Canadian actor Scott Hylands described himself as a “theatre rat.” He was proud of his season at Ontario’s famed Stratford Festival in 1981 and of his self-written Shakespeare-themed one-hander Lend Me Your Ears!, performed on B.C.’s Salt Spring Island in 2021.
So, it bothered him a little to be most associated with his role as the sinewy, skeptical crime-solving Det. Kevin (OB) O’Brien in the gritty Canadian cop drama Night Heat, a hit CBS-CTV collaboration that ran for 96 episodes on those networks from 1985 to 1989.
“I don’t want this role carved on my epitaph,” he told The Globe and Mail at the height of his stardom in 1987. Years later he acknowledged such associations were out of his hands. “It’s what happens,” he told The Victoria Times-Colonist in 2015, “when you’re in everyone’s living room every week.”
Scott Hylands Douglas, a ruggedly handsome and versatile stage and screen actor for more than five decades, died on July 29 in Victoria. He had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2021 and had defied the predictions of his oncologists by living to be 83.
The British Columbia-raised Mr. Hylands and Jeff Wincott co-starred on the police procedural as detectives working the graveyard shift in an anonymous northeastern North American city played by Toronto.
Night Heat earned Gemini Awards for Best Drama Series in 1986 and 1987 but was criticized by nationalists because it hid any on-screen evidence that it was shot in Canada’s biggest city. The CN Tower was missing from the skyline and the unusually clean streets were dirtied up with garbage to make them appear more American.
Mr. Hylands, a journeyman actor and an only child raised by a single mother, had no time for cultural purism.
“To hell with the culture and pride aspects,” he told TV Guide’s Bill Brioux. “What we’re dealing with here is heavy marketplace reality.”
The series with a Canadian cast and crew was co-created by American producer and former New York City Police Department detective Sonny Grosso. It drew more than one million viewers a week in Canada at its peak and was a late-night cult favourite in the United States.
In 1987, CBS even aired six episodes during prime time, making it the first Canadian drama series seen on a major U.S. network at those hours of the day since 1958. There was a lot riding on the success of the show − for Canadian producers and for actors trying to make a living in Toronto instead of heading to Hollywood.
“We’re trying to create a certain amount of credibility,” Mr. Hylands told The Globe at the time. “We’re living down an implication about Canadians.”
Night Heat cast members remember Mr. Hylands as an authentic person who had a quiet authority about him.
“There was nothing showbizzy about the production, and there was nothing showbizzy about him,” said Stevie Vallance, who played a detective. “Scott didn’t do anything outwardly, but he watched over the show silently. He was the glue.”
Stephen Mendel is six-foot-three, much taller than Mr. Hylands, not only a castmate but a close friend. During one photoshoot, he slouched slightly to lessen the height difference.
“Scott looked at me, elbowed me in the ribs and, using strong language, told me to stand up,” Mr. Mendel said. “He was a wonderfully physical man who had confidence in himself.”
During Mr. Hylands’s season at Stratford, The Globe and Mail’s Ray Conlogue described the actor in the role of the poet Oronte in Molière’s The Misanthrope: “He has a robust virility in his self-presentation, like a street fighter turned poet who will certainly flatten the nose of any detractor.”
He was born Feb. 27, 1943, in Lethbridge, Alta. His mother was Ruth Douglas (née White), a Prairie girl from Yellow Grass, Sask. The nurse (and later a math teacher) was described in the actor’s self-published memoir, Leaf in the Wind, as “a petite, auburn-haired beauty.” His father was Walter Norman Douglas, from Haileybury, Ont. They met when he attended flight school in Regina.
He was a 24-year-old flight lieutenant with the Royal Canadian Air Force when he died in Germany on May 14, 1945, six days after the war in Europe was over. He was killed while lying on his bunk when a fellow pilot’s gun accidentally discharged. His son in Canada was two years old.
Mr. Hylands’s professional career began on Sept. 20, 1964, when the 21-year-old graduate of the University of British Columbia arrived in New York on an Air Canada flight. The city was hosting the World’s Fair in the middle of a heatwave, and the Beatles were in town to perform a charity concert on the last night of their first full North American tour.
A cab took him to a rooming house at West 92nd Street and Broadway. His small room had a view of a brick wall, and he spotted a cockroach in a hallway lit by a single dim bulb. And yet the Drifters had famously sung just one year earlier that the neon lights were bright on Broadway.
“What on earth was I thinking?” Mr. Hylands wondered in his memoir.
He dropped his family name when he joined a performers union in New York. There was another Scott Douglas, a dancer.
In early 1965, Mr. Hylands got a job on a production of Stravinsky’s orchestral dance piece L’Histoire du Soldat. It was in benefit of the America Israel Cultural Foundation, with Jason Robards as the narrator. But because the great actor had a tight schedule, a stand-in for him was required for some of the rehearsals. After the show, Mr. Robards complimented his surrogate: “Good pipes,” he said of Mr. Hylands’s booming voice.
His first role was as the lead in an off-Broadway production of the comedy Billy Liar in 1965. He then acted with the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and eventually found screen work in L.A., often as heavies on episodic programs such as Baretta, Cannon and Kung Fu. Nothing steady though − none of the many television pilots he worked on ever took off.
Back in Canada in the 1980s, he met his future wife while filming a Night Heat episode one summer evening near Maple Leaf Gardens. The former Veronica Barany was a nurse at the Hospital for Sick Children. While cameras rolled in the lobby of her apartment building, she was stuck outside with melting ice cream, unable to get in.
“I got pretty vocal about it,” Ms. Hylands Douglas said. “Scott came over and we chatted. He was gracious and apologetic.”
She was taller and half his age. They were married in 1990 and built their dream house on Salt Spring Island, where they raised two children before moving to Victoria.
In 2015, Mr. Hylands played Pozzo in Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy Waiting for Godot at Victoria’s 225-seat Roxy Theatre. There he put the pipes which Mr. Robards admired years earlier to good use.
“Scott was not a small actor, and the theatre was not big enough for him, really,” said the company’s former artistic director, Brian Richmond. “But the role gave him an opportunity to play at a size that he enjoyed.”
He leaves his wife, Veronica Hylands Douglas; children, Luke Hylands and Rebecca Halper; and grandchildren, Max and Lucy. What his doctors predicted would be a one- or two-year remission from leukemia lasted five.
“Because he married late in life, he wasn’t sure he’d ever see grandchildren,” his wife said. “He got to spend more time with them because of the remission. The extra years were a gift.”
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