Ellen David
Ellen David is an actor, born 1960.
Every production city runs on actors like David, and no city runs without them. Montreal-born and Montreal-based, she has spent a long career supplying doctors, detectives, secretaries, landladies and mothers to films and series shooting in her home town, in both official languages and in a great deal of animation.
The list of characters tells the story better than any summary: Mrs. Fiorello in Brooklyn, Mrs. Glatt across both Goon films, Dr. Jarvis in Fatherhood, Dr. Gerard in The Bold Type, Evelyn Roche in Transplant, a placement agent in My Salinger Year, a spaceport customs officer in a science fiction spoof. These are parts measured in scenes rather than arcs, and the craft in them is real: arriving with a whole person already assembled, delivering the information the plot needs, and leaving without denting the film.
Her awards recognition has come from Canadian television rather than film. She was co-nominated for a 2007 Gemini Award for ensemble comedy performance in The Business, nominated for a Prix Gemeaux in 2005, and received the Award of Excellence from the Montreal chapter of the ACTRA Awards in 2015.
The voice work deserves its own line. Children's animation produced in Montreal has used her for decades, including Caillou and Postcards from Buster, which means a fair number of adults know her voice without ever having matched it to a face.
Movies (19)
- Wicked Minds (2003)
- Brooklyn (2015)
- Fatherhood (2021)
- Goon (2012)
- Shut In (2016)
- Nine Lives (2016)
- The Death & Life of John F. Donovan (2019)
- A Walk on the Moon (1999)
- 2001: A Space Travesty (2000)
- My Salinger Year (2020)
- Surviving My Mother (2007)
- Office Games (2022)
- Goon: Last of the Enforcers (2017)
- Spinning Gold (2023)
- Isn't She Great (2000)
- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2008)
- Savage Messiah (2002)
- Love & Human Remains (1994)
- Afterglow (1997)
TV (8)
Where to start with Ellen David
Her best film is Brooklyn, and it is also the neatest demonstration of the job: a handful of scenes, and a fully specified person who plainly existed before the camera found her.
For comedy, the Goon films are the place to go, and she is one of the few performers in them playing the emotional cost of the sport straight. Transplant gives her the most sustained television role here, a hospital administrator with actual institutional weight, and The Bold Type and Being Human show the guest-star version of the same competence. My Salinger Year is the most literate thing in her filmography. If you have children, or had them in the 2000s, Caillou will be more familiar than anything else on this list.