According to Stuart Margolin, Salt Spring Island in 1969 was populated with “loggers, fishermen, hippies, some draft resisters from the States, and a lot of retired English army”. To that already strange mix of folk, let’s add one very successful Hollywood character actor. Margolin had already appeared on Bewitched, The Monkees, That Girl, and every other American TV series of note by the time he started looking for a home beyond L.A. “I had just discovered the Gulf Islands and had gone crazy for this piece of land. It just so happened I was a songwriter—I am still—and I got an advance from BMI and used that as a down payment, and that’s how I got the place,” he says, of a Salt Spring Island property that would eventually boast a house designed by renowned architect Hank Schubart.

Margolin and his family lived on Salt Spring for 22 years while the actor/writer/director—best known as James Garner’s hustling sidekick, “Angel” Martin, on The Rockford Files—racked up big-screen credits for the likes of Blake Edwards and took advantage of Vancouver’s evolving film and TV industry. He’s been relatively quiet of late, but the 77-year-old makes a welcome return to theatres in The Second Time Around, opening Friday (March 24). He plays Holocaust survivor Isaac, whose romantic prospects make a late and unexpected comeback with the arrival of Laura (ex-Avenger Linda Thorson) at his Toronto group home. “Someone told me it’s a ‘geezer pleaser’,” Margolin says with a chuckle during a call to the Georgia Straight from Lewisburg, West Virginia, the latest remote location he has chosen over Hollywood (“I’m about 90 minutes from three of the great golf courses in the world,” he confides). “I hadn’t read anything quite like this script,” he says of Second Time Around, “and even though there are elements about it that are old-fashioned—but in a good way—a lot of it was new to me, like the whole life that both of them live at the retirement home, or ‘assisted living’, or however you quantify living at one of those places. I can only say, because I’ve been to a couple of screenings now, that I’m really, truthfully amazed by the reaction. People are so moved, laughing a lot, but also lots of tears. I don’t know why I wasn’t prepared for it, but I wasn’t.”

Among the film’s incidental delights is a supporting cast of veteran Canadian thesps, including Louis Del Grande and Jayne Eastwood—“A wonderful comedienne and actress who always strikes gold”—whom Margolin first met on the set of the CBC’s Mom P.I. It was there that Margolin also began his association with Romeo Section creator Chris Haddock. “He’s one of the closest friends I made in my time in Vancouver, and I consider him to be one of the best writers in all of television,” Margolin says, adding that his stepchildren Chris and Michelle Martini recently scored producer and costume-designer jobs, respectively, on Stan Douglas’s acclaimed six-hour video installation Luanda-Kinshasa on the advice of Romeo Section producer Arvi Liimatainen. “Arvi and I go back to the days of Anne Wheeler’s Bye Bye Blues, so the connection still lives,” he declares, proudly, before signing off with a cheery “Thank you, and love and hello to everybody in the ’Couv!”

Georgia Straight, March 2017