Camille Mitchell seduces in Graduate

TOVA G. KORNFELD

To play the role of the world’s quintessential cougar is a daunting task, but Jewish community member Camille Mitchell relishes the challenge in the Arts Club production of The Graduate, now playing on the Granville Island stage.

The iconic 1967 film starring Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft and Kathleen Ross is ranked as the seventh-greatest film of all time on the American Film Industry’s Top 100 movies list. All three stars were nominated for Oscars in their respective categories and director Mike Nichols won for best director.

In 2000, Terry Johnson adapted the film for stage, with runs in London’s West End and on Broadway. The role of Mrs. Robinson has been played by many well-known actors, including Kathleen Turner, Morgan Fairchild, Jerry Hall and Linda Gray.

Meet Mrs. Robinson

Born in Los Angeles, Mitchell moved to Vancouver at the age of 10. She is the youngest child of actor Cameron Mitchell (Carousel, How to Marry a Millionaire, Death of a Salesman and The High Chaparral) and Johanna Mendel of the Saskatoon Mendel family, Jewish philanthropists who donated an art gallery to that city.

About her famous father, someone who acted with the likes of Clark Gable, James Cagney, Marlon Brando, Spencer Tracy and Marilyn Monroe, Mitchell said, “Even though my parents divorced when I was young and I lived with my mother, my father was always there to encourage and support me. Talk around the kitchen table was invariably about acting. I did not feel any pressure to live up to any standard but just to achieve my own goals. My mother also helped me. She studied acting in New York (where she met my father). She was brilliant with a script.”

Mitchell knew from an early age that she wanted to act.

“My grandfather, Fred Mendel, who owned one of the biggest meat-packing companies in the country, used to tell me that people will always need food and want to be entertained. He was in the food business. I decided to go into the other one,” she told the Independent.

Trained at the University of British Columbia and in England and France, Mitchell cultivated her acting career with seasons at the Shaw and Stratford festivals, and has been nominated for many awards in both theatre and television, winning a Jessie (Vancouver theatre award) for best supporting actress in The Tempest. She returns to the stage for The Graduate after an eight-year hiatus from the thespian world, although she has been very active in television, with recurring roles in Smallville, Poltergeist: The Legacy, Madison and Mysterious Ways.

Mitchell is both excited and nervous about playing the seductress Mrs. Robinson.

“I have to do this love scene with a 20-year-old boy,” she said. “I have a 19-year-old son, Charlie, who is coming to see the show tonight. I don’t know what he is going to think about his mom in bed with someone his age. I was a little nervous the first time I did the scene with Kayvon Khoskam, who plays Benjamin, but he was lovely and the director, Lois Anderson, was great. We did it as a closed rehearsal. It is not full nudity, like Kathleen Turner did on Broadway (people are not going to see me naked), but it is tastefully done while still honoring the original script. My husband is played by Jerry Wasserman (well-known local actor, theatre critic and head of the UBC theatre department). We worked together a long time ago and it is nice to be back on stage in Vancouver with people I know and care about.”

Asked to give her thoughts on the play and its relevance today, Mitchell said, “This show is not just the coming-of-age story of Benjamin graduating from school and moving from adolescence to manhood. All of the characters in the play are graduating from something in their lives. Take my character. She was a smart woman who had to drop out of university because she became pregnant and ended up a suburban, bored, lonely housewife – but she goes for what she wants, she does not tolerate foolishness. My sense of her is that, if she were living today, she would be running a company and be someone really fabulous. Although the story reflects the suburban-swimming-pooled world of the early sixties, it really is about how two families cope with changes in their lives.”

In addition to reengaging in theatre, Mitchell, who is a former governor of the National Theatre School and a founding board member of PAL Vancouver (a home for local retiring artists), has just finished her first term of documentary filmmaking at Capilano University. She hopes to expand her artistic repertoire into directing and on her “to do” list are documentaries about her father and her maternal grandfather.

The Graduate runs until May 14. For more information, visit artsclub.com or call 604-687-1644.

Tova G. Kornfeld is a Vancouver freelance writer and lawyer.

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