Bruno Santos Gerussi (7 May 1928[1] – 21 November 1995)[2] was a Canadian stage and television actor, best known for the lead role in the CBC Television series The Beachcombers from 1972 to 1990. He also performed onstage at the Stratford Festival, worked in radio, and hosted Celebrity Cooks, a daily cooking/variety show, on CBC from 1975 to 1979 then on the Global Television Network from 1980 to 1987.
Early life and education
Gerussi was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, as the eldest son of Enrico Gerussi, a coal miner working in Lethbridge, who had trained in Italy as a stonemason, and his wife Teresina Lazzorotto. The two married in 1927 and moved to Medicine Hat. The family subsequently moved to Exshaw, where Enrico worked as a sectionman on the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Bruno Gerussi grew up in Exshaw and later moved with his family to New Westminster, British Columbia. He attended the Banff School of Fine Arts on a scholarship.[3] Bruno was just 22 when his father committed suicide by hanging himself in the woods behind the provincial mental hospital at Essondale.[4]
In 1954, Gerussi joined the Stratford Festival in its second season.[6][7] During the next few years he went on to act in many stage productions in Canada and the United States, including performing the role of Feste in Twelfth Night, which he later reprised on CBC Television in 1964, and as Romeo opposite Julie Harris in the Stratford Festival's first production of Romeo and Juliet in 1960.[5][8][9]
His wife Ida died in 1965. As a single parent raising two children, Gerussi was less able to travel for work and so he joined CHIN radio as its morning man hosting Gerussi, Words and Music for four hours a day from 6 to 10 AM. After the show began in January 1967, the Toronto Daily Star's Barbara Frum reported that the show had no listeners for the first two-and-a-half hours of its premiere.[10] The show became popular, however, and in the fall of 1967, CBC Radio gave him a national daily morning show, Gerussi!,[11] which aired until 1971 and became the model for the network's This Country in the Morning and Morningside in the 1970s and 1980s.[5]
The Beachcombers years
Gerussi's best-known role arrived in 1972, when he was signed to play Nick Adonidas in The Beachcombers, a comedy-adventure-drama created by Marc and Susan Strange and set on the west coast of Canada.[12]The Beachcombers ran for 387 episodes between 1972 and 1990 and remains Canada's longest-running weekly dramatic series.[3]
During part of his time with The Beachcombers, Gerussi hosted the CBC cooking program Celebrity Cooks in the late 1970s and most of the 1980s.[13] The series filmed for 12 seasons, with a Monday-to-Friday time slot for most of those years and Gerussi hosted 478 episodes before the show's last season in production, 1987. The Celebrity Cooks episode featured the last public appearance of actor Bob Crane of Hogan's Heroes fame, who was murdered soon afterwards. The taping of Crane's episode was dramatized in the 2002 film Auto Focus, in which actor John Kapelos portrayed Gerussi.
Gerussi's appearances in Celebrity Cooks led him to become commercial spokesperson for a line of microwave ovens in the late-1970s/early-1980s. He appeared in commercials for a variety of food products.
He was the host of the first Genie Awards broadcast in 1980.
After The Beachcombers
On 21 November 1995, Bruno Gerussi died of a heart attack in Vancouver at the home of his companion, Judge Nancy Morrison.[14]
The TV movie The New Beachcombers (2002), was dedicated in his memory. A new series was broadcast from 2002 to 2004.[15]
Awards and recognition
Gerussi received a Gemini Award nomination for Best Performance by a Lead Actor in a Continuing Dramatic Role in 1990 for the final season of The Beachcombers.
He won the Geminis' Earle Grey Award posthumously for lifetime achievement in 1996. His children Rico and Tina accepted it on his behalf.
Personal life
Gerussi was married to Ida Edith Trento Gerussi. After she died in 1965, he left Stratford and raised their two children, then 13 and 10 years old, as a single parent.[5]
Both of Gerussi's children went on to work in film and television. His daughter, Tina Gerussi, is a casting director.[16] His son, Rico Gerussi, is an assistant director as well as a lead guitarist/vocalist in R&B band The Raging Butanes in Toronto.[17] He died at the age of 67 of an apparent heart attack.[5]
Filmography
1953 "Herring Hunt" as
1962 Alexander Galt: The Stubborn Idealist (movie) as
