North of 60 star visits Saskatoon schools

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Tina Keeper, who plays Michelle Kennedy on CBC's North of 60, shared the secrets of the TV trade with the students of several inner city elementary schools during a Saskatoon visit.

She was invited to speak at a fund-raising dinner on March 10 for Sasktoon's First Nations Child Development Centre. But while she was in town, Saskatoon Police Services' Aboriginal Liaison Officer Craig Nyirfa and School Liaison Officer Larry Vols persuaded her to spend some time with the students.

Keeper, who previously worked as a teaching assistant and has two children of her own, obviously felt at home with the children and thoroughly enjoyed her visits.

She delighted and entertained the children and charmed everyone with her warmth, openness, quick smile and easy laughter.

At each school she began by introducing herself to the students and telling them about herself. Then she opened the floor for questions.

The children responded by subjecting her to a grilling as intense as any media scrum, asking challenging questions like "If you're not married, how can you have children?"

Keeper's family is from Norway House in northern Manitoba and through her preschool years her father worked on a reserve called Waterville.

"Then we moved to Winnipeg," she reports, "and I went to school there. I worked hard in school. I liked school. The only thing I did, I talked too much."

"I never thought I'd be an actress. So I sort of got into it by accident. At first I loved to paint and draw. I didn't want to be an actress. I wanted to be a teacher or a doctor or a painter."

When she was 20 years old, she and a group of friends started a Native theatre company.

"That's when I started acting. I started into it and I really loved it. I went to two acting schools, one in Winnipeg, one in Ontario, which was a Native acting school. I came back to Winnipeg and started working as an actress, doing a lot of plays for kids your age.

"Then I went to university. I studied acting for three years at university. That's when I got my job on North of 60, after all that schooling.

"So school's really important. It's really important for me. I wouldn't be an actor on North of 60 if I had' gone to school for all those years.

Then the questions began:

"How do you grow your hair so fast?"

"Do you have a kid named TeeVee?"

"Are you a grandma?"

"How come on the show you don't have glasses?"

Keeper replied that she gets nervous when she performs on stage but not when she's in front of a camera. She confessed to being very nervous at the Gemini Awards.

"She is not married but she is "happily" not married.

"I was married and I had children and now I'm not married. But I'm really good friends with my ex."

Asked her age, she threw the question back to her audience? "How old do you think I am?" She may have wished she hadn't as some of the answers were rather alarming. "Fifty??!!.. Who said 47??!! I'm 32 for about another 10 days.

She reported that she really enjoys the other people who work on North of 60

and that some of them, like Gordon Tootoosis, are especially close friends. But she diplomatically sidestepped the question of who is her favorite actor on the show.

"I think the little baby girl," she replied. "Did you see the baby this year? Wasn't she good?"

She was quite forthcoming, though, when asked how much money she made. "I don't make as much as American TV starts. Those Americans make a lot more money than I do. But I make as much money probably as a doctor does. It's good money but I'm not rich.

"I can't go flying around. I don't have two cars. But I can buy new jeans and new runners. I have a car and I can get it fixed when it's broken."

North of 60 is filmed from early summer till Christmas, leaving the cast about half the year to work on other projects.