Diana Frances | |
---|---|
Born | Diana Frances Clent |
Nationality | Canadian |
Alma mater | Douglas College |
Occupation(s) | Comedian, writer, business manager |
Website | dianafrances |
Diana Frances (born Diana Frances Clent) is a Canadian comedian, writer, and business manager. She has written and performed comedy for stage, television and radio for three decades, and served as the managing director of the Vancouver-based Rock Paper Scissors comedy collective. Her writing has been recognized with a Canadian Screen Award and a Writers Guild of Canada Award, and she has also been nominated for a Gemini Award and nine Canadian Comedy Awards.
Diana Frances Clent moved from Langley to Maple Ridge, British Columbia, when she was 13, after what she later described as a "rather traumatic family shake-up". [1] She was adopted [2] and lived with her aunt and uncle while attending Maple Ridge Secondary School. [1] She took drama courses and initially pursued dramatic Shakespearean acting, [3] but was repeatedly cast in comedic roles and was thrilled by the audience response. [1] She studied theatre at Douglas College. [3] As she entered the entertainment business, she dropped her surname which she felt sounded like "a cartoon sound effect". [1]
Frances joined the Vancouver Theatresports League, where she learned improvisational techniques. Her quick wit gained her a place in the Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) comedy collective. [3] In 1991, she replaced an actor in the RPS production A Twisted Christmas Carol, an improvisational play based around a framework of the Dickens classic. [4] She returned to be a part of every seasonal production of the play to 2005, and later relaunched the play in 2014 at the Arts Club. [5]
RPS attracted corporate clients and found steady work performing customized comedy for conferences and also offering workshops for employee relations. As managing director of RPS, Frances was named one of the "Forty Under 40" by Business in Vancouver magazine in 2003. [6] [3] Frances also performed with the Impolite Company (IMPCO) sketch collective, [7] Urban Improv [8] [9] and Canadian Content. [10]
In July 1997, Frances starred in the one-act musical comedy I'd Probably Be Famous. [11] She directed a production of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) in January 1998, [12] and staged a portion of the play as a song-and-dance number when she found that her actors could tap dance. [13] In 2001 and 2002, she performed with RPS in the improvised musical Blankety Blank: The Unknown Musical [14] and Design For Living . [15] In 2005, Frances began performing Leave it to Cleavage, an improv show she had developed with Ellie Harvie, in which their housewife characters provide 1950s-era solutions to modern problems posed by the audience. [16] [17] [18] They were recognized with a 2004 Canadian Comedy Award nomination for Best Improv Troupe. [19]
A demand for television programming came in the late 1990s with the launch of The Comedy Network, for which Frances wrote and starred in the sketch-comedy series Slightly Bent TV (1999) and Sucker Punch (2001–2002) [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] and wrote for the 2002 satirical newsmagazine Point Blank . [25] She wrote for CTV's Comedy Inc, [26] and co-produced and performed in a comedy tour in support of its fifth season. [1] She later wrote for This Hour Has 22 Minutes . [18] Frances was nominated for a Gemini Award for writing for The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos. [27] Frances later wrote for Corner Gas Animated , [28] which won her a 2020 Canadian Screen Award [29] and a nomination for a 2020 Writers Guild of Canada Award.[ citation needed ] She has also written for The Beaverton , Aunty B's House and Still Standing .[ citation needed ]
Frances has developed material for Vancouver and Victoria fringe festivals, [7] and is credited with bringing improvisational comedy to the Yukon after insisting on an improv segment at the 2003 Nakai comedy festival. Organizers and audiences were so impressed that Frances was booked for full improv shows the following years [25] and closed the 2007 festival with Leave it to Cleavage. [19]
In 2004, Frances wrote a CBC Radio documentary about women in comedy. [30] She has written and appeared on several episodes of The Debaters and Definitely Not the Opera , [31] contributed to the sketch comedy show The Irrelevant Show , and served as a relationship columnist with her feature Dating Diana. [32] Frances continues to write for The Debaters, which was a finalist for the 2024 New York Festivals Radio Awards. [33] [ relevant? ]
Frances performed with RPS on two tours for the Canadian Armed Forces: a one-month tour in 1997, visiting CFS Alert, Bosnia, Egypt, Israel, and CFB Goose Bay; [1] [34] and a nine-day tour of Afghanistan in 2003, performing at Camp Julien in Kabul [35] and nearby Camp Warehouse. [36]
In 2018, Frances began touring with Elvira Kurt and Friends [37] and Girls Nite Out. [38] In 2023, she performed six shows of Leave it to Cleavage at the Incanto Theatre in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with Second City alumni Karen Parker and Vancouver TheatreSports alumni Christine Lippa. [39] [ relevant? ]
Frances has written for a number of award shows in Canada, including the 2018 ACTRA Awards in Toronto show, hosted by Colin Mochrie, [40] and the 2019 and 2024 ACTRA Awards hosted by Martha Chaves.[ citation needed ] For 11 years, she has written the Banff World Media Festival Rockie Awards.[ citation needed ] She also wrote for the Just For Laughs Galas for 2017–2019.[ citation needed ] Frances has written for the Canadian Screen Awards in 2018[ citation needed ] and 2019, the latter of which earned her a Canadian Screen Award nomination. [41] and she has also written for The Directors Guild of Canada Awards (host Arisa Cox),[ citation needed ] and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.[ citation needed ]
Frances's first feature film script, The Burning Season, won Best Screenplay at the Whistler Film Festival and Canadian Film Festival [42] and at the Writers Guild of Canada Awards. [43]
Ryan Lee Stiles is an American-Canadian comedian and actor. His work is often associated with improvisational comedy. He is best known for his work on Whose Line Is It Anyway? and for his role as Lewis Kiniski on The Drew Carey Show. He also played Herb Melnick on the CBS comedy Two and a Half Men and was a performer on the show Drew Carey's Improv-A-Ganza.
Joy Nozomi Kogawa is a Canadian poet and novelist of Japanese descent.
Colin Andrew Mochrie is a Scottish-born Canadian actor, writer, producer and improvisational comedian, best known for his appearances on the British and American versions of the improvisational TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway?.
CIVT-DT is a television station in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, serving as the West Coast flagship of the CTV Television Network. It is owned and operated by network parent Bell Media alongside Victoria-based CTV 2 station CIVI-DT. CIVT-DT's studios are located at 969 Robson Street at the intersection of Robson Street and Burrard Street in downtown Vancouver, which also houses the British Columbia operations of the CTV network itself, including the CTV National News Vancouver bureau. The station's transmitter is located atop Mount Seymour in the district municipality of North Vancouver.
Paul Reginald Nelson, known by the stage name Paul Hyde, is a British-born Canadian singer-songwriter.
Where the Spirit Lives is a 1989 television film about Aboriginal children in Canada being taken from their tribes to attend residential schools for assimilation into majority culture. Written by Keith Ross Leckie and directed by Bruce Pittman, it aired on CBC Television on October 29, 1989. It was also shown in the United States on PBS on June 6, 1990, as part of the American Playhouse series and was screened at multiple film festivals in Canada and the United States.
Fletcher Markle was a Canadian actor, screenwriter, television producer and director. Markle began a radio career in Canada, then worked in radio, film and television in the United States.
James Douglas Genn is a Canadian film/TV writer, producer, and director born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1972.
Peter Wall is a Ukrainian-born Canadian businessman. He is a property developer in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, who, in the 1990s and 2000s, played a significant and controversial part in the city's real-estate boom. He has been described as "a leading contributor to Vancouver's 'City of Glass' reputation" during a period in which the city's skyline has been transformed, along with its economic and social profile. Rejecting the label "developer", Wall has stated that he "just make[s] some money investing in business ideas and projects".
Carmen Rodríguez is a Chilean-Canadian author, poet, educator, political social activist, and a founding member of Aquelarre Magazine. Along with her husband and daughters, she fled to Canada after the Chilean Coup of 1973 and where she now resides as a political refugee. Rodríguez is known for her unique approach to writing, publishing most of her work in both Spanish and English. The translations of Rodríguez's work are done by her alone, a trend not commonly followed among other multilingual authors. Rodríguez translates her work until "[she feels] that both tips of [her] tongue and [her] two sets of ears were satisfied with the final product.'" Rodríguez's major works are and a body to remember with, a collection of short stories, and Guerra Prolongada/Protracted War, a collection of poems in both English and Spanish
Alison Acheson is a Canadian writer of fiction for adults and children.
Peggy Thompson is a Canadian screenwriter, producer, playwright, and professor. She is known for her films The Lotus Eaters and Better Than Chocolate.
True North Calling is a Canadian documentary television series, which debuted on CBC Television on February 17, 2017. Produced by Proper Television, the six-part series profiles several young Canadians living in the Canadian Arctic territories of Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavut.
Jamillah Ross is a Canadian comedian, actress, and singer-songwriter. She trained through Toronto's The Second City and has performed in improvisation troupes and on stage, television and film. She was in the cast of Show Stopping Number which won a Canadian Comedy Award (CCA) for best improvisational troupe.
Desiree Lim is a Malaysian-born Canadian independent film director, producer, and screenwriter. She is known for her films Sugar Sweet (2001), Floored by Love (2005), and The House (2011). Lim tends to work within the realm of family drama and comedy, and highlights themes of lesbianism, multiculturalism, and body positivity. She now works in Canada and Japan.
Chapelle Jaffe is a Canadian film, television and stage actress. She is most noted for winning the Canadian Film Award for Best Actress in a Non-Feature at the 29th Canadian Film Awards in 1978 for the television film One Night Stand, and receiving a Genie Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the 3rd Genie Awards in 1982 for The Amateur.
"A Shakespearean Baseball Game", subtitled "A Comedy of Errors, Hits and Runs", is a sketch by the Canadian comedy duo Wayne and Shuster. First performed on television in 1958 and slightly revised in 1971 and 1977, the sketch depicts a fictional baseball game with the manager, players, and umpires all speaking in Shakespearean verse. The dialogue parodies lines from the plays Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Richard III while referencing modern baseball culture. It became Wayne and Shuster's signature sketch, and both its television and radio recordings have been preserved as significant works.
"Rinse the Blood Off My Toga" is a comedy sketch by the Canadian comedy duo Wayne and Shuster. First broadcast on The Wayne and Shuster Hour on CBC Radio in 1954, it was reenacted for their British television debut in 1957 and their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1958. The sketch recasts the Shakespearean historical tragedy as a detective story with gangster overtones. Set in the Roman Senate right after the assassination of Julius Caesar, the script has Brutus (Shuster) engaging the services of private eye Flavius Maximus (Wayne) to identify Caesar's assassin. Several lines from the sketch became popular catchphrases, including Flavius's order of a "martinus" in a Roman bar, and the repeated lament of Caesar's widow Calpurnia in a thick Bronx accent, "I told him, 'Julie, don't go!'" It is considered Wayne and Shuster's most famous sketch.
Aaron David Abrams is a former Canadian rugby union player. He played as a hooker and represented Canada internationally from 2003 to 2006. He was included in the Canadian squad for the 2003 Rugby World Cup and played in two group stage matches. Aaron finished that tournament as one of the try scorers for Canada.
Keiko Margaret Lyons was the first female vice president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). She is known for her role in the CBC's "Radio Revolution", a populist revamp of the CBC Radio network which resulted in programs such as Quirks and Quarks and As It Happens. Lyons was designated a Member of the Order of Canada in 2010 for her work in broadcasting.