Helen Shaver

Shaver was born and raised with five sisters, in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada.

After roles in such Canadian features as Outrageous! (1977), Starship Invasions (1977), Who Has Seen the Wind (1977) and High Ballin' (1978), Shaver won a Canadian Film Award as Best Lead Actress opposite Tom Berenger (for her performance as "Ann MacDonald") in In Praise of Older Women (1978).

Shaver was one of the stars of director Sam Peckinpah's final film, 1983's The Osterman Weekend. In 1985, Shaver starred in Desert Hearts as a 1950s university professor who falls in love with another woman.[1] Her performance, with co-star Patricia Charbonneau, drew critical praise and Shaver won the Bronze Leopard Award at the Locarno International Film Festival. Another prominent film performance during that time came in 1986 as the love interest of Paul Newman in his Oscar-winning portrayal of "Fast" Eddie Felson in Scorsese's The Color of Money, a sequel to 1961's The Hustler.

Helen Shaver's star on Canada's Walk of Fame

In 1980, Shaver starred with Beau Bridges in the short-lived NBC TV series United States developed by Larry Gelbart. A year later she starred in the short-lived drama series Jessica Novak. She was in the 1984 Canadian-made Countdown to Looking Glass. She subsequently appeared on such television shows as Hill Street Blues and T. J. Hooker. In 1990, she guest-starred as the murderer in Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo, and later that year co-starred on the short-lived series WIOU, playing a television journalist (as she also did on Jessica Novak). From 1996-1999, Shaver co-starred on the TV series Poltergeist: The Legacy, playing Dr. Rachel Corrigan, a widowed psychiatrist with an eight-year-old daughter who is helped by the Legacy in the pilot episode; her performance earned a Saturn Award nomination. In 2000, she won a Genie Award for her portrayal of a drug-addicted prostitute in the independent feature We All Fall Down.

Shaver made her feature-length directorial debut in 1999 with the television film Summer's End, which won an Emmy and earned her a directorial nomination. Shaver has also directed a number of television shows and cable movies, including The Outer Limits, Judging Amy, Joan of Arcadia, Medium, The OC, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The L Word, Jericho, Journeyman, Private Practice, The Unit, Crusoe, Orphan Black, Vikings (2013 TV series), 13 Reasons Why, and Westworld. In 2003 she won a Gemini award for Best Direction in a Dramatic Series for the Just Cause television series episode "Death's Details".

In 2004, Shaver was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.[2]

Happy Place, her first theatrical feature film after directing for television, premiered at the Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival, and was screened at the 2020 Vancouver International Film Festival.[3]

In 2021, Shaver picked up The Living Legend Tribute at the 23rd Women's Image Network Awards with fellow honoree JoJo Siwa its Rising Musical Star recipient.[4][5]

In 2023, Shaver won the DGA award for directing episode 8 ("Who's There?") of Station Eleven.[6]

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• Canadian Film Encyclopedia: A publication of The Film Reference Library/a division of the Toronto International Film Festival Group
• Helen Shaver at IMDb
• Helen Shaver on Twitter