Martha Henry

01 / The Detroit story

The Detroit story

Martha Henry was born Martha Kathleen Buhs in Detroit in 1938 and grew up in the northern suburb of Bloomfield Hills, where she attended the Kingswood School, the girls' school of the Cranbrook campus. She studied drama at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and in 1959 moved to Canada, where she became the first graduate of the National Theatre School in Montreal in 1961. That same year she was invited into the Stratford Festival company, and in her first season, 1962, she played Miranda to William Hutt's Prospero in The Tempest. Over the following six decades she became the Festival's defining actress and later one of its directors, while also working on Broadway, at Lincoln Center, in London's West End and in Canadian film, winning three Genie Awards for Best Actress and the Governor General's Performing Arts Award. She died in Stratford, Ontario, in 2021, shortly after her final performance there.

Highlights

1. Leading actress of the Stratford Festival from 1962
2. First graduate of Canada's National Theatre School (1961)
3. Three Genie Awards for Best Actress; Governor General's Performing Arts Award
4. Raised in Bloomfield Hills; attended Cranbrook's Kingswood School