Patrick portrayals

A few actors have played members of the Patrick family in TV and film.

In 2008, Fox Sports Network aired an episode of its Amazing Sports Stories series called Lester Patrick: The Old Man in the Net, which included dramatizations of Lester’s star turn in goal during the 1928 Stanley Cup playoffs.

Playing Lester was Ron Rogell, whose other acting credits include All My Children. He posted the whole thing on his YouTube channel and you can watch it below. It includes interviews with Lester’s grandson Craig Patrick, veteran hockey writer Stan Fischler, and the late John Halligan, a former New York Rangers PR man.

In a nice touch, the show reveals at the end that its three interviewees had something in common: they were all recipients of the Lester Patrick Trophy for outstanding contributions to hockey in the United States.

(The same show included a few seconds of Lester’s actual voice. Click here for a rundown of the few instances where the real Lester appeared on film.)

The aforementioned Craig Patrick was assistant coach of the 1980 US Olympic men’s hockey team, whose story was told in the 1981 TV movie Miracle On Ice, in which Craig was played by Robert Pierce. In the 2003 movie Miracle, Craig was played by Noah Emmerich, also known for Beautiful Girls, The Truman Show, and the FX series The Americans, among other things.

Coincidentally, portions of Miracle were filmed in Rossland, BC, standing in for Lake Placid, New York. Rossland was the site of what Lester Patrick described as his greatest game (although he was probably conflating a couple of different games).

The second episode of the 2006 CBC-TV series Hockey: A People’s History included a recreation of Frank and Lester booting along in one of their early vehicles, but the actors were not credited. I have cued it up below. There is also a voiceover by someone playing Frank Patrick, but the actor is not specifically credited either.

There was also a Lester Patrick movie that (alas) never was. Or maybe two of them.

In late March 1992, syndicated entertainment columnists Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith reported that hockey fan Richard Dean Anderson, TV’s MacGyver, had acquired the rights to The Lester Patrick Story.

Anderson said he received permission from Lester’s great-grandson (unfortunately the story didn’t say which one) and that the Patrick family was “extremely happy with the idea of my playing the part.” Anderson regularly played in charity hockey games on a celebrity team that also included Dave Coulier, Alan Thicke, and Matt Frewer.

“We’ve already developed a treatment for the story and submitted it to the family,” Anderson said, although he didn’t explain who “we” was. He added that he hoped to get the project going within a couple of years, otherwise, “I’m going to have to play Lester Patrick in his wheelchair.”

The project didn’t happen. It would be interesting to know if the treatment still exists. But two years later, when Vancouver and New York were playing in the Stanley Cup final, John Armstrong of The Vancouver Sun reported that MacGyver producer Robert Frederick and his Vancouver-based company MVP Movie Vista Productions planned to shoot Ranger, the story of Lester Patrick and the 1928 New York Rangers.

Was this the same project with a different title? Or a new one altogether? It was unclear, for while Frederick suggested that Anderson might appear in the film (perhaps with other hockey-playing actors like Michael Ontkean and Michael J. Fox), he didn’t have him in mind for the title role. Instead? Robert Redford or Kevin Kline. However, Ranger never happened either.

Had a much earlier movie about Lester Patrick been made, there would have been a leading contender to play him. Andy Lytle wrote in the Toronto Star Weekly of Jan. 17, 1948 that Lester had “some of the stage attributes of Jack Barrymore, the Great Profile, to whom some said he bore a resemblance.” Lester’s protege Frank Boucher also saw the similarity.

Finally, the Ottawa Citizen of March 9, 1956 carried a listing for a half-hour program on CBO radio called “The Lester Patrick Story,” a “semi-documentary account of ‘the silver fox’ of hockey.” It is not clear if the program featured Lester himself or someone portraying him.

Updated Feb. 11, 2025 to add the part about the Lester Patrick movies that weren’t. Updated April 1, 2025 to add the Andy Lytle quote and the CBO semi-documentary. Updated on June 18, 2025 to add the clip from Hockey: A People’s History.