Torontoist » obituaries

Elwy Yost, 1925–2011

Growing up in the '80s in Toronto, there were many ways for you to become a lifelong lover of film well before you were old enough to drink. There was CityTV, with its Great Movies four or five times a week. There was the Toronto International Film Festival, of course—but back then it was still the Festival of Festivals, and it still was first and foremost a collection of films from around the world that had premiered at other festivals first. Reg Hartt was already showing off Bugs Bunny's dick at the Cineforum twice a week.

Mark Dailey, 1953–2010

Mark Dailey started working for Citytv in 1979. Most of Torontoist’s readers have known him as the “voice of City” for their entire lives, as has this writer. His death today at the age of fifty-seven due to complications from kidney cancer leaves a deep void in Toronto’s media landscape. Mark Dailey was the Voice. [...]

Remembering Leslie Nielsen

Canadian character actor and comic icon Leslie Nielsen passed away last night in a hospital bed in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the company of family and friends. He was eighty-four. Hailed by Roger Ebert as “the Olivier of spoofs,” Nielsen was best known for his work in genre parody films like Airplane! and the Naked [...]

Will Munro, by Bruce LaBruce

Will Munro. Photo by John Caffery. The night before I heard Will Munro had passed on to that great rock’n’roll fag bar in the sky, I was sitting in Trinity Bellwoods Park smoking a joint with my good friend and his, Kevin Hegge, the cute young man who used to work at Rotate This to [...]

Harlan Clark, 1922–2009

Harlan Clark was one of those small, quiet, essential Toronto institutions. He and his wife Norine started a Port Perry chicken farm in 1946; one year later they began selling eggs at St. Lawrence Market. According to a profile of the couple in the Toronto Star last year, one or both have them have been [...]

Martin Streek is Dead

Photo of Martin Streek, taken last September, by Jay Richards. Legendary radio announcer Martin Streek, most famous for his work on CFNY/Edge 102 over several decades, before being unceremoniously fired from the station in May, is dead. He committed suicide on Monday. The news was first reported late Monday night by Mike Boon, based on [...]

Derek Weiler, 1968–2009

Derek Weiler, editor of Quill & Quire since 2004, has died, at age forty. The Globe‘s Martin Levin says that he knows “virtually no details about Derek’s death, other than that he had been in poor health for many years, and virtually never talked about it,” going on to tell about Weiler’s tattoo, which reads [...]

Stage Legend William Hutt Dies at 87

Veteran stage actor William Hutt, famous for his many seasons playing all the great Shakespearean roles at Stratford, died today of leukemia at Stratford General Hospital at the age of 87. As a founding member of the Stratford Festival, Hutt acted and directed in 130 productions. He officially retired from the festival in 2005 playing [...]