Nationality Canadian Years active 1940s-1990s | Occupation Actor Spouse Alice Hill | |
Born April 16, 1918 (age 98) ( 1918-04-16 ) Regina, Saskatchewan Nominations Genie Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role Movies Happy Birthday to Me, Two Solitudes, A Cool Sound from Hell, Blue City Slammers, Bye - See You Monday Similar Bo Harwood, J Lee Thompson, Maurice Dugowson, Sidney J Furie, Lionel Chetwynd | ||
Murray westgate after hockey night in canada 1965 imperial oil esso television commercial
Murray Westgate (born April 16, 1918 in Regina, Saskatchewan) is a Canadian retired actor. He is best known for his roles in Blue City Slammers, for which he garnered a Genie Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor at the 9th Genie Awards in 1988; in Two Solitudes as the Prime Minister of Canada; and for his longtime role as a television pitchman in Canadian commercials for Esso.
Before becoming an actor, Westgate served as a radio operator in the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II. He then moved to Vancouver to join Everyman Theatre as an actor, before joining CBC Radio as an actor in radio dramas. He began appearing in Esso commercials in 1952, when the company signed on as the main commercial sponsor of Hockey Night in Canada, and retained this role until 1968. In 1991, he returned for a one-off appearance in a new Esso commercial, which featured both a black-and-white clip of one of his original Esso ads and newly recorded footage.
He also had recurring roles in the television series R.C.M.P., Seaway, House of Pride and Seeing Things, and had some guest roles in television and supporting roles in television and theatrical films, but found that he sometimes lost out on roles because he was too recognizably typecast by the Esso commercials. He won an ACTRA Award in 1979 for his performance in the CBC Television film Tyler.
He was inducted into the Canadian Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2002.