Tony RossTONY ROSS, who has died aged 80, was a radio and television producer, and worked in Ireland, Canada and Britain. He later drew on his experience to make a new career as an academic.
Canadian composer Victor Davies, who collaborated with Ross on many productions, said: “He cast a light into the dark of my creative life and pointed me forward. He was a man of vision and imagination, a poet. Composing scores for him was always a highlight as he was tremendously imaginative and wanted you to rise to the occasion and be the best you could be.”
John Hobday, a colleague at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, said: “Tony was a larger than life character – a classier version of Brendan Behan, his brown woollen overcoat flung over his shoulders like a cape flapping in the wind.”
Born in Athy, Co Kildare in 1929, he was one of two children of Robert Hill Ross, from Waterford and Margaret Balfe Ross, from South Park, Co Roscommon. From 1940 to 1945, he was a boarder at Clongowes Wood College.
Following his father’s death, the family fell on hard times and his formal education could not proceed. He moved with his mother and sister to Middlesbrough, where his mother worked as a housekeeper for a Jesuit community. He received informal tuition from a member of the order.
In the late 1940s, he worked for the Palgrave Murphy shipping line as chief clerk of the export department. He moved to London and found work as an apprentice broker with the Baltic Exchange.
He transferred to an associate office in Madrid and learnt Spanish. He left the company in 1956 to work as Spanish translator to director Stanley Kramer during the filming of The Pride and the Passion, which starred Cary Grant, Sophia Loren and Frank Sinatra.
He emigrated to Canada in 1957, and worked at a number of jobs before joining CBC Halifax as a radio producer. Returning to Ireland, he worked briefly for Telefís Éireann. He then joined the BBC, working on the antiques quiz show Going for a Song, a forerunner of Antiques Roadshow.
In 1965, he returned to Canada and was appointed radio drama producer for the Prairies, based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Among the many productions he was associated with was a 90-minute Christmas special in 1967, featuring a large cast and chamber orchestra, the first stereo broadcast of a radio drama in Canada.
During the 1970s, he taught communications at Sir Sanford Fleming College in Peterborough, Ontario and from 1978 to 1986 taught arts administration and gallery management. In 1986, he took a sabbatical to teach in an arts programme at Trent University.
He resumed teaching communications at Sir Sanford Fleming College, retiring in 1991 to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and then to Toronto in 1997.
Friends remember him as an incurable romantic, “intensely proud of his Irish heritage”, who possessed a “magnificent voice as rich and soothing as a pint of Guinness”.
His first marriage was annulled. A second marriage ended in divorce and a third in separation.
He is survived by two sons, Robert and Nicholas, and a stepdaughter Deanna Rexe.
Anthony Nicholas (Tony) Ross: born May 23rd, 1929; died August 6th, 2009