FAESSLER o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-12-21 published
MOORE,
J.
Mavor, C.C., O.B.C., D.Litt, LL.D., F.R.C.S.
Mavor MOORE passed away peacefully on December 18th after a number
of years of failing health in Victoria, British Columbia at the
age of 87. Writer, actor, producer, composer and teacher, he
was Professor Emeritus of York University, and from 1991-2004
Research Professor, Fine Arts and Humanities at the University
of Victoria. The first artist to chair the Canada Council for
the Arts (1979-83), he was also founding chair (1996-98) of the
British Columbia Arts Council. In 1999 he received the Governor
General's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. He was
a Companion of the Order of Canada, and among other awards holds
the Order of British Columbia, the Diplôme d'honneur, the 1984
Molson Prize for the Humanities, and honorary degrees from eight
universities. He was recently inducted into the Starwalk Hall
of Fame at Vancouver's Orpheum Theatre, and invited to become
a Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada. At 14 he was active
in early Canadian radio, becoming a feature producer for Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation Radio after graduation from the University
of Toronto. After overseas service in World War 2 (psychological
warfare), he joined the inaugural team of Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation's new International Service. In 1946 he and his mother
Dora Mavor
MOORE launched Toronto's New Play Society, a seedbed
of Canada's postwar professional theatre, where he initiated
the record- breaking annual review, Spring Thaw -- while commuting
to New York to write and direct documentaries for the United
Nations, three of which won international Peabody Awards. In
1950 he was appointed Chief Producer for the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation's new television network, leaving in 1954 to join
the Stratford Festival and to produce his own plays and musicals.
For stage, radio, television and film These now number over 100,
including book, lyrics and music for Sunshine Town and A Christmas
Carol, book and lyrics for Johnny Belinda, and opera librettos
for Harry Somers' Louis Riel and Louis Applebaums' Erewhon. He
commissioned, produced and contributed lyrics to the world-wide
hit Anne of Green Gables. He translated plays by the Quebec writers
Gratien Gélinas, Marie-Claire Blais and Jacques Languirand. Works
of his have been presented in the U.S.A., the United Kingdom,
Europe and Asia. Two of his short plays, Getting In and The Store,
have been made into films. He produced, directed and acted for
radio, television and theatre across Canada and in the U.S.A.,
and appeared in some sixty films. From 1958-60 he was the drama
critic for the Toronto Telegram, and from 1984-90 the Toronto
Globe and Mail's first cultural affairs columnist. His essays
on cultural policy are widely circulated. A founding board member
of the National Theatre School,
MOORE was the first chair of
the Canadian Theatre Centre and of the Guild of Canadian Playwrights
founding head of both Charlottetown's Confederation Centre and
Toronto's St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts; co-chair of the World
Conference on Arts, Business and Politics at Expo 86 in Vancouver.
Long active in international organizations such as the Center
for InterAmerican Studies, Les Jeunesses Musicales, and the Canada-Israel
Cultural Foundation, he was invited to the United Nations in
1994 to address United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization's World Commission on Culture and Development. His
1994 memoir Reinventing Myself has been called "a classic of
Canadian arts and letters, history, satire and autobiography."
He is survived by his beloved wife
Alexandra
BROWNING to whom
he was married for 26 years and their daughter Jessa. From his
first marriage to Darwina
FAESSLER; his four daughters Dorothea
"Tedde"' (Don
SHEBIB), Rosalind, Marili, and Charlotte (Patrick
MAZURKEVITCH;) his grandchildren Zoe, Suzanna, Noah, Katie and
Emily; great-grandchild Ella
BELLE, and his cousins, nephews,
nieces. The family would like to thank the staff of The Lodge
at Broadmead for their care and compassion and to Doctor Chris Morgan
for his many years of Friendship and wise counsel. A celebration
of his life and achievements will be held at a later date in
Toronto. A lecture series named after him to perpetuate his dedication
to the arts in Canada will be established at York University
where he made such an important contribution. If desired, donations
may be made to Mavor Moore Fund, York University Foundation,
York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto M3J 1P3. To celebrate
his legendary wit The Mavor Moore Theatre Society was established
in Vancouver with a mandate to create, produce, present and promote
live theatre that is a witty and bold catalyst for change, and
to establish a theatre company in his name. Contributions may
be made to the society at 208 West 23rd Avenue, Vancouver, British
Columbia V5Y 2H3. In Victoria, Friends and colleagues are invited
to a tribute followed by a reception at the University Club,
University of Victoria on Saturday, the 6th of January, 2007
at 2 p.m. "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women
merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And
one man in his time plays many parts." -Shakespeare 'Around the
corner there may wait A new road, or a secret gate' - Tolkien
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FAESSLER o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-12-21 published
Mavor MOORE,
Actor,
Producer And Writer: (1919-2006)
A 'one-man cultural conglomerate,' he went from a job as youngest
producer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to being appointed
the first artist to become head of the Canada Council, with many
stops in between, writes Sandra
MARTIN
By Sandra MARTIN,
Page S7
As multitalented as he was prolific, as romantically restless
as he was artistically ambitious, Mavor
MOORE worked all sides
of the cultural street as an actor, director, producer, dramatist,
impresario, composer, writer, critic, cultural commentator and
academic. It is hard to believe that he was only one person.
For five decades in this country beginning in the 1940s, he was
the happening person for most cultural enterprises, including
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Spring Thaw, the Stratford
Festival, the Charlottetown Festival and the St. Lawrence Centre
for the Arts in Toronto.
In all, he wrote more than 100 works for stage, radio, television
and film, including the book lyrics and music for Sunshine Town,
the book and lyrics for Johnny Belinda and the librettos for
Louis Applebaum's opera Erewhon and Harry Somers's opera Louis
Riel.
"He had great knowledge about the theatre and a great sense of
history," said opera and theatre director Leon
MAJOR, who succeeded
Mr. MOORE as general director of the St. Lawrence Centre for
the Arts. "He took risks with young directors and then let young
directors do what they wanted to do, guiding them as they went."
After commenting on how much he had learned from Mr.
MOORE, not
only about the theatre but also about dealing with actors and
writers, Mr.
MAJOR said yesterday: "In his heart, I think that
he was a teacher more than anything… because he took a lot of
time with young people to talk to them and listen to them and
explain."
Mr. MOORE was a man who truly believed in the development of
Canadian theatre, he added.
"As I was growing up [in the 1950s and 1960s], he and Lister
Sinclair were the two real Renaissance figures in Canada, the
two people who were sophisticated and civilized," said Peter
HERNDORF, president of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. "Nobody
in the country has ever been so accomplished and as effective
in doing all of these art forms over a career." And yet, "for
a man who had all of these talents and all of these accomplishments,
he was very rooted" in Canada.
"He was a very, very likeable individual who didn't change over
the 40-odd years that I knew him," he said, pointing out that
the jobs Mr.
MOORE took on as an administrator were fraught with
peril and that he always managed to avoid controversy and resentment
without ever giving up what he was trying to achieve artistically.
"He had a very good emotional quotient" that made him "comfortable
enough in his own ego that it was easy for him to encourage younger
artists," he said.
"He did everything," lyricist Elaine Campbell said yesterday.
"He knew what was happening all over the world. He wrote so many
musicals and they were all good, but he was always there encouraging
people by saying, 'We're Canadians, we can do it.'"
James Mavor
MOORE was the middle of three sons of John, an Anglican
cleric, and the indomitable Dora (née
MAVOR)
MOORE.
His
Toronto
childhood was culturally enriched because his mother was an actor
and theatrical producer. He watched her play Viola in Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night when he was only 7 and she returned the favour
five years later by producing his first play for a girls' dramatic
club.
By the time he was 10, he and his brothers were producing neighbourhood
puppet shows (drawing heavily on the Bard for their plots) and
he had made his first radio broadcast as part of a choir singing
Christmas music. His parents separated in 1929 after his father,
who appears to have been a bounder, left his mother to raise
their three sons on her own. Young Mavor helped augment the family
finances by acting in The Crusoe Boys, a daily radio serial.
After elementary school, he went to the University of Toronto
Schools, then a boys only, academically elite institution. He
expanded his theatrical range to play Falstaff and Macbeth in
school productions. From University of Toronto Schools, he entered
the University of Toronto in 1936, where he studied philosophy
and English and participated in theatricals, becoming the first
student director to win the University Drama Festival, serving
as president of the Players' Guild and the Philosophical Society,
as drama critic for the student newspaper The Varsity, and as
literary editor of The Undergraduate. After failing a year because
of his heavy complement 1 with a first-class honours degree.
He immediately joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as
its youngest producer. He was 22. His poor eyesight made him
ineligible for active service overseas during the Second World
War, so, instead, he produced wartime radio features for the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Later, he served as a psychological
warfare officer in Canadian Army Intelligence attached to the
Canadian High Commission in London. At the same time, he married
Darwina (Dilly)
FAESSLER on October 14, 1943. They eventually
had four daughters: Dorothea (Tedde), Rosalind, Marili and Charlotte.
From 1944 to 1945, Mr.
MOORE worked in the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation's international service, becoming senior producer
for the Pacific region in 1946. In the late 1940s, he also did
summer stints in the information division of the newly formed
United Nations Secretariat in New York, and with the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization seminar on
education, writing and directing documentaries, three of which
won the Peabody Award.
Meantime, he was directing plays for Spring Thaw, the annual
Toronto revue that his mother had created under the auspices
of the New Play Society (which they had jointly founded in 1946).
He directed the first Spring Thaw, which opened on April 1, 1948,
and ran for three performances at the theatre in the Royal Ontario
Museum. His mother produced the revue until 1961, when she sold
the production rights to her son. He bumped up the production
values and the performance schedule, extending the annual run
at the height of Spring Thaw's success into midsummer and across
the country. In 1966, he began leasing the production rights
to younger producers.
Always in the centre of the cultural action, Mr.
MOORE was chief
producer in television's fledgling days at the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation from 1950 to 1954, having turned down an offer from
CBS to direct its top television drama series, Studio One.
One of the people who answered to him at the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation was Norman Campbell, who had been working in radio
in Vancouver. In 1952, he reported for duty as a television director,
along with his wife, Elaine Campbell.
"I will always remember him as the first person I met at the
Canadian
Broadcasting
Corporation," she said yesterday of Mr.
MOORE.
"He was wonderful. He was so full of ideas." She remembers the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as expansive and accommodating,
with nobody vacillating about productions by worrying about audience
numbers or reactions. "If you had an idea, you went to Mavor,
and said: 'I want to do this show or that show and you did it.'"
The Mavor MOORE show she remembers best from that time is Sunshine
Town, based on Stephen Leacock's classic Sunshine Sketches of
a Little Town. Mr.
MOORE wrote the book, lyrics and music for
the show, which aired first on radio as The Hero of Mariposa
on March 31, 1954, and then on television as Sunshine Town that
December. It was also performed on stage in Toronto and Orillia,
Ontario (Mr. Leacock's home town), and later revived at the Charlottetown
Festival and the Mariposa Festival. "He had beautiful songs and
it was a funny script based on Stephen Leacock's humour," said
Mrs. Campbell. "He didn't miss a bit of it."
In 1954, Mr.
MOORE quit the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
to join Tyrone Guthrie at the new Stratford Festival, to act
and to produce his own plays and musicals. His tenure was brief,
but he did appear as Escalus in Measure for Measure in the festival's
inaugural season.
His richest creative period was probably his years as the founding
artistic director of the Charlottetown Festival, from 1964 to
1968. Mrs. Campbell tells a charming story about Mr.
MOORE's
reprising some songs about Anne of Green Gables from a television
show that Mr. Campbell had produced, at the gala performance,
in front of the Queen, at the opening of the Confederation Centre
for the Arts in Charlottetown in 1964. Apparently, the Queen
loved the songs but wondered where the rest of the show was.
Mr. MOORE interpreted these comments as a "command" from the
monarch and issued an invitation to the Campbells to come up
with a musical about Anne.
And that was the genesis of the musical Anne of Green Gables.
Mr. Campbell wrote the music, Don Harron adapted the book and
Mrs.
Campbell wrote many of the lyrics. In the end, Mr.
MOORE
contributed two key songs, The Words and Open the Window, which
opens the second act. "He has been part of our trio ever since,"
she said.
After the breakup of his first marriage in the mid-1960s, Mr.
MOORE
married literary biographer Phyllis
GROSSKURTH in May of 1968.
Nathan Cohen announced their nuptials by writing in the Toronto
Star: "
Double congratulations to Mavor
MOORE. He married literary
historian Phyllis
GROSSKURTH on Sunday, and
on Monday Toronto
City Council finally gave the go-ahead signal for the building
of the St. Lawrence Centre." As general director, Mr.
MOORE saw
the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts opened and passed on the
reins to Leon
MAJOR in 1970.
The two men had met in the early '60s because Mr.
MAJOR had directed
a couple of Spring Thaws. Mr.
MAJOR went to Halifax in 1963 to
start the Neptune Theatre and invited Mr.
MOORE to play Undershaft
in Major Barbara. "It was very important to me to have him there
because he was so knowledgeable and he could bring some weight
to Neptune," Mr.
MAJOR said.
Mr. MOORE also directed plays for Neptune in subsequent seasons.
The two men worked together years later when Mr.
MAJOR directed
the opera Louis Riel, for which Mr.
MOORE had written the libretto.
"Working with him on that was a joy because he was a writer who
didn't think every word he wrote was sacrosanct and he was supportive
about the production," said Mr.
MAJOR.
From the St. Lawrence Centre, Mr.
MOORE accepted an appointment
in the faculty of arts at the newly established York University
in Toronto. While teaching at York, he took on yet another responsibility
as the first artist appointed head of the Canada Council, a position
he held from 1979 to 1983. York designated him professor emeritus
in 1984 when he reached 65.
By now, his second marriage had ended. In 1979, he and Harry
Freedman attended the Courtney Summer Youth Camp in British Columbia,
supervising the production of the opera Abracadabra -- Mr. Freedman
wrote the music and Mr.
MOORE the libretto. Soprano Alexandra
(Sandra) BROWNING was also there as a teacher and singer. "It
was instant attraction," she said yesterday from Victoria. "Our
eyes met in the cafeteria and we clicked." They were married
the following year and have one daughter, Jessica.
He moved to British Columbia, settling first in Vancouver, then
in Victoria in late 1980s. He made his presence known in the
best possible way by teaching at the University of British Columbia,
serving as co-chair of the World Conference on Arts, Business
and Politics at Expo 86 in Vancouver, as founding chair of the
British Columbia Arts Council from 1996 to 1998, and as an adjunct
research professor in fine arts and humanities at the University
of Victoria.
He published his aptly named memoirs, Reinventing Myself, in
1994 when he was 75, although he largely limited himself to the
first 50 years of his life. In reviewing the book for The Globe
and Mail, Martin Knelman called Mr.
MOORE a "one-man cultural
conglomerate." He praised the book as "a lively and informative
memoir almost preposterously crammed with incident," but he chastised
Mr. MOORE for his frustrating lack of disclosure and introspection
not only about his own life, but his relationship with his formidable
mother. But then that was one of Mr.
MOORE's more charming qualities
his diplomacy and his amicability that enabled him to get
along with almost anybody, including his three wives, all of
whom were on friendly terms with him until the end of his life.
James Mavor
MOORE was born in Toronto on March 8, 1919. He died
in Victoria after a period of declining health on December 18,
2006. He was 87. He is survived by his wife, Alexandra (Sandra)
Browning, his five daughters and their families, five grandchildren
and one great-grandchild. A tribute to his life will be held
at the University Club in Victoria on January 6, 2007, at 2 p.m.
Another celebration will be held in Toronto at a later date.
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FAESSLER o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2006-01-02 published
TOVELL,
Walter
Massey, B.A.M.S., PhD.
Peacefully at the Avalon Retirement Centre, Orangeville on December
30, 2005 in his 90th year. Born Toronto June 25, 1916. Eldest
grandchild of Susan
DENTON and Walter
MASSEY.
Raised at Dentonia
Park, East York. Brother of Freeman, Victoria, British Columbia
Harold, New York (deceased), and Vincent, Toronto; Father of
Mariane MUIR, Courtenay, British Columbia, and Denton
TOVELL,
Toronto; Grandfather of Wilson
MUIR, Denton
MUIR, Robert
TOVELL
and Janet GRASSI;
Great-grandfather of Ryan
GRASSI and Elliott
MUIR.
Predeceased by his wives Anita
FAESSLER and Ruth
MARSHALL.
Walter attended Upper Canada College and was a member of their
cricket club and was a life long sports enthusiast. After graduating
from the University of Toronto and the California Institute of
Technology Dr.
TOVELL found careers and interests throughout
his life that turned his love of nature, the environment, and
history into USAble skills. He was Faculty member at the Department
of Geological Sciences at U of T; a pioneer in exploration geology
using helicopters; serving the Royal Ontario Museum for 35 years,
finally as its Director; member of the Metropolitan Toronto Region
Conservation Authority; author of the Guide to the Geology of
the Niagara Escarpment; staff of Scarborough College; life member
of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada; member
of the Federation of Ontario Naturalists and Upper Credit Naturalists
former Board member of the Niagara Escarpment Commission and
Canada Trust's Friends of the Environment; former Director of
Coalition On the Niagara Escarpment. Walter was a life long teacher
and educator. He was passionate and funny in his lectures and
tours. Walter received numerous Government, naturalist, and conservation
awards during his lifetime and was considered a leading authority
on glacial geology. Since retiring to his schoolhouse in Mono
Township and then to the Lord Dufferin Centre in Orangeville,
Walter has been a founder, Board Member and supporter of the
Dufferin County Museum and Archives and remained a mentor to
the staff until weeks before his death. Dr.
TOVELL was the donor
of art and artifacts to numerous Canadian, Provincial and local
museums and galleries. Walter made numerous Friends throughout
his life and there are many who will always remember his generosity
and loud laughter. Friends will be received at the Dods and McNair
Funeral Home and Chapel 21 First St. Orangeville (519-941-1392)
on Saturday January 14th, 2006 from 2: 00 p.m.-4:00 p.m. A celebration
of Dr. Walter
TOVELL's life will be held at the Historic Church
at the Dufferin County Museum and Archives (Hwy. 89 and Airport
Rd.) on Sunday, January 15th at 2: 00 p.m. Dr.
TOVELL wished donations
to be made to the Dufferin County Museum and Archives Trust,
P.O. Box 120, Rosemont, Ontario L0N 1R0 in lieu of flowers. A
tree has been planted in memory of Dr.
TOVELL in the Dods and McNair
Memorial Forest at the Island Lake Conservation Area, Orangeville.
A dedication service will be held on Sunday, September 10th,
2006 at 2: 30 p.m. (Condolences may be offered to the family at
www.dodsandmcnair.com)
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