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Springford, Norma

Norma Springford
Norma Springford

Actor, director, and professor of theatre, born Norma Linton in St. John, New Brunswick in 1916; died in 1991, after working in the theatre for over five decades. She graduated from the University of New Brunswick, and studied theatre with Elizabeth Sterling Haynes. After working in amateur theatre in New Brunswick, she came to Montreal in 1942 where she and her husband soon joined up with the Montreal Repertory Theatre/MRT.

She managed the the Quebec Drama Festival, worked with the Shakespeare Open-Air Playhouse with Theodore Komisarjevsky, William Shatner and Christopher Plummer. She then ran the Mountain Playhouse for eleven seasons until it closed in 1961. She was also one of the co-founders of Playwrights' Workshop Montreal.

She became one of the first Canadian judges for the Dominion Drama Festival before helping to form a drama program at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia), where she was on the drama faculty from 1958 to 1982, and acted as design consultant for Concordia's Douglas Burns Theatre. In 1984, she was awarded an Honorary Degree from Concordia.

Source: Herbert Whittaker. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, eds Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989.

Profile by Gaetan Charlebois.

Last updated 2021-11-02