Léonie Armstrong
- Actress
- Producer
- Casting Director
Léonie came about by a chance meeting at the Vancouver General Hospital
of a Saskatchewan-born German nurse and a Thunder Bay anesthesiologist
with Liverpudlian antecedents. These two lovebirds married, moved to
Victoria and, in the fullness of time, increased the population of
Canada by one. Two years later, the population decreased again, and
Léonie was left motherless. Chapter One (education) Now the only
daughter of a single working doctor, Léonie grew up in a rambling old
house near the beach complete with secret passages, a wishing well, a
gardener and a maid, and a yard, more moss than lawn, that played host
to robins, fir trees, quails, raccoons, and the occasional confused
hiker wondering why the path from the parkland ended in the back of a
house instead of the street. Notwithstanding occasional emergency
babysitting sessions by the recovery room nurses of the Jubilee
hospital, Léonie was cared for by a British nanny named Doreen, and was
raised on crumpets, margarine and stories about the war. Her succession
of pets included hamsters, rats, goldfish, a frog called Swimmy that
she raised from a tadpole and, one summer, a family of raccoons that
took up residence between the floor of the upstairs deck and the family
room ceiling. When she was 14, she acquired a puppy from a fortuitous
accidental rendezvous between the next-door neighbors' golden
retrievers. Léonie attended private school, complete with uniforms and
school houses, through Grade Ten, tried public school on for size in
Grade Eleven and decided that she was having none of it. Despite not
attending ninety percent of her final year of high school, Léonie
graduated with honours, spent a gap year working in the restaurant
business, and then moved on to university, where she studied psychology
at the University of Victoria and wrote for the school paper, the
Martlet. Halfway through Research Psych 201, Léonie decided that it was
more interesting watching paint dry than conducting research studies,
so she ran away to acting school in Los Angeles. She graduated from the
American Academy of Dramatic Arts with her Associate's degree in
theatre, and moved back to BC, where the weather is kinder to redheads,
trees aren't just a rumour, and the clouds occasionally show up to
work.