Chlotrudis condolences

It's been a bad summer for winners of the Chlotrudis Society's Chloe Award for Career So Far. Tracy Wright, who won the Award in 2007 for her indelible roles in such independent movies as Miranda July's "You and Me and Everyone We Know," died on June 23 at age  50. She was the wife of actor and filmmaker Don McKellar, who won the Chlotrudis Body of Work Award, also in 2007. Here's Chlotrudis co-founder Michael Colford's eloquent and wry introduction to Wright given at the award ceremony [scroll down to bottom of the page].

And yesterday the great character actor Maury Chaykin, winner of the Chlotrudis Award in 2006, died on his 61st birthday. His IMDB file lists 153 credits since 1975 and I'd be willing to bet that in each he was one of the most memorable parts of the film. My recollection, for example, of Kevin Costner's "Dances With Wolves" (1990) is pretty much a blur except for Chaykin's intense, mordant, suicidal frontier cavalry officer.

More recently he had a terrific, villainous role as the despicable accountant in Fernando Meirelles adaptation of the late Jose Saramago's novel "Blindness" (co-written, by the way,  by Don McKellar, who also co-starred in it). Boy, was Chaykin fun to hate in that movie, but in person it was a different story; his acceptance speech for his Career So Far Award was one of the funniest and most moving I've heard.

Chlotrudis members and cinephiles everywhere will mourn the premature loss of these two and their contributions to independent and mainstream movies.