Henry Ramer
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Henry Conrad Ramer (April 29, 1924 – August 11, 2009) was a Canadian actor.[1] He was most noted for his supporting performance as Jerry Dingleman in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,[2] for which he received an ACTRA Award nomination for Best Film Actor at the 4th ACTRA Awards in 1975.[3]
Born in Chernivtsi (Romanian: Cernăuți) when it was still Romanian territory, he moved with his family to Montreal, Quebec, in childhood.[1] He made his acting debut as a teenager in a stage production of The Cherry Orchard.[1] He attempted to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II, but after being turned down he devoted himself more actively to acting, and was soon hired as a staff announcer and radio actor for CBC Radio.[1]
In 1951, he made his first film appearance in The Butler's Night Off, a film which also marked the debut of William Shatner. He frequently appeared in CBC Television drama anthologies through the 1950s and 1960s, and frequently did voice-over roles in animation, television commercials and narration.[4] Despite not actually being a fluent speaker of the French language, he was also skilled enough in phonetically reading French-language dialogue in a native-sounding accent that he was frequently given French dubbing roles.[4] He also continued to have stage roles, most notably as Tiger Brown in a 1972 production of The Threepenny Opera at the Stratford Festival alongside Jack Creley, Anton Rodgers and Lila Kedrova.[5]
In addition to his ACTRA nomination for Duddy Kravitz, he also received nominations for Best Television Actor at the 2nd ACTRA Awards in 1973 for Here Come the Seventies,[6] and Best Radio Actor at the 9th ACTRA Awards in 1980 for Grasshopper Hill.[7]