When the original Ottawa Senators vanquished the Vancouver Millionaires for the 1921 Stanley Cup, a budding actress who would log one degree of separation from hockey cinema several times later in life came into being.
A best-of-five series, contested entirely in the PCHA champion Millionaires’ barn, culminated April 4, 1921. Four nights after his club failed to shut the door in Game 4, Ottawa’s Jack Derragh single-handedly surmounted an initial 1-0 deficit. The 2-1 edge held up, securing a repeat crown for the Senators.
A lifetime later, another Ottawa Senators franchise would briefly make Grand Rapids, Mich., its minor-league base. But on this day, the River City gained delayed fame as the birthplace of Elizabeth Wilson.
In a 94-year lifespan, Wilson would earn major award nominations for film, TV and stage acting alike. In that regard, she peaked with a 1972 Tony for her part in Sticks and Bones.
Five years prior, Wilson had played Dustin Hoffman’s mother in The Graduate. While she was not singled out for hardware over that project, her casting in the classic clearly pleased a few BAFTA voters. The British guild had considered her for the distinction of most promising newcomer to film in 1957.
To complete the nomination triangle, Wilson was up for an Emmy in 1987.
As one of her later film appearances, Wilson had an uncredited cameo in 1994’s Nobody’s Fool. Besides such A-listers as Melanie Griffith, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Bruce Willis, the picture also featured a pair of hockey movie veterans.
The star of the screenplay was Oscar winner and former Slap Shot protagonist Paul Newman. Josef Sommer, aka Mr. Ducksworth from The Mighty Ducks, took up a similarly underhanded role in this storyline.
In the same year, Wilson appeared in Quiz Show, opposite future Mystery, Alaska supporting actor Hank Azaria.
Wilson subsequently put in nine more appearances on TV or the silver screen over her final two decades of life. She broke a 10-year hiatus in 2012 by playing Sara Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson.
Both the Senators’ victory and Wilson’s birth occurred on a Monday, one that followed a not-so-uneventful weekend. The preceding Saturday, physicist Albert Einstein unveiled his theory of relativity at a convention in New York City.
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