lit a candle 3h agoLonesome Dove: The Series used to run on German television on Sunday afternoons, and my grandmother always had it on when we visited her in Freiburg. I did not know until years later that Hannah was played by a Swiss-born actress. Strange to read now that she died in Calgary, a place I have never been, after a life so far from Aargau.
Their story
Christianne Hirt was a Swiss-born Canadian actress, acting teacher, director and writer whose career moved from teenage screen roles in Vancouver to leading parts opposite Russell Crowe and in the syndicated western Lonesome Dove: The Series, and then to three decades of training actors at Company of Rogues Actors' Studio,…
Christianne Hirt was a Swiss-born Canadian actress, acting teacher, director and writer whose career moved from teenage screen roles in Vancouver to leading parts opposite Russell Crowe and in the syndicated western Lonesome Dove: The Series, and then to three decades of training actors at Company of Rogues Actors' Studio, the school she co-founded with her husband, actor and director Joe-Norman Shaw. She died on 24 October 2026 at Rosedale Hospice in Calgary, Alberta, aged 58, after what her family called a two-year journey through cancer.
She was born Gabriella Christiane Läuchli on 20 March 1968 in Brugg, in the Swiss canton of Aargau. When she was two her family moved to Vancouver, where she grew up in the West End and North Vancouver, and she graduated from the Waldorf High School in 1986. As a girl she was a competitive figure skater for about seven years, until injury and chronic tendinitis ended her skating at thirteen. She turned instead to acting, and in 1981 joined the very first class taught in Vancouver by June Whitaker, a student of Sanford Meisner. She later described that first night as the moment she felt she "had come home", and she studied with Whitaker for the next decade, later continuing her training at HB Studio in New York.
Her professional screen career began in the early 1980s. She was cast as Jill in The Glitter Dome, the 1984 HBO crime drama starring James Garner, Margot Kidder and John Lithgow, with Colleen Dewhurst, which was filmed in Victoria, British Columbia. Television movies and Vancouver-shot series followed, including Shelley, Picking Up the Pieces, Danger Bay and The Beachcombers.
Her breakthrough was the CBC television film Skate! (released on video as Blades of Courage), first broadcast in October 1987. Hirt, who had not skated competitively for years, went back to the ice for three months of private lessons to win the lead role of Lori Laroche, a young skater from Peterborough, Ontario, caught between her family and an abusive coach played by Colm Feore. The film won the 1988 Gemini Award for best TV movie, and Hirt was nominated for the Gemini for best performance by a lead actress in a dramatic program or mini-series. She went on to play Marilyn Lee Cross in "The Cold Equations", a 1989 episode of The Twilight Zone, and Jamie in the 1990 TV film On Thin Ice: The Tai Babilonia Story.
In 1993 she starred as Lill Anderson, a prairie farm wife whose husband is overseas, in Aaron Kim Johnston's Second World War romance For the Moment, opposite Russell Crowe as an Australian airman training in Manitoba. From 1994 she was a series regular as Hannah Peale, the newspaper publisher's daughter who wins the heart of Newt Call (Scott Bairstow), in the first season of Lonesome Dove: The Series. Her performance as Jennie, a woman who discovers she was forcibly sterilised as a teenager under Alberta's Sexual Sterilization Act, in Francis Damberger's film Heart of the Sun (1998), earned her the 1999 Alberta Film and Television (AMPIA) award for best actress. Later credits included Firestorm (1998), Cold Squad, Da Vinci's Inquest, Intelligence, Wild Roses, Northern Lights, Shattered and Angels Crest, and in all she played more than 60 lead and supporting roles.
Teaching became the centre of her working life. With Joe-Norman Shaw she co-founded Company of Rogues Actors' Studio in 1993, opened Rogues in Calgary in 1996 and founded Rogues West in Vancouver in 2014. The studio became known as one of Western Canada's leading homes of the Meisner Technique, and she taught thousands of actors, among them Jared Keeso and Benjamin Arthur Gutknecht. She also taught at Mount Royal University in Calgary, the Alberta Centre of Acting Studies and Dramaworks in Edmonton, and served as a mentor actor and board member for the Women in the Director's Chair program at the Banff Centre.
She was also a filmmaker and writer. Her short film Craving screened at the Calgary International Film Festival in 2005, and she wrote and directed the short If You Really Knew Me, which won her the 2013 AMPIA award for best screenwriter. Her play The West End was staged at the Pumphouse Theatre in Calgary, starring her daughter Sophia Hirt and directed by her husband. On stage she played Roberta in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, and roles in Ivanov, The Real Thing and Theatre Calgary's A Christmas Carol. During her illness she trained and graduated as a therapist from Rhodes Wellness College.
She is survived by her husband Joe-Norman Shaw, her daughter Sophia Hirt and Sophia's wife Audrey Baunez, her cousin Natasha Martina Koechl and her stepbrother Christopher Felzmann. She was cremated, and Company of Rogues hosted a celebration of her life at the Joyce on 4th in Calgary on 1 November 2026. In lieu of flowers, her family asked for donations to Rosedale Hospice.
Biography adapted from Family obituary (Evan J. Strong Funeral Services, Calgary Herald, Globe and Mail); Company of Rogues Actors' Studio faculty biography; Women in the Director's Chair biography; Skate Guard (2019); Wiki.
In their own words
“Telling the truth, living imaginatively, trusting my inner life, trusting my instincts and above all Doing the Work simply for the Joy of Doing the Work.”
On what Meisner training taught her, Company of Rogues Actors' Studio faculty page
“Being the geeky, awkward, self conscious kid that I was, in that moment I felt something new; I had come home.”
On her first acting class with June Whitaker in 1981
“A great teacher not only inspires her students but truly wants the best for them. She patiently demands, class after class, year after year that the student(s) rise to their potential.”
On her mentor June Whitaker
“I was never at the point in my skating where Lori is, but I dreamed of the same things. In a way, it was very close to me, and yet on the other hand, it showed me how far I had moved away from the skating world.”
To The Vancouver Sun on playing skater Lori Laroche in Skate! (1987)
Photos
2Christianne Hirt
by People Forever
Christianne Hirt in later life
by People Forever
From social media
1Posts by Christianne, and posts about them, kept here so they are not lost.