Leon Dubinsky
Leon Dubinsky is a Canadian actor, theatre director and composer from Sydney, Nova Scotia.
He first became prominent in music with the regional touring band Buddy and the Boys in the 1970s and 1980s, and launched an annual musical stage revue, The Rise and Follies of Cape Breton, in the early 1980s. A song from that show, "Rise Again", became a Canadian pop music standard when the folk music group The Rankin Family recorded it for their 1993 album North Country; their version was a cross-format hit, reaching the Top 20 on Canada's RPM pop and adult contemporary charts and the Top 40 on the magazine's country charts. The song was also later performed and recorded by Rita MacNeil and Anne Murray.
Another musical revue by Dubinsky, the Cape Breton Summertime Revue, toured even more extensively across Canada in the 1990s. In 2002, Dubinsky won the Stompin' Tom Connors Award from the East Coast Music Awards in honour of his contributions to the region's musical culture.
As an actor, Dubinsky is associated primarily with regional stage productions in the Maritime Provinces, including with The Mulgrave Road Co-op, Theatre Antigonish, Theatre PEI, and Factory Lab Theatre. He appeared in the 1987 film Life Classes, for which he garnered a Genie Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the 9th Genie Awards. He starred alongside Rick Mercer in the 1988 CBC Television teleplay My Brother Larry, and had a recurring role as Cap McKenzie in the 1990s television series Pit Pony.
