If you are the kind of moviegoer who stays to watch the final credits, you might have seen Prudence Emery’s name scroll by. A vivid and lighthearted personality, with what she called “prematurely red” hair, she was the unit publicist on some 120 films both Canadian and international, a genius at generating the buzz and anticipation needed to launch a new movie. In this she was never hampered by shyness or timidity or reluctance to wrangle celebrities to participate in a publicity stunt she might have dreamed up.
Ms. Emery worked with film directors David Cronenberg, John Cassavetes, Peter Hall, Tony Richardson and John Kemeny among many others. Movie stars whom she made glow a little brighter included Jeremy Irons, Malcolm McDowell, Sophia Loren, Nicolas Cage, Jodie Foster, Sally Kellerman, Ellen Burstyn, Ben Kingsley, Robin Williams, Viggo Mortensen and others too numerous to name.
Mr. Cronenberg used Ms. Emery on almost all his films, he told The Globe in a 1999 interview: “Got a difficult shoot? Call Pru. She’s a one-off. She makes it fun. She plays the eccentric edges, and the oblique angles, and that’s a gift.”
Handling snobbish and unco-operative celebrities was her specialty: “She knows the chemistry and can sense when combinations are wrong. And she knows what to do about that to make it work,” Mr. Cronenberg explained.
Her clothes in clashing colours, her hair which was fuchsia when it was not red, and her sense of adventure made her an unforgettable figure in Toronto’s motion-picture industry. Film production in the city began its expansion in the early 1970s, around the time she became a unit publicist on movie sets, always ready to drive to California or jump on a plane to China or to Budapest if needed.
Her job was to write the regular press kits containing production notes and synopses, as well as putting together electronic press kits.
“Pru had a condo on Walmer Road in Toronto but mostly it was just a campsite between shoots. She was a nomad,” recalled her friend Ron Base, who first met Ms. Emery on the set of Black Christmas in 1974. She had invited him there to interview the film’s star Margot Kidder for the Toronto Sun, where he then worked.
Ms. Emery and Mr. Base were to reconnect years later when the flamboyant publicist reinvented herself as a popular author. Her tell-all memoir Nanaimo Girl, published by Cormorant Books in 2020 when she was 83, became a sleeper sensation, reaching the top spot on Amazon in the entertainment-memoir category.
It led to her co-authoring with Mr. Base a series of whodunits about a miniskirted Canadian girl from Vancouver Island who solves murders in swinging London of the late 1960s. The red-haired sleuth Priscilla Tempest was based on Ms. Emery herself.
Ms. Emery died of multiple system atrophy at the age of 87 on April 14, at the Amica Jubilee House nursing home in Victoria. She had moved there in December after a fall.
She came from a family of English origin who settled in London, Ont., in the 19th century – a great-grandfather founded and later sold the London Life insurance company.
Prudence Emery was born in Nanaimo on Aug. 27, 1936, the elder of two daughters of Edward Douglas Emery, an ophthalmologist and Lorna Doone Emery (née Saville), a gifted pianist and hostess who knew how to cook for a crowd.
Her doctor father was an eccentric character who did imitations of Charlie Chaplin playing Hitler in The Great Dictator, and liked to stand on his head and walk down the stairs on his hands.
Barbara Emery, her younger sister, recalled that he would lift Pru as a child and place her atop the grand piano where she would dance for visitors. Pru became a rebel, a boy-crazy adolescent whom her parents frequently sent away to camps and boarding schools in the hope of improving her behaviour. “I don’t think our mother knew how to handle her,” her sister recalled.
Pru was finally sent off to board at Crofton House, a Vancouver private school where her artistic and musical talents were recognized. She later tried university and a series of odd jobs back in Victoria.
By the age of 21, she had made enough for her first voyage to London, England, and had resolved not to marry but to have many lovers. In this she succeeded.
In London, she enrolled at the Chelsea School of Art to study commercial art but her time was spent mainly at clubs, singing and playing her ukulele. She moved in with British screenwriter Patrick Kirwan, then in his early 50s, who needed someone to type his film scripts. He became her lover and mentor, introducing her to the world of films and theatre. When her father cut off her allowance, she took a job as a barmaid. After five years, she returned to Canada in time for Expo 67 in Montreal.
Planning for Expo started early, and visitors, including heads of state and other dignitaries, were expected in enormous numbers. Ms. Emery was working as a proofreader at The Globe and Mail, while keeping company with a reporter named Robin Green. On a trip to Montreal she met Krystyne Romer, who had been hired to manage the Pavillon d’Honneur for the dignitaries. Ms. Romer knew there would be a lot of oddball celebrities who also needed escorting, and recommended Ms. Emery. Staffing had been contracted to Bell Canada, the telephone company; Bell at first rejected Ms. Emery.
“Prudence had on one red boot and one green and when I sent her off to the personnel department, they didn’t understand that,” recalled Krystyne Griffin (as she is now called). “Pru expressed herself through colour all her life. She would touch your imagination. She jumped the barrier. She would put on a purple scarf and a yellow one at the same time.
“Whatever she did, she found the fun in it.” The two women remained friends for life.
Hired at Expo, Ms. Emery was unfazed by the owner of a private zoo who arrived with a boa constrictor; and she walked around with Playboy publisher Hugh Heffner who wore bedroom slippers and had a busty blonde on each arm. She escorted the fragile model Twiggy and her hairdresser, as well as the young English actress Hayley Mills and playwright Edward Albee, and got on well with Liberace. She also met some rowdy journalists including Leo Yadroshnikov from the Soviet news agency TASS.
“No doubt he was a spy,” Ms. Emery wrote in Nanaimo Girl. He later showed up at her doorstep with an enormous bouquet of roses; a night of passion followed.
After Expo, she took what she thought would be a brief holiday back in London but stayed 5½ years. Invited to lunch at the estate of her cousin Victor Emery, she met Hugh Wontner, chairman and managing director of the Savoy Hotel, who was the father of Victor’s wife, Jenifer. He offered Ms. Emery a job as press and public relations officer at the Savoy, the legendary Victorian hotel built by Richard D’Oyly Carte with profits he made staging Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.
The Savoy did not advertise but got plenty of press. It maintained contact with a network of journalists who dropped in regularly to be plied with champagne and whisky and given tips on which celebrities were currently guests of the hotel. Ms Emery was popular with the inebriated journalists as well as with hotel guests who profited from her ability to obtain tickets for them to popular shows and reservations at exclusive restaurants.
Her work brought her into contact with Liza Minnelli, Louis Armstrong, Elaine Stritch, Noel Coward and many other performers and other celebrities. The job also led to much obligatory drinking. “It was almost impossible to stay sober,” Ms. Emery admitted in her memoir.
For the sake of her health, she returned to Toronto, worked briefly for Global Television, then for the newly opened Toronto Zoo, generating media coverage around exotic-animal specimens such as the largest spider in the world, a Siberian tiger that had just given birth to four cubs, and Pygmy hippos arriving from Liberia on Swissair.
As a film publicist starting in the 1970s, she continued her amorous adventures. On the set of Death Hunt, a 1980 film starring Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin, she connected with a grip 20 years her junior – a grip sets up the movie camera and the lights – whom she went on to live with in Toronto for an extended period.
In 2000, she successfully publicized the launch of the Griffin Poetry Prize, internationally and in Canada, when it was created by Scott Griffin. In its first year it received 304 submissions of poetry collections and that number more than doubled to 634 by 2016.
Her final creative work was writing crime novels with Ron Base: Death at the Savoy, Scandal at the Savoy, Princess of the Savoy. The fourth book in the series, Curse of the Savoy, will come out next year. Published by Douglas & McIntyre in Canada, the books have enjoyed unexpected success in France, in translation.
Publishers’ Weekly called it “light, frothy … perfect escapist fare,” while a reviewer for the Vancouver Sun wrote: “Think Harlequin Romance meets James Bond.” Film rights have been bought by Edoardo Ponti, the producer son of Sophia Loren. He envisages a 10-part television series.
Ms. Emery leaves her sister, Barbara Emery; niece, Gillie Easdon; and nephew, Douglas Easdon.
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