After an extensive career in stage, radio, television, and film, Bruno Gerussi became one of Canada's most highly recognizable actors and television personalities. Despite the diversity of his career, the Canadian-born Gerussi is best known for his role as Nick Adonidas on Canada's longest-running television series, The Beachcombers ( I 972-90).

     Gerussi began his acting career on the stage, where he performed both supporting and leading roles in Canadian Players and Stratford Festival productions such as Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and The Crucible. The exposure and experience provided in the theater allowed Gerussi to make a smooth transition into the expanding arena of Canadian television production of the late 1950s and early 1960s. During this time the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) developed a number of televised dramas, including The Crucible (1959), Riel (1961), and Galileo (1963), in which Gerussi assumed important dramatic roles.

     After a two-year stint (1967-68) with his own nationally broadcast midmorning CBC radio show, Gerussi, Words and Music, Gerussi won the lead role on the popular CBC family-adventure series The Beachcombers created by Marc and Susan Strange (produced by Philip Keatley and Derek Gardner). Gerussi portrayed Nick Adonidas, the Greek-born owner of Nick's Salvage Company and father figure for a set of characters who inhabited the fishing village of Molly's Reach. Although largely consistent with the family-adventure genre, Beachcombers (The was dropped from the title in 1988) stretched the limitations of the form sufficiently to allow the various characters to evolve and the series to stay fresh during its extensive run. Over the course of the series, for example, the romantic, free spirit nature of Gerussi's character became increasingly responsible and fatherly toward his substitute family.

     A total of 324 half-hour Beachcomber episodes were produced over a 19-year period. At its peak in 1982, the series attracted an audience of 1.94 million (25 percent of the available audience) during the "CBC Sunday night family hour" (7:30 P.M. time slot). Beachcombers was one of the few Canadian productions of its time to be widely exported, broadcast in a single season in as many as 34 countries, including Greece, Australia, Italy, and Britain. The location of the production, Gibson's Landing, a small fishing village on the coast of British Columbia, generated upwards of 100,000 tourists a year as a result of the show's popularity.

     Despite the international appeal of Beachcombers, the program was often interpreted by Canadians as the quintessential Canadian program. This was true both in terms of its economic development-a relatively low-budget product of the publicly subsidized CBC, as well as culturally, in the sense that it presented a relatively innocent, unglamorous group of characters and storylines, which distinguished the series from much of the U.S. prime-time programming distributed on Canadian airwaves. Ironically, CBC management at tempted to revamp the series in its last years by in­ creasing the level of action and violence in the storylines, decreasing the contrast with its competition. This move was publicly criticized by longtime cast members, particularly Gerussi, who saw this as an "Americanization" of Canadian programming. By the 1988-89 season, Beachcombers' audience fell to 990,000, and the program was canceled the following year.

     From the 1970s, Gerussi accumulated dozens of television credits as a guest character on various Canadian and U.S.-Canada coproductions, including E.N.G., McQueen, Seeing Things, Hangin' In, Wojeck, Wiseguy, and CBC's Side Effects. Gerussi was often cast in roles that took advantage of his "larger than life" persona. For example, Gerussi acted as the host of the Canada Day telecast, and the opening of the Canada's National Arts Centre. Gerussi also hosted his own CBC afternoon cooking program for four years entitled Celebrity Cooks. This weekday production, of­ ten shot in one take, drew on the host's personality and ability to interact with the celebrities who acted as guest chefs. Through his association with the Beachcombers series, and his decision to locate his career permanently in Canada rather than in the larger U.S. market, Gerussi developed a particularly strong link to Canada and its television industry.