When it comes to what kind of life she’d lead, Jennifer Wigmore never really had a choice. As the daughter of Ron Wigmore — the first manager of the Jubilee Auditorium, and a founder of Walterdale Theatre — she wandered the hallowed halls of the city’s marquee theatres before ever setting foot on stage.
“The Jubilee was kind of like my babysitter,” she says. “So I don’t think it was any surprise that I became an actor or an artist in all the ways that I am, and it’s totally my father’s fault.”
While she loved her theatrical upbringing, her artistic urges didn’t fully emerge until she enrolled in MacEwan University’s (then Grant MacEwan Community College’s) musical theatre program, which she calls “still one of the best. I spent two years there. And that’s where it all really began.”
Professionally, it all really began on the Citadel stage, where she played Marian Paroo in The Music Man, then Emily Webb in Our Town. She ended up “bouncing around” the country, to Vancouver and then Toronto, where she started a film and television career that would be the envy of any actor. But a closer look at her credits shows a gap where Wigmore’s 40s started — a depressingly common reality for women actors, but one she wouldn’t let bring her down.
“I had a casting session that went very sideways. I felt very disrespected, and my time was abused,” she says. “I just thought, is this what it’s going to be like? Because acting requires a lot of yourself, and if you’re upset and angry at the industry, or you feel like you’re not being seen, those things translate into your acting. So, I literally phoned my agent after that audition and said, ‘That’s it. I’m done.’ I cut all my hair off, let it go grey, and started painting.”
Wigmore earned her master’s in painting, and for almost 10 years pulled a “full Joni Mitchell,” creating award-winning portraits of people like Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent (and the actual Joni Mitchell). But a fortuitous meeting between her and Canadian playwright Salvatore Antonio, who asked her to read his script, brought her back to the stage in 2018, for his play Sheets.
“It changed my life in every conceivable way,” she says. “I remembered what I missed so much about acting and what it gave me.” A year later, she had a new agent, “and I said I’m not going to dye my hair. I don’t do Botox. And sure enough, [my career] has been pretty great, and I feel pretty grateful that the world has changed a little.”
The world changed a little more a couple years after Wigmore’s return, when the #MeToo movement began. With her own audition experience still in mind, Wigmore got involved with the grassroots, female-identifying group Got Your Back, where she heard the casting-couch and acting-class stories of other women. “And it became very clear that there was very little training for acting coaches and educators, and really no oversight of them whatsoever, because there’s no organization that was providing minimum standards, or just basic best practices for what anyone can expect from an acting teacher.”
In response, Wigmore co-created the Association of Acting Coaches & Educators (AACE) and a code of conduct “that all acting educators can sign so that students know they are respect-based coaches and can expect an environment free of harassment, discrimination and bullying.”
Practically every other element of the industry has a similar association, Wigmore says (TAMAC for agents and managers, ACTRA for actors, CDC for casting directors, NVA for voice teachers). “But just because you’ve been acting on sets and theatres, doesn’t mean you actually know how to teach it. There are a lot of power dynamics involved in teaching that don’t really come into play when you’re acting. So, understanding the basics of power dynamics is a really important skill for teachers to learn.”
AACE provides community, courses and classes on ethical business practices and sector-specific training for acting teachers. Every other year, the association holds a two-day conference with workshops, classes, panels and lectures from guests and industry specialists. “Because there haven’t been many opportunities for those of us who like to teach acting to expand our skills, and find community and resources on how to become better teachers.”
Whether it’s casting directors wasting actors’ time, or teachers abusing their power, the problem is local to nowhere, Wigmore says, evidenced by the international response AACE has received in its less-than-three-year existence. “We have members in America and Australia and all across Canada,” she says, “and we’re about to open AACE U.K. So it’s growing every day as people start to learn what we’re doing and recognize the value of having some minimum standards to follow.”
With recent roles in the TV show Cross, and the 2023 film Dream Scenario (in which Nicolas Cage slammed her character’s hand in a door), Wigmore’s post-break career is at least as strong as the days before she went grey. The biggest difference is the work she’s doing to help young actors safely find their ways.
“To them, I would say: You are not alone, you are loved and I see you. And secondly, I would say: diversify. I think actors sometimes think acting is all they can do. And I disagree. Start painting, start writing, start directing, start teaching, start finding other avenues to express your artistic self. I think there are many things that you can do if you give yourself permission to do it.”
This article appears in the April 2025 issue of Edify
