Donald Austin Cullen (January 18, 1933 – June 26, 2022) was a Canadian actor, comedian, writer, and proprietor of the Bohemian Embassy, which he operated, off and on, in various Toronto locations from 1960 to the early 1990s.
Performers included musicians Gordon Lightfoot, Sylvia Fricker (later Tyson) and Joni Mitchell, and poets Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Milton Acorn, and Al Purdy.
[6] A later edition of the Village Revue, under the title, Two's Company, featuring only Baldaro and Cullen, played Cafe Le Hibou, the Ottawa coffeehouse, in September 1965.
Toronto Daily Star theatre critic Nathan Cohen described Cullen as "having the look of a famished vampire and a voice trembling on the brink of uninhibited hysteria.
Emulating Alec Guinness's ability to change his appearance according to the character he played, using makeup, costume, hair, and props, Cullen said he enjoyed when people said, "You were on Wayne and Shuster?
In 1967, he directed it at the Studio Arena Theater in Buffalo, New York, with a cast of Toronto performers: Barrie Baldaro, Roy Wordsworth, Stuart Hamilton, and Nick Simons in the role that Cullen declined to play while staging the show.
The show premiered in St. John's, Newfoundland, in late January, to negative response, and had toured across the country for about two months, before the producer called in another writer, Roderick Cook, to try to fix it.
In early 1974, Cullen was a writer on Global Television's Everything Goes, a late-night variety program, airing weeknights, that ran for 100 episodes, where he worked alongside talent including Dan Aykroyd, Ken Finkleman, and Martin Short.
The Bohemian Embassy returned in 1974, when Cullen, having finished his Global contract, accepted an offer to resurrect the coffeehouse at Toronto's new cultural facility, Harbourfront.
[17] Cullen continued to foster comic talent, as Artistic co-Director, with Wordsworth, of the Leacock Festival of Humour, in Orillia, Ontario, for seven years in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
[22] Cullen revived the Bohemian Embassy twice more, for short runs: for nine months in 1979, as a CBC radio program, and in 1991–92, for almost one year, at 318 Queen Street West, in Toronto.
[23] As a student, John Robert Colombo had organized readings at the original Bohemian Embassy, and Cullen enlisted him to help with literary events at the 1970s incarnation of the venue.