Most actors need a more regimented discipline like playing music to bring order and support between roles. But actor and singer-songwriter Bill Colgate is doing it the other way around.

“Acting pays the bills,” said Colgate. Over the years he has appeared in numerous prime-time television shows and motion pictures; shows like Sue Thomas FBI and Relic Hunter and movies like Robocop. He also does voices, and may be recognized as the voice of Mr. Mole in Franklin the Turtle or Billy Dog in The Busy World of Richard Scary.

His agent tells him he has just been booked onto the Jon Dore Show, a new series to air on the Comedy Network.

Colgate is a full-time musician with regular gigs at the Graffiti on Baldwin Street in Kensington Market and the Dominion on Queen on Queen Street East in Toronto. “I would love to be able to bring my music to Muskoka,” he said. “I hope to persuade the Huntsville Festival of the Arts to consider me for next season. I appear solo, as well as with my band the Urbane Guerillas. My music is lyric-driven, uprooted roots music.” His roots in Muskoka and on Lake of Bays date back more than 50 years, and he still enjoys his Lake of Bays cottage today.

“My song Lake of Bays appeared on my first CD When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth,” he said. “It was inspired by my early days, when Bigwin Inn was still open and having dances. When the only rock music you could pick up on radio was done by jury-rigging a copper-wire aerial up into the trees, hoping to catch the latest Dylan, Beatles or Hendrix tune. The radio station was late at night, out of Wheeling, West Virginia.”

Colgate saw his first live band, Mandala, at Bigwin Inn and used to hitchhike on Saturday nights over to Hidden Valley to see such bands as Crowbar, Vanilla Fudge and Lighthouse.

“My cottage on the south shore of Lake of Bays, opposite Bigwin Island, is where I spend as much time as I can today,” he said. “It has been in the family since 1967. In the ’50s my parents rented a cottage in Baysville and from 1959 to 1969 I went to a summer camp on Portage Bay where I ended up as a counsellor, taking canoe trips around the Lake of Bays. I always had my guitar with me back then.”

Colgate's latest CD boomer bust, with the Urbane Guerillas, was released earlier this year. The song Lake of Bays is available for free download from Colgate’s MySpace page at www.myspace.com/billcolgate.