Don's career began in theatre. He was a founding member of both a touring company known as Child's Play Theatre and the Augusta Theatre Company, a collective which also featured Tracy Wright and Daniel Brooks. Working with these companies, he had a hand in inventive productions like the Daniel Brooks-directed Drinking, Ends and Odds, The Man With the Million Pound Note, and the critically acclaimed Toronto Fringe Festival favourite, Indulgence. He also starred in the plays Red Tape and Measure for Measure.

It was while performing in a self-penned play at Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille that McKellar was first drawn into the world of film. A young director named Bruce McDonald was looking for a writer for his first feature film and Daniel Brooks, a mutual friend, introduced him to the playwright. Don just assumed that Bruce's interest in him had been sparked by the play and it was not until years later that he found out Bruce had never even seen it. In fact, he's still not sure if Bruce had ever seen anything he'd written when they met!

Even if he knew nothing of Don's talent at the beginning, it soon became apparent that the two would be almost perfect for each other artistically. McDonald offered Don one hundred dollars to write him a script for Highway 61 and sent him off with folders full of ideas which he wanted put together into a story. Don was faced with a tough decision: should he try to work with Bruce's ideas and see what he could come up with or do it his own way and risk losing the hundred bucks? He chose the latter and Bruce was very impressed with the results. It was then that Don realized that they could work together.

While Don was writing Highway 61, Bruce was busy making a documentary about a rock band touring in Northern Ontario. When the band proved to be less than reliable documentary subjects, the project grew into McDonald's first rock n' road film, Roadkill. McKellar was enlisted to write the script and also taken on the shoot to look after continuity. Roadkill proved to be quite the happy accident, earning the 1989 Toronto-CityTV Award for Best Canadian Feature Film. Don received Genie nominations for his contributions to the film in the categories of Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role and Best Screenplay.

Following that success, Don gave an eerie supporting performance in Atom Egoyan's The Adjuster and landed his first leading role as Pokey Jones, the small town musician (okay, barber) in Highway 61. He delivers such a natural and charming performance that it's hard to believe Bruce was reluctant to cast his screenwriter in the role. According to Don, "Bruce auditioned everyone in town before me".

After Highway 61, McKellar enrolled in the Canadian Film Centre's directing program. It was there that he made the short film Blue, staring David Cronenberg as Tom, the repressed carpet man.

Following his time at the film centre, Don was approached by Niv Finchman of Rhombus Media to co-write a biopic on the legendary and enigmatic Glenn Gould with director Francois Girard. The resulting film, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, became an art house hit and multiple award winner. It was even parodied on The Simpsons, a sure sign that you've cracked the mainstream consciousness. The Girard/McKellar dynamic proved to be successful enough that the the two also collaborated on Girard's 1998 film, the popular, Academy Award-winning The Red Violin.

In between Girard features, Don spent most of his time in front of the camera. Working with such luminous directors as Atom Egoyan (Exotica, Bach Cello Suite #4: Sarabande), David Cronenberg (eXistenZ), Peter Lynch (Arrowhead, The Herd) and Patricia Rozema (When Night is Falling), he gave a number of memorable and diverse performances. His turn as Thomas, the quiet pet store owner in Exotica even won him a Genie for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

It was also during this period (1994 to be exact) that then-head of CBC's English television, Ivan Fecan, suggested that Don should write something for the Corporation. "Sure Ivan," Don responded. "How about a new King of Kensington?" In 1995, Don put pen to paper and Twitch City was born. By this time, Fecan was no longer head of the CBC and no one there was quite sure what Don was talking about, but after some months of silence, the new guard seemed equally impressed with the idea and Twitch City got the green light. Premiering in January of 1998, the original six episodes of the quirky and brilliant series brought Don's work to a whole new audience. Support for the series was so strong that Twitch City returned by popular demand to the CBC for seven more episodes in early 2000.

1998 also saw the release of Last Night, Don's feature-length directorial debut. Last Night grew out of an invitation to make one of a group of films about the end of the millennium from the French firm Haut et Court. Not wanting to make something that would become dated easily, Don quickly changed the subject from the end of the millennium to the end of the world. The resulting film (which he also wrote and starred in) was a funny and touching exploration of humanity in its final hours that won McKellar many awards, including the Genie's Claude Jutra Award and the Prix de la Jeunesse at the Cannes film festival. It also prompted Variety to pronounce him one-to-watch on the international scene.

The seventh most important person in Canadian film (according to Shift magazine), Don still maintains residence in Toronto, where he continues to live up to Peter Lynch's description of him as "a multitask-oriented guy with so many projects on the go that it is mind-boggling". His upcoming projects include the film adaptation of Jose Saramago's award-winning novel "Blindness".

(Bio by Sarah Kurchak, with a little help from Shift & Take One magazine.)