In 2000, on his last trip to his home town, Hume Cronyn visited the Grand Theatre. It was there, as a London school boy attending plays, that Cronyn had first discovered his love of theatre; where he had performed in the late 1940s and early '50s and where he had co-starred with his wife, the late Jessica Tandy, in the 1947 production of Jan de Hartog's play, The Four Poster.

For long minutes during that final visit, the veteran actor stood in silence at the centre of the dark, empty stage and finally, in tears, turned to whisper, "Oh, how I love this place!"

The incident is one of many London-based recollections of Cronyn, who died Sunday of colon cancer in his Connecticut home at age 91.

During a career that spanned eight decades and included appearances on Broadway and at the Stratford Festival, numerous film and TV roles, a multitude of awards and international recognition, Cronyn never lost touch with his Forest City roots.

"I'm haunted by my childhood and I don't mean that in an unhappy way," he said in a 1990 Free Press interview. "London had an incredible influence on me and I still have a lot of family living there. But it's not something I can verbalize in a few sentences. I wrote about it in the book."

At the time, Cronyn was writing A Perfect Liar, a collection of memoirs.

The son of the late London MP Hume Cronyn and great-grandson of Benjamin Cronyn, the first bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Huron, left his study of law at Montreal's McGill University in 1932 to pursue the life of a professional actor in New York.

Two years later, Cronyn made his Broadway stage debut, playing a janitor in Hippers' Holiday, followed by his portrayal of Elkus in the 1938 production of There's Always a Breeze and the role of Andrei Prozoroff, the brother in Chekhov's Three Sisters (1939).

Movie audiences saw the actor for the first time in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and in his second screen outing, The Seventh Cross in 1944, Cronyn garnered a best supporting actor Oscar nomination.

That same year, his brilliant performance in Hitchcock's classic Lifeboat prompted the New York World-Telegram to write, "Hume Cronyn is one of the most vivid young character actors to come along in Hollywood in quite a time."

For the next 50 years, Cronyn played roles of varying sizes in movies, but never abandoned his love of the stage.

The resume of his distinguished theatre credits features two Tony Awards -- Broadway's version of the Oscars -- for playing Polonius opposite Richard Burton in John Gielgud's 1964 production of Hamlet and for his work in A Delicate Balance in 1968.

He also drew Tony nominations as producer and star of The Gin Game, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play for which his wife and co-star won the Tony.

In 1978, while working on the script of The Gin Game, Cronyn came to see Tandy in London, where she was starring in the Grand Theatre's production of Long Day's Journey Into Night.

"I think Hume brought out the sense of humour in Jessica," recalls Rob Wellan, the Grand's public relations manager. "She was a bit more serious, while he always had this little twinkle in his eye. To quote an old Hungarian saying, Hume was 'always pulling the devil by the tail.' At the same time, he was so very real as a performer and both he and Jessica were the consummate professionals."

In A Terrible Liar, published in 1991 by Key Porter, Cronyn writes of the bittersweet experiences that an actor encounters.

One was the filming of Cleopatra, the 1963 blockbuster, in which 10 months of Cronyn's hard work was cut to five minutes of screen time.

"Measured in dollars per minute, I may have been as well paid as Elizabeth Taylor," wrote Cronyn of the film's star, who received a record- setting $1 million (US) fee. "But that was small consolation at the time."

In the later part of career, Cronyn refused to use aging as a reason to retire and remained true to a promise the actor/director/writer made in his 1990 interview:

"I'll keep working as long as my health permits. I have the opposite anxiety from most people who, at my age, want a rest. I just want to keep being busy, active and moving to the next project."

Films of Hume Cronyn

Shadow of a Doubt, 1943

Phantom of the Opera, 1943

The Cross of Lorraine, 1943

Lifeboat, 1944

The Seventh Cross, 1944

Main Street after Dark, 1945

The Sailor Takes a Wife, 1945

A Letter for Evie, 1945

The Green Years, 1946

The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946

Ziegfeld Follies, 1946

The Beginning or the End, 1947

Brute Force, 1947

The Bride Goes Wild, 1948

Top o' the Morning, 1949

People Will Talk, 1951

Crowded Paradise, 1956

Sunrise at Campobello, 1960

Cleopatra, 1963

Hamlet, 1964

The Arrangement, 1969

Gaily, Gaily, 1969

There Was a Crooked Man, 1970

Conrack, 1974

The Parallax View, 1974

Honky Tonk Freeway, 1981

Rollover, 1981

The World According to Garp, 1982

Impulse, 1984

Brewster's Millions, 1985

Cocoon, 1985

Batteries Not Included, 1987

Cocoon: The Return, 1988

The Pelican Brief, 1993

Camilla, 1994

Marvin's Room, 1996