Madeleine Sherwood est une actrice canadienne, née le 13 novembre 1922 à Outremont (Montréal, Canada) et morte le 23 avril 2016 à Saint-Hippolyte (province du Québec, Canada).

Biographie

Sherwood was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. During the Civil Rights Movement she met and worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the late 1950s and 1960s and went south to join CORE (Congress on Racial Equality). She was arrested during a Freedom Walk, jailed and sentenced to six months hard labor for "Endangering the Customs and Mores of the People of Alabama". Her lawyer, Fred Grey, was the first African-American lawyer to represent a white woman south of the Mason–Dixon Line. During this period, she reportedly lost much of her sense of hearing.

During the 1980s, she received a grant from A.F.I. as one of the first women to direct short films for the A.F.I. (along with Cicely Tyson, Joanne Woodward, and others). She wrote, directed and acted in her film, Good Night Sweet Prince, which received excellent notices.

In the 1970s, she met Gloria Steinem, Betty Dodson and other activists at the First Women’s Sexual Conference at Barnard College in New York City. From there she started consciousness raising groups and counseling workshops for Women and Incest. In the early 1990s, she returned to Canada and resettled in Victoria, British Columbia and Saint-Hippolyte, Quebec. Although she was a longtime resident of the United States, she has remained a Canadian citizen all her life. She has one daughter, two grandchildren and six great-grand children. She is an active member of the Society of Friends (Quakers).