Canada on Screen: The Railway Castles Where Hitchcock, Marilyn and Hollywood North Came to Film

Canada's grand hotels were built by railway companies, and they were designed to look like château fantasies at the end of the line. That makes them irresistible to filmmakers, who have used them to suggest everything from Edwardian New England to a mountain lodge on the edge of nowhere.

Fairmont Le Château Frontenac: I Confess (1953), French Girl (2024)

Alfred Hitchcock filmed I Confess entirely in Quebec City, and it opens with a shot of the Château Frontenac, the copper-roofed hotel above the St Lawrence often described as the most photographed hotel in the world. Montgomery Clift plays a priest who hears a murderer's confession and then becomes the prime suspect himself, bound by the seal of confession to stay silent. Anne Baxter co-stars.

Seventy years later, the hotel was at the centre of the romantic comedy French Girl (2024), in which a Brooklyn teacher follows his Québécoise girlfriend home when she's offered the chance to compete for an executive chef job at a renowned restaurant in the Château Frontenac. The film has sent a new wave of fans to the hotel.

Fairmont Banff Springs: River of No Return (1954), The Edge (1997)

When Marilyn Monroe came to the Rockies in 1953 to film Otto Preminger's River of No Return with Robert Mitchum, the cast and crew arrived by special train and made the Banff Springs their base. Monroe had sprained her ankle filming river scenes in Jasper and spent her Banff stay on crutches; the hotel's longtime historian says the bellboys flipped a coin each morning to decide who got to push her wheelchair around the lobby. Joe DiMaggio joined her at the hotel, and Look magazine photographed her by the pool. Guests still ask which room she stayed in. The hotel won't say.

The hotel also appears in The Edge (1997), the survival thriller written by David Mamet in which Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin end up stranded in the wilderness with a very large bear, and in the Chevy Chase comedy Goose on the Loose.

Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise: Springtime in the Rockies (1942)

Lake Louise was a favourite of early Hollywood, and director Irving Cummings chose the Chateau Lake Louise as the setting for Springtime in the Rockies, a Technicolor musical starring Betty Grable, John Payne and Carmen Miranda. The hotel stands at the end of the turquoise lake beneath the Victoria Glacier, and the view from the lakeside rooms is one of the most famous in Canada.

Fairmont Empress: Little Women (1994), The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

The ivy-covered Empress, facing Victoria's Inner Harbour since 1908, appears in Gillian Armstrong's Little Women (1994), the adaptation starring Winona Ryder, Susan Sarandon, Kirsten Dunst and Christian Bale, for which Ryder was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. It also appears in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997), which won the Grand Prix at Cannes and earned Egoyan two Oscar nominations.

Fairmont Royal York: Molly's Game (2017)

Aaron Sorkin's directing debut, Molly's Game, stars Jessica Chastain as Molly Bloom, the former Olympic-class skier who ran the world's most exclusive high-stakes poker games. Parts of it were shot at the Royal York, across from Toronto's Union Station, before the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Sorkin was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.