> Sep 20, 2008

> Martin Knelman - Toronto Star
> Entertainment Columnist

> Peter Kastner - who will always be remembered as the juvenile delinquent
> rebelling against his upper-middle-class Canadian parents in the 1965
> surprise
> hit Nobody Waved Goodbye - died suddenly Thursday night while driving
> his car in
> downtown Toronto.

> The cause was apparently a heart attack. He was less than two weeks shy
> of his
> 65th birthday.

> Kastner achieved stardom early, beginning as a child actor in the early
> days of
> Canadian TV and winding up in Hollywood as the star of Francis Ford
> Coppola's
> 1966 comedy You're a Big Boy Now.

> But after starring in a disastrous ABC sitcom, The Ugliest Girl in Town, in
> which he played a young man disguised as a young woman, his career
> tanked, and
> his life story turned into a bizarre twist on Sunset Boulevard, with
> Kastner
> turning into an updated Canadian male incarnation of Norma Desmond, the
> deluded
> former star of silent movies.

> After moving back to Toronto from the U.S. a few years ago, Kastner played
> coffee houses (including Free Times Café) and comedy clubs (including
> Yuk Yuks)
> with a one-man show. He not only milked the irony of his own career
> crash but
> attacked his mother, the late Rose Kastner, resulting in a bitter
> estrangement
> from his three siblings and other members of the family.

> "We all adored him when we were growing up," says his brother John,
> Gemini and
> Emmy-winning documentary director. "He was hugely talented and seemed
> blessed by
> the gods. But he left home at 18, and we don't know why he became so
> troubled.
> We just did not recognize the Peter Kastner of the last decades.

> "We were all estranged from him, but we wished him well. He seemed to be
> mired
> in a bitter, angry attack on the family that loved him so much. And in
> our view,
> it was full of lies, especially about our mother. We couldn't understand
> it."

> Peter was the second of four children who grew up in the family home
> backing
> onto a Forest Hill ravine. Their parents, prominent leftists, were in the
> printing and publishing business.

> Peter's older sister, Susan, was a Star staff writer for many years.
> John, who
> followed in Peter's footsteps as an actor early on, went on to a
> distinguished
> career as a film producer-director. Their younger sister, Kathy
> Kastner-Berns,
> worked for a time as host of a Toronto CBC current-affairs show.

> With encouragement from Rose, Peter gained acclaim as an amateur in the
> Dominion
> Drama Festival and was spotted by a CBC casting director who gave him
> his big
> break in a children's drama called Emil and the Detectives. He remained
> a busy
> child actor and, at age 18, starred in the popular Canadian variety show
> Time of
> Your Life.

> Nobody Waved Goodbye, directed by Don Owen, was supposed to be a
> National Film
> Board documentary but became an improvised drama with Kastner earning
> acclaim
> for his performance as an endearing, misunderstood teenage rebel. The
> movie had
> a fresh, authentic flavour, and Kastner's performance combined bite with
> charm.

> When it played the New York Film Festival in 1965, it was called
> "marvellous" by
> The New Yorker's Brendan Gill and was chosen one of the year's best by
> critic
> Judith Crist.

> The next year Kastner was starring in Coppola's coming-of-age comedy,
> with a
> supporting cast that included such icons as Rip Torn and Geraldine Page.
> That
> performance came close to landing Peter the lead in The Graduate - but Mike
> Nichols gave the role instead to Dustin Hoffman. Kastner also had a
> success on
> Broadway in The Playroom opposite Karen Black, who was his girlfriend
> for some
> time.

> His ABC sitcom, The Ugliest Girl in Town, made him some serious money
> but turned
> out to be a career-killer he could never live down. It was high on TV
> Guide's
> list of the 50 worst series ever made.

> In the 1970s and 1980s Kastner appeared in minor movie roles and acted
> frequently on episodic TV series including King of Kensington. But his
> career
> was on life support by the time he made his last movie, Unfinished
> Business -
> Owen's sequel to Nobody Waved Goodbye - in 1984.

> "He has been a mythic figure for much of my life," says Jamie Kastner, his
> nephew, "but I have this sense of someone with huge talent who somehow went
> awry."

> Last year when Jamie's film Kike Like Me was being screened at Hot Docs
> and the
> Toronto Jewish Film Festival, his uncle Peter distributed flyers
> promoting his
> own one-man show, including a video attacking the Kastner family. The flyer
> featured the Star's glowing obit for Rose, along with a promise to tell
> the real
> truth about his mother.

> Besides his siblings, Kastner leaves his second wife, Jenny.

> http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/502845

> http://tinyurl.com/4qbs66
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