Harry Rintoul (December 9, 1956 - January 14, 2002) was a Canadian playwright and theatre director. He was best known for his 1990 play Brave Hearts,^[1] which was noted as one of the first significant gay-themed plays in Canadian theatre history to address gay themes in a rural setting outside of the traditional gay urban meccas of Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal.^[2]

Born in Canmore, Alberta, Rintoul moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba in childhood. As a young adult he moved to Regina, Saskatchewan for a time, during which he began writing Brave Hearts,^[3] but then moved back to Winnipeg and founded Theatre Projects Manitoba. He met the woman he'd marry in Winnipeg, and they moved to rural Manitoba and had a daughter before he died.

The first production of Brave Hearts was staged by Buddies in Bad Times in Toronto, where it was a Dora Mavor Moore Award nominee for Outstanding New Play, Small Theatre Division in 1991.^[4] In 1992 Brave Hearts was included in Making Out, the first significant anthology of gay-themed Canadian plays, alongside works by David Demchuk, Sky Gilbert, Daniel MacIvor, Colin Thomas and Ken Garnhum;^[5] in 2006, it appeared in the anthology Perfectly Abnormal: Seven Gay Plays, alongside plays by Greg Kearney, Shawn Postoff, Christian Lloyd, Greg MacArthur, Ken Brand and Michael Achtman.^[6]

Rintoul's other plays included Life and Times, Refugees,^[7] Montana,^[8] Jack of Hearts, Between Then and Now, The Convergence of Luke^[9] and Lake Nowhere.

Following his death in 2002, the Manitoba Association of Playwrights established an annual Harry S. Rintoul Memorial Award, presented to the year's best play by a Manitoba writer at the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival.^[10]