Paul Gross

Biography

To many people, Paul Gross is Constable Benton Fraser, the principled Mountie who, along with detective Ray Vecchio, helped bring peace to the streets of Chicago in the CBC/CTV television series due SOUTH.
The oldest of two brothers, Paul was born in Calgary, Alberta, but has lived all over the world, the consequence of being an Army brat. His father, Bob Gross, was a Tank Commander in the Canadian Army. Every 18 months the family moved around: from Canada to England to Germany and the U.S. and then back to Canada. In was in his early teens while in Washington that he was introduced to acting, doing plays such as Canturbery Tales and Faustus. At age 14, he was doing TV commercials. Another move ended up with the Gross family in Toronto, and Paul graduated from the Earl Haig Secondary School.

There were problems with constantly joining new schools and having to make new friends. Paul admits that he did fall in with the 'wrong people' for a while. However, he did quite well at school. The continuation of TV commercials enabled him to pay for higher education. He studied acting at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and graudated with a degree in Drama.

When Paul was 15 years old, he was given an Opportunities for Students grant that paid for a summer at the Stratford box office, where he was very impressed by what he witnessed. He vigorously pursued Canadian regional theatre and began writing. One of his models was the U.S. playwright Sam Shepard, and the darkness showed in his early works. What also showed was his facination with father/son relationships. His first play, The Deer and the Antelope Play, won the Clifford E. Lee National Playwriting Award and the Alberta Cultural Playwriting Award. This was not a one-time occurrence, for his second play, The Dead of Winter, did exceptionally well at the Toronto Free Theatre.

He was then invited by artistic director John Neville to be the playwright- in-residence at the prestigious Stratford Festival, where his play Sprung Rhythm (about a delusional heart surgeon), was produced in co-operation with the Toronto Free Theatre. He held the same position, under artistic director Robin Phillips, at the Grand Theatre Company in London, Ontario. Paul's other play, Thunder, Perfect Mind, a 'sci-fi multi-media rock extravaganza', was produced by the Toronto Free Theatre and ran for a year at Toronto's McLaughlin Planetarium.

His writing skills soon extended to television. He earned a 1986 Gemini nomination for Best TV Drama for his screenplay of "In This Corner," an episode of the CBC series For the Record. He also penned the critically acclaimed CBC drama Gross Misconduct about the life of hockey player Brian Spencer (which starred former Due South co-star Daniel Kash).

Paul's film and television appearances have been numerous, and his characters just as varied. He has run the gamut: from quiet farm hands (Getting Married in Buffalo Jump) to dead rock stars (Whale Music), as well as a skeptical minister in Buried on Sunday. His television appearances have been just as diverse. He appeared in the Kirk Douglas role in CBS's remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, as a yuppie in the hilarious Canadian handyman show, Red Green, and has appeared in two miniseries (Chasing Rainbows (an 18-month shoot which he equated to a 'prison sentence') and Tales of the City).

Besides film and television, Paul has earned accolades for his stage performances. He won a Dora Award for Best Performance in the title role of Romeo and Juliet (1985) and a Dora Award for Best Performance for his role in the 1988 North American premiere of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the Somme.