Comedy icon Mary Walsh launches this year’s Festival with wry flair. The Gemini-winning star of This Hour Has 22 Minutes presents Brassy Bit of Aging Crumpet, a vulnerable, hopeful, wickedly funny memoir-in-essays celebrating her colourful—sometimes difficult but never dull—life and career.
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, and in 2026 she released Brassy Bit of Aging Crumpet: A Memoir in Pieces. She currently writes, directs and stars in The Missus Downstairs, for which she has been nominated for multiple Canadian Screen Awards.
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.
