One Book, One Milton

About Mary Walsh

Mary Walsh created and starred in This Hour Has 22 Minutes, CBC’s wildly popular take on current affairs. The series earned her many of her numerous Gemini awards and showcased her dynamic range of characters, including the flagrantly outspoken ‘Marg Delahunty’.

Walsh wrote, produced and starred in the Gemini award winning series Hatching, Matching and Dispatching, which returned to CBC in 2017 as a feature length presentation called A Christmas Fury, with Walsh and the original cast reprising their roles. In 2017 she released her debut novel, a Canadian bestseller, Crying For The Moon. She currently writes, directs and stars in The Missus Downstairs, for which she has been nominated for multiple Canadian Screen Awards.

Walsh’s recent TV credits include recurring roles on MGM’s The Institute, Syfy’s Resident Alien, CBC’s Hudson & Rex, and Little Dog, for which she was nominated for a 2020 Canadian Screen Award, as well as numerous guest appearances on This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

Select feature film credits include The Grand Seduction and Closet Monster (Official selections at TIFF 2014 and 2015, respectively), Mambo Italiano, Happy Place (dir. Helen Shaver), for which she won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2021, Deaner ’89 (alongside Paul Spence, Will Sasso, and Kevin McDonald), and Dancing On The Elephant (alongside Sheila McCarthy), for which she won the 2025 Joan Orenstein Award for Outstanding Performance at the Atlantic International Film Festival.

Outside of the film, TV and theatre world, Mary is an outspoken advocate for mental health and addiction awareness as a spokesperson for Bell Let’s Talk. She’s a staunch supporter of the Wabano Centre for Aboriginal Health in Ottawa, and lends her time and voice to the CNIB, St. Joseph’s Hospital and CAMH. Among her many awards and doctorates, Mary is the recipient of the Order of Canada, the Governor General’s Lifetime Achievement Award in the Performing Arts, and the CSA’s Earle Grey Award for lifetime achievement in television acting.

Brassy Bit of Aging Crumpet: A Memoir in Pieces

In this disarmingly vulnerable and wickedly hilarious collection of essays, Mary Walsh chronicles her colourful—sometimes difficult, never boring—life, coming to the hopeful conclusion that growing old means finally finding (and loving) yourself.

In this sharply observed and wryly funny collection of essays on identity, family, and belonging, Mary Walsh takes readers on a rollicking—and sometimes difficult, but never boring—journey through her life. Her subjects range from the heartbreak of growing up next door to her family, to Newfoundland’s vibrant and not altogether happy entry into the Canadian confederation, to the behind-the-scenes of her wildly popular CBC shows, including This Hour Has 22 Minutes, to her complicated relationship with her complicated mother, and to her struggles with alcohol, self-doubt, and what it means to connect with those around her.

The result is a collection of essays that are deftly comical, vividly rendered, heartachingly vulnerable and, above all, hopeful. In the end, Mary learns the trials and hurdles (some self-inflicted) that she endured in her younger years only make the process of aging all the sweeter. The message she now has is a powerful one: her older years are her best ones yet, because she’s finally learned to accept who she is.