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Toronto Star Star Week A car crash left CFL great Terry Evanshen with brain damage, but his wife and three daughters never gave up fighting to get back the man they knew and loved… Bv JIM BAWDEN We first spot the car hurtling down a tree-lined country lane until it roars out of view. Then we hear (but do not see) the sickening crash. The car is spotted completely upturned but its wheels are still spinning. The camera moves in and we see a mangled male body in the field. It is football great Terry Evanshen and he is comatose and near death. That's the starkly dramatic beginning of CTV's new TV movie The Man Who Lost Himself: The Terry Evanshen Story. It stars David James Elliott {JAG} as Evanshen. Wendy |
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Crewson as wife Lorraine and Katie Boland, Tatum Knight and Clare Stone .as daughters Tracey, Jennifer and Tara. There's taut direction from Helen Shaver (Judging Amy) and the Grade-A script - based on the book by June Callwood - is by Suzette Couture (Jesus). The TV movie will also air later this month in the U.S. under the melodramatic title The Stranger I Married.
The scene quickly 'shifts to the hospital emergency ward: Evanshen is barely alive, breathing through a ventilator, in a deep coma When Lorraine finally gets there all she sees is this shattered hulk - only his superb physical condition keeps him going; As days turn into weeks she is warned he may never leave his comatose state. "See, it's all true:' Elliott told me when I went on the set in, July. The accident occurred in 1988. "That's why I grabbed it,. what an acting challenge. Every step Terry took is documented. For him to have come back from this - it demands everything from an actor!' In some early scenes Elliott must play almost every |
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emotion using only his eyes and he keeps us watching through a roller-coaster sweep of triumphs and tragedies.
But Crewson says, "I read the script and approached it as basically a love story. I met Lorraine and got from her all incredible toughness. I don't mean hardness, it's determination. This was her life, too, her dreams that got shattered. And she was going to fight for the entire family including their three girls. It’s her story just as much as Terry's."
The day I travelled to the Cambridge farm where exteriors were being shot, the real life Evanshen family came to meet the fictional Evanshen family, to share lunch and talk about how the project was going. The real Terry passed around picnic baskets of strawberries he had just picked, the first of the season. Standing side by side the two Terrys shared only one attribute: both are devilishly handsome. The real Terry is pocket sized, five feet seven inches. The fictional big guy, alias Elliott, is truly of Hollywood proportions at six feet four inches.
"If I'd been that big maybe I'd be a TV star" joked the real Terry. "But I like this guy, and David is doing a fine job. Ifs just very strange seeing somebody else be you, very strange."
During the lunch break I told Crewson I'd first spotted the Evanshens when Terry was playing for the Hamilton Tiger Cats and after he'd signed, the footballer and his unbelievably gorgeous blonde wife paraded down King Street for crowds to look at them and applaud. Lorraine then chuckled, as the twosome actually weren't talking to each other that day, which is why they seemed so regal, so aloof. "
Crewson said she very definitely did not want to sport a blonde wig to impersonate Lorraine (she turned down a part on Once and Again because it required her to be peroxided ).
"I wanted to capture her essence. They were high school sweethearts; in fact they met when she was 12. Her steely will is something else. The experts said he'd remain in a coma. She begged to disagree most vocally."
In fact, I first met Terry in April, 2001, when CTV aired a documentary based on Callwood's terrific biography, which forms the material for Couture's script, too. CTV's version was called A Life Forgotten and looked at the events of July 5, 1988, when Evanshen was hit by a van which ran a red light and smashed into his car. If he'd been in the car ahead of him, he would have suffered minor cuts.
Instead, doctors found 14 broken ribs, a collapsed lung, perforated diaphragm, damaged spleen (which had to be removed), bruised kidney, right arm swollen to four times its size. TV sportscasters prematurely delivered obits of the nearly late great.
"I should have died that night," Evanshen told me." But I didn't. Why? I think I'll always be asking that question."
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It took six weeks and a half dozen operations for physicians to repair all the physical damage. But the brain concussion was something else: the brain had smashed repeatedly against the skull causing massive internal bleeding. When Evanshen finally opened his eyes he had lost this entire memory. It was strange he still knew how to drive, but basic language skills had vanished. "The doctors said my wife was coming to see me but I didn't know |
what a wife was. I didn't know my daughters. Who were these strangers? I talked garbled. I cried, I raged. Where was the rest of me?"
Evanshen had to be taught almost everything all over again: Speech, how to walk, how to put on his pants. And as he says, also how to love. Asked who taught him that he simply said, "My wife Lorraine" This childhood sweetheart was not going to back down until She had her husband back and she prodded experts, challenged prevailing opinion.
"I asked myself if that happened to my husband could I do what Lorraine has done" Crewson says. "I sincerely hope so but I don't know that. Lorraine reached deep inside herself. She was pulling for the entire family."
Screenwriter Couture says, "I knew it was a wonderful story of fighting back. But it is difficult to dramatize because so much of Terry's fight is interior, against his own demons. We needed a really big name and David was our only logical choice. He's exactly the age Terry was, he's a huge TV star and he convinces he could have been a big football player."
"Did Suzette also say he's completely cute?" Shaver asks. "It's a hard shoot for him because he's in every scene but he always arrives completely prepared and has some great ideas of his own to make a scene better. I just like looking at him, he can run up and down this hill all day long and I won't get bored. I don't see it as a football story those scenes are incidental. To me it's a test of survival not for one but two people. I mean a lot of couples split over stuff that seems minor compared to this."
Shaver is one of the heroines of the independent Canadian movie scene: she's made such distinctive ones as In Praise of Older Women and Who Has Seen The Wind. But she says the last time she acted was as the transgendered professor in the Richard Dreyfuss series The Education of Max Bickford. Last season she executive produced Judging Amy and this season is booked as director for such prestigious LA based series as Close To Home, Medium, CSI:NY and What About Brian?'
With her directorial dance card so full why bother this one? Well, it turns out Shaver is on a rather personal crusade to reorient Canadian films. She says the only way to compete with glossy U.S. fare is "to emphasize intimate stories that reach out and touch the audience. To be the best at these personal stories which we do better than almost anybody else. To be ourselves: that’s it."
After nine seasons on CBS's JAG, Elliott says "It just felt like the time to move on" That move could mean major movies, but Elliott says he hates separating himself from his young family. "We have a two-year-old and he was all over me when I went home for the weekend A movie might take me away for months."
Born in Scarborough, the 45-year-old says he never thought about acting but after studying King Lear in class was told by a teacher he had potential. Signed for Ryerson Theatre School (he sang."Zip-A-Dee- Doo"Dah" at the audition) he blossomed and was taken on at the Stratford Festival for two seasons. In 1985 he co-starred on CBC's Street Legal as Sonja Smits' younger lover and moved to LA in 1990.
He remembers a CBC casting director's advice: "Sure! Go! Then when you flop and return with your tail between your legs I can hire you at half price." Instead he's now one of US. TV's most marketable names. After guesting on Seinfeld and Melrose Place he wound up on JAG and huge TV stardom. People magazine voted him one of the Top 50 Sexiest People.
For Elliott, coming home "is a great feeling, I knew it had to be in something of quality. I think we've got it here. It's a story that is breathtaking. It also let me pretend I could play in the CFL with cheering crowds, the works."
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