Meet Liesje Wagner

Liesje Wagner was born in The Hague, Netherlands, and came to Toronto when the city was still Toronto the Good. Catholic school nuns taught her how to read music and learn the love of singing. “It’s like prayer.” Having performed in high school plays, she attended York University and joined the York Players. Later, she found an agent and became a professional actor, dancer and model for over twenty years in Toronto. 

“CBC encouraged me take English lessons because I had a thick Dutch accent. I was in many of their TV series. I was Miss Shweppes for the corporation (laughing.) I was doing a fashion show and Miss Edith Head approached me and said, ‘You, my dear, are going to be my Marilyn Monroe.’ In her Toronto fashion shows, I wore the gown Marilyn wore when she sang at JFK’s birthday. " 

She was a board member of Toronto Women in Film and TV (1988 to 1994) and Editor for their quarterly magazine, helped fundraise at the Canadian Film Centre and helped lobby the CRTC to eliminate use of women’s bodies in advertising. She produced and directed a documentary called Breaking the Cycle of Violence and fulfilled a variety of productions roles on smaller films.

In 1995, she moved to Nova Scotia, as Marketing Manager for a computer animation studio -   pixelMotion Images: “We did the first 90% computer motion control/ capture animation series called Lexx, the Dark Zone with C.O.R.E. Digital, ahead of its time.” While in Nova Scotia she continued to act and taught acting through a popular community theatre group, South Shore Players, for whom she had the privilege of directing and choreographing a number of musicals with massive casts.

In 2016, she published her first book under a pen name - Italian Bones of Contentions, a comedy. This was followed by seven various publications including three written in her own name. “I had to come out of hiding for this one. It’s a very emotional and intense story about my mother and her experience as a child during Nazi Occupation and a pen name just didn’t sit right.” 

Singing was always part of her life. School, choir, operettas, musicals – professional and non – and the proverbial coffee houses.