Dora Mavor Moore - Life

Life

Born Dora Mavor in Glasgow, Scotland, she moved with her family to Toronto in 1894, when her father, James Mavor (1854-1925), became a professor of political economy at the University of Toronto. She was the first Canadian student ever to be accepted at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and graduated in 1912.

In 1915 she married Francis Moore, an Army Chaplain, but separated from him in 1928. She had three sons: Francis Wilfrid Mavor, James Mavor (known as Mavor Moore), and Peter Mavor.

In 1938, she helped found an amateur theater group called the Village Players which performed Shakespeare plays in high schools of Ontario. After World War II, in 1946, she help found the New Play Society which was the first professional theatre company in Toronto founded after the war.

In 1947, the company presented its first Canadian play, Lister Sinclair's The Man in the Blue Moon. The Society also assisted in creating the Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada. As well she helped to bring Tyrone Guthrie, the Tony Award-winning British theatrical director, to Canada.

In 1970, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada "for her contributions to theatre in Canada".

Read more about this topic:  Dora Mavor Moore

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    The Heavens. Once an object of superstition, awe and fear. Now a vast region for growing knowledge. The distance of Venus, the atmosphere of Mars, the size of Jupiter, and the speed of Mercury. All this and more we know. But their greatest mystery the heavens have kept a secret. What sort of life, if any, inhabits these other planets? Human life, like ours? Or life extremely lower in the scale. Or dangerously higher.
    Richard Blake, and William Cameron Menzies. Narrator, Invaders from Mars, at the opening of the movie (1953)

    I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.
    Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)

    Why not make an end of it all?... My life is a succession of griefs and bitter feelings.... What is death?... A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.
    Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)