Ian Tracey: Canadian Actor, Jack of All Trades

Canadian actor Ian Tracey is a performer of great acclaim in his home country and lots of credits appearing south of the border, too, especially in genre fare. At 42, he's best known in the U.S. for playing tough cops, dumb rednecks and psychopathic criminals. But he still has a following in Germany for a series he did when he was 14, playing the world's best-loved juvenile delinquent, Huckleberry Finn. Tracey has been around a long time and he's done a lot of different roles. The name "Ian Tracey" should be as famous as Brad Pitt or David Caruso, but hailing from Vancouver, he's still relatively unknown. That may be about to change.

Ian Tracey's series, Intelligence, is the most prominent of CBC's scanty drama lineup this fall. Intelligence is about a Vancouver pot smuggler who agrees to turn informant for the local Organized Crime Unit and CSIS (Canada's equivalent, more or less, to the CIA or MI-5). Tracey plays the smuggler, Jimmy Reardon. Tracey's performance has caught the favorable attention of most of Canada's critics (though some apparently thought they were watching a Canadian version of Dukes of Hazzard). He plays Jimmy as tough, paranoid and charismatic.