a First Name Basis by Norm Foster.

Of her acting career, she has said: "I've learned over the years you can't criticize something you're in. You just have to go out there and do it. And the best performances you give are often ones when you walk offstage and have no idea of what you've done. You just know it felt good" (quoted from The Hamilton Spectator 19 Oct 2017).

She has two sons with Robin Weatherstone (d. 2018), and a daughter by another relationship. She lives in Stratford, where she has a landscape design business.

Profile by Gaetan Charlebois and Anne Nothof

Last updated 2020-09-01