Whitehead, William, 1931-2018 : Born in Regina, William Whitehead graduated from the University of Saskatchewan in 1955. After moving to Toronto in 1957, he worked as an actor with the Stratford Festival, the Canadian Players, the Crest Theatre and the Red Barn Theatre. During this time, he met the actor and aspiring writer Timothy Findley, with whom he had a long relationship, ending only with Findley's death in 2002.
Whitehead began his career as a documentary writer and broadcaster in the mid-1960s and has been associated with CBC radio's Ideas and CBC television's The Nature of Things and Man at the Centre. During the 1970s, he wrote scripts for a CBC television film series for teenagers called Drop In, and three CBC television specials on Canadian history called Images of Canada. Among other projects, he contributed to CBC's series A Planet For the Taking in the early 1980s. His work has also included scripts for the NFB and TV Ontario, as well as some political speechwriting.
Whitehead has won a number of awards for his work, including an ACTRA award for The National Dream (1975, with Timothy Findley), a Monaco Film Festival award for The Nature of Things (1975), and Ohio Awards for The Octagonal Approach to Spiders (1965) and Dimensions in Science (1976).
Findley, Timothy, 1930-2002 : Timothy Findley was born and educated in Toronto, Ontario. His first career was as an actor, and he worked at Stratford Festival during its opening season, 1953, before moving to London, England, to study at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Between 1953 and 1956, Findley toured in Europe and North America and it was during this time that he began writing. Upon his return to Canada, he worked in radio, television and the theatre before taking up writing full-time in 1962. Findley's involvement with radio and television continued, however, and he wrote many documentaries and plays, some in collaboration with his companion William Whitehead. These co-authored scripts include the CBC series The National Dream, 1974, and Dieppe 1942, 1979. Findley also wrote many of the episodes for The White Oaks of Jalna, 1971-1972.
Findley's first novel, published in 1967, was The Last of the Crazy People (re-issued in 1983). This was followed by The Butterfly Plague (1969; rev. 1986). After a hiatus of several years, Findley published a string of critically acclaimed and best-selling novels, including The Wars (winner of the Governor-General's Award in 1977), Famous Last Words (1981), Not Wanted On the Voyage (1984), The Telling of Lies (1986; winner of an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America), Headhunter (1993; winner of the City of Toronto Book Award), The Piano Man's Daughter (1995), You Went Away (1996), Pilgrim (1999), and Spadework (2001).
Findley is also the author of the plays Can You See Me Yet? (1976), John A.-Himself (1979), The Stillborn Lover (1993), The Trials of Ezra Pound (1990, 1995), and Elizabeth Rex (2000, winner of the Governor General's literary award for drama). Three collections of his short stories have been published: Dinner Along the Amazon (1984), Stones (1988, winner of the Ontario Trillium Prize), and Dust to Dust (1997). The Wars was made into a film, directed by Robin Phillips, in 1983 and Not Wanted on the Voyage was made into a play in 1992. Two non-fiction works were published by Timothy Findley as well: Inside Memory: Pages from a Writer's Notebook (1990,) based on Findley's journals and notebooks; and From Stone Orchard (1998), a collection of articles Findley wrote for Harrowsmith Magazine, based on his experiences with William Whitehead at their farm near Cannington, Ontario. In the mid-1990s, Timothy Findley and William Whitehead sold their farm and moved to Stratford, Ontario and to a second home in the south of France near Cotignac, where Timothy Findley died at age 71 on June 20, 2002.
![Portrait of Timothy Findley by Alan Dayton [graphic material]](/images/folder-81.png){kind=small}