Arlene Duncan
Arlene Duncan is an actor.
More than eighty film and television roles sit behind Arlene Duncan, a Canadian actress and singer from Oakville, Ontario, alongside a long theatre career, and her credit list is a neat map of how the Canadian industry actually works. The American productions that shoot in Ontario gave her functionaries: an emergency room nurse in Extreme Measures, an aide in Don't Say a Word, a juvenile court judge in Get Rich or Die Tryin', a teacher in Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, a party guest in Chloe, a casino cashier, a night maid. One scene each, no name worth remembering.
The Canadian productions gave her people. She is best known as Fatima Dinssa, the diner owner in the CBC sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie, a role that ran for years and needed an actress who could be warm and immovable in the same breath. Velma Diggs in Diggstown, Peggy in Private Eyes, Vera Van Dorne in the recent Mistletoe Murders and Melvina in The Spiderwick Chronicles follow the same pattern.
The gap between those two columns is the story of a lot of Canadian careers, and worth keeping in mind while reading her filmography. Her father is African Canadian, with ancestors from Nova Scotia, and she has worked as a singer alongside the screen and stage work throughout.
Movies (9)
TV (8)
Where to start with Arlene Duncan
Fatima Dinssa in Little Mosque on the Prairie remains the reason to know her, and the show holds up. It is a gentle CBC sitcom about a Muslim congregation in a small prairie town, made with more curiosity than most network comedies manage, and Duncan's Fatima runs the diner where everybody has to be civil to everybody else.
Diggstown is the substantial dramatic work, a legal series set in Nova Scotia with a real point of view, and the natural next watch.
After that, Private Eyes and Mistletoe Murders are the comfortable Canadian genre television she has done a great deal of, The Spiderwick Chronicles is the recent fantasy series, The Romanoffs is the prestige anthology, and A Dog's Journey is the mainstream film credit most people will have seen.