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Don Hannah
writer
RITA HOWELL POSTCARD GALLERY
Rita Howell 1931 - 2019
Rita Marie Howell was born 95 years ago Oct. 6th 2026; she died on Dec. 16, 2019. Covid upended plans for a memorial the next spring.
But it’s never too late to remember.
This memorial was originally a series of 95 (including duplicates) postcards made from Rita’s collection of publicity stills and headshots; they date from a 1958 Off Broadway Cole Porter Revue to Stratford’s Medea in 2000 and were mailed out to old friends and colleagues. Among the photographers whose work was used are Louis Claes, Michael Cooper, Michael Drummond, Ludvik Dittrich, Tony Hauser, Peter Smith and Photo Features Limited.
Rita grew up in Hartford Connecticut; she studied art at the Cranbrook Academy then moved to New York City where she worked in industrial design, studied voice and acting (Uta Hagen Studio), and ended up onstage in Little Mary Sunshine. According to the New Yorker, “Rita Howell managed, by sheer exertion of comic talent, to make a fair part for herself out of such unpromising lines as ‘Look, here they come now.’”
But, you’ve got to hand it to Little Mary Sunshine, it brought Rita to Canada.
In 1962 she was at Stratford with her good friend Martha Henry and through Martha she met the great love of her life, Marianne Bohdanetsky. For nearly 50 years Rita acted in revues, musicals, contemporary plays and classical drama, as well as film and television. She taught Alexander Technique from Florida to Nebraska to Halifax. John Wood brought her to Neptune in the mid 1970s and she would work with him across the country and throughout her career. In addition to various nuns, gypsies, soubrettes, matriarchs, courtesans, spinsters, queens and housewives, Rita has been Amanda Wingfield, Edith Piaf, L.M. Montgomery, Medea’s Nurse, a Weird Sister, Mama Rose, Big Mama, and Miss Daisy.
Rita and Marianne bought a little house in Port Medway NS in 1988 and were beloved for their dinner parties and their friendship. Rita was a magnificent cook, a fine gardener, and a talented painter of watercolours. A decade after she lost Marianne, she fell in love with June Blewett and the dinner parties continued. She once worked for a philatelist who taught her the felonious art of covering up postage marks, and forever after she steamed stamps from her mail, tidied them up with gouache, and reused them. She bought her dining room table secondhand in New York, took it apart, bundled up legs, leaves and all else with rope and carried it home on the plane as luggage. Rita was petite, she was an outlaw, and she was resourceful.
She enjoyed a glass of wine, even more a tumbler of tequila and a reefer. She was a wicked Scrabble player, a bawdy story teller, a generous host, a great actor, and a warm and kind friend, as her pals and neighbours in Port, who still miss her, can attest.
The Postcards
Click on image to enlarge
Many thanks to Ann Stuart, Bruce Blakemore, Niki Lipman, Seana McKenna, and, most specially, Monique and Len Michalik.
Rita’s watercolour, a gift to Jenny Munday during the run of Joanna M. Glass’ “If We Are Women” TNB