Spotlight

Karen Leblanc Gets Chills

Karen LeBlanc had been waiting for that really great part to come her way. And when she read for the role of Jude, the dying single mother in the dramatic Nurse.Fighter.Boy, she knew she had found it.

“You hear it over and over again from actors,” says LeBlanc on the line from her east-end Toronto home, “and finally I had the opportunity to say it — this is an amazing script, it’s so well written, so honest and I got chills reading it.”

LeBlanc gives a wonderfully subdued performance as a proud woman struggling to care for her 12-year-old son (Daniel J. Gordon), while falling in love for one last time with a sombre street fighter (Clark Johnson) in director Charles Officer’s debut feature film.

For Leblanc, who grew up in Tottenham, Ontario, dreaming of being a singer (“we used to sing on the streets, scream at the top of our lungs our favourite rock ’n’ roll songs”), acting was an afterthought.

But after graduating from Sheridan College’s musical theatre program, acting began to eclipse her work as a singer, and the woman who has sung back-up for Glass Tiger and performed as Tina Turner in a revue show has now made acting her first priority.

“My agent said to me, ‘Karen, you could actually put your Tina Turner stuff away for 10 years and still come back and do your Tina.’ And that’s fine,” says LeBlanc. “I finished shooting a feature called Dolan’s Cadillac, where I don’t have any lines. I’m playing this gun-toting bodyguard for Christian Slater. She’s a silent, afro-wearing, tough-looking woman. I’ve been playing all these women of strength lately, it’s  amazing and I love it.”