As a teen, she overcame shyness and a stutter by performing for childrenProvince: 2009 March 29
Carolyn Walters, who started her lifelong showbiz career at age 11 as "Canada's youngest ventriloquist," died at the age of 63 on Feb. 22.
Walters was born Carolyn Louise Blythe in the English working-class neighbourhood of Verdun in Montreal on Aug. 19, 1945, just after the end of the Second World War.
She was the first of five children and was a "desperately shy child, with a pronounced stutter," friend Kathleen Cross said in a eulogy at her memorial in Vancouver earlier this month.
When she was 11, she brought a hand puppet to "show and tell" at school and, while talking through the puppet in its voice, Walters told jokes without stuttering or even moving her lips and made her classmates laugh.
It wasn't long before she and her dummy, Sandy, started performing puppetry and ventriloquism with her father's amateur entertainment group, the Blue Sky Revue.
Sandy was the alter ego of the young Carolyn Blythe, the wisecracking, cynical, confident and funny person Walters became as an adult, Cross said.
By age 17, Walters was earning a living as the ventriloquist host of the CBC-TV show Sandy and Co., a gig that lasted three years and led to several other appearances on TV and radio, including the Juliette Show, Talent Caravan, Doubletalk, Tabloid and Montreal Matinee.
She and Peggy Austin later co-hosted TV's Cartoon Corner. She, along with Sandy, was also a regular on CBC's youth variety show Time of Your Life and also wrote for CTV's Hi Diddle Day show in Ottawa.
But she eventually suffered burnout as a child star and had difficulty moving beyond that persona, said Cross.
Walters was married briefly in her 20s and she and her husband had a son, Christopher Walters.
In the early 1970s, she performed as a puppeteer with the Waterville Gang, a weekly CTV show, before founding the Wobble, Lump and Squeak Theatre in Toronto, a rod-puppet company for children.
She later worked in film animation and other entertainment projects and as the production manager for the 1993 Steven Spielberg/Tim Burton film The Family Dog.
"Her whole life was devoted to expressing that childlike wonder at the world and delight in the humourous, the wacky, the downright cheeky," said Cross.
During her working years, "she worked like a maniac and then there would be times when I'm not sure what she lived on," recalled former partner Lynnie Johnston.
In 1995, while living in Toronto, Walters was diagnosed with terminal cancer at age 50 and given 18 months to live.
As testament of her friends' devotion to her, they found her a new apartment and moved her into it while she was in hospital after it was determined her loft was unsuitable for her convalescence.
Despite the early death prediction, Walters lived another 13 years.
After moving to the West Coast, she took up ocean kayaking and "extreme" knitting (knitting together multiple strands of yarn using oversized needles) and she and partner Ida Dennekamp made a short film called The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree that was screened at gay and lesbian film festivals in Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa.
In 2005, she celebrated her decade of living with terminal cancer with a party called "10 years past expiration" and a kayaking trip with several friends to Mexico.
Walters was predeceased by her mother. She leaves her son, father and four siblings.
slazaruk@theprovince.com
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