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Potter, Miles

CTE photo
Miles Potter

Actor/director who has worked at many of the major venues in Canada for the past 35 years.

At the beginning of his career, he worked at Theatre Passe Muraille, involved in the collective creation of works such as The Farm Show and The Donnellys), Toronto Free Theatre, and Tarragon Theatre.

He acted for three seasons at the Stratford Festival (Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Flavius in his Timon of Athens, and in the world premiere of Elliott Hayes' Homeward Bound among others).

As a director he helmed over forty productions. He was Artistic Director of the Belfry Theatre (1984-86), and has directed at the Blyth Festival, the National Theatre School of Canada, Manitoba Theatre Centre (seventeen productions), Centaur Theatre, Theatre Calgary, Bastion Theatre and Alberta Theatre Projects. In 1999, his 1997 production, for Centaur, of Picasso at the Lapin Agile won a Masque Award for best English-language production.

In 1999 Miles Potter directed a work at Passe Muraille which alludes to the creative process around The Farm Show--The Drawer Boy (Dora Mavor Moore Award); and the Bard on the Beach production of Measure for Measure . In 2000 he directed the production of A Streetcar Named Desire at MTC and Medea at Stratford. In 2007 he directed a popular production of The Taming of the Shrew for Bard on the Beach (Jessie Richardson Award), and then returned to Stratford to direct Shakespeare's Will by Vern Thiessen. In 2013, he directed The Three Muskateers at Stratford; and in 2018, he directed Long Day's Journey Into Night.

For Blyth Festival, he directed the new play, Innocence Lost by Beverley Cooper, about the Steven Truscott case (2008), and Cooper's If Truth Be Told (2016). He has also directed The New Canadian Curling Club by Mark Crawford in 2018, a sold-out success, which is slated for Alberta Theatre Projects' 2018/19 season. For ATP, he directed the premiere of 1979 by Michael Healey in April 2017.

He has been guest director and teacher at the National Theatre School of Canada, George Brown College, Humber College, Dalhousie University, the University of Ottawa and the University of Missouri.

He is married to actor Seana McKenna and they have one son, Callan Potter, an actor.

Profile by Anne Nothof, Athabasca University

Last updated 2021-07-30