Anna Heupel is a national treasure of our times. She is a Canadian artist, writer and public speaker, known best from her two National Golden Globe Awards for her role as Dagwood MacNab’s supportive and idealistic police detective in the award-winning movie, Rise of The Red Cap. She has been applauded not only for her amazing performance but also for the way she presented herself and the fact that she is one of few Canadian performers to receive such high praise from an international audience. A year before her winning of the Golden Globe for her second movie, Anna Heupel displayed her stunning sense of style when presenting the cast of The Royal Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with grace and dignity. It was a performance that won her the most prestigious award of the night.
However, it was her association with Canada’s first socialist government that elevated her status and popularity. In her early years in Canada, Heupel travelled extensively to promote revolutionary ideas in the North American continent, including the creation of a national welfare program and the creation of the Canadian National Bank. In this time, her artistic career was closely tied to the activism of her country’s progressive social movements. As a result of these travels, Heupel developed an understanding of the experiences of working with people of different backgrounds, encouraging them to have a positive vision and to work together to build a better future.
When asked about her opinions on marriage and love, Anna Heupel responded with words of wisdom which are as relevant today as they were back then: “etics – beauty and art.” Perhaps it was this knowledge of philosophy that led her to accept the advice of her now husband, Roy Scheppers, in regard to the height difference between his partner and him. As Anna Heupel rightly points out in her book, Love And Friendship: A History of the Marriage Relationship, “tall people have bigger feet than short ones”, and by using the height difference as a launching pad to discuss love, marriage and family in depth, it would seem that she saw herself as having more in common with her partner than with the many inches that he stood. It seems that her willingness to go on to be a teacher of philosophy at the university she had founded, Victoria University, may have been influenced by her experience as a young woman who fell out of love with tall men. In any case, it is easy to see why Anna Heupel’s philosophy of love and friendship continues to influence our thinking even today.