Lorena Gale

Biography

Lorena Gale was born in Montreal, Quebec to a white Canadian mother and a black American father. She studied at Concordia University and the National Theatre School and completed a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver in 2005.

Her performances on stage for Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Joseph A. Walker’s The River Niger won her the Montreal Gazette Theatre Critics Award for Outstanding Performance in 1981.

In 1985 she became the artistic director of Montréal's Black Theatre Workshop. She then studied playwriting at the Playwrights' Workshop Montréal.

After moving to Vancouver in 1988, Lorena won a 1991 Jessie Richardson Award for best supporting actress as Normal Jean in The Colored Museum (1990) .

Her play, Angélique, the story of executed slave Marie-Joseph Angelique, was the winner of the 1995 duMaurier National Playwriting Competition in Canada. Her writing explores the nature of being black and mixed race and belonging in Canada.

She appeared in such movies as Another Cinderella Story, Ernest Goes to School, Fantastic Four, Traitor, The Chronicles of Riddick, The Mermaid Chair, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. She has guest starred on programs such as The X-Files, Stargate SG-1, Smallville and Kingdom Hospital. Until August 2005, she starred as Priestess Elosha on the SciFi Channel television program Battlestar Galactica.

Gale also lent her voice to several animated works such as RoboCop: Alpha Commando, The Bitsy Bears, Camp Candy, The Adventures of Corduroy and Hurricanes.

Gale's final film role was a librarian in Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins.

Death

Gale died following a battle with throat cancer on June 21, 2009 at age fifty-one. Her body was cremated.