Anna Sandor attends the world premiere screening of the Hallmark Channel original movie Accidental Friendship at The Paley Center for Media in November, 2008, in Beverly Hills, California.Charley Gallay/Getty Images
If you are of a certain age, chances are you’ve seen Anna Sandor’s work. Before relocating to the United States in search of opportunities, the screenwriter was responsible in the 1970s and 80s for shaping a great swath of Canadian popular culture in the form of CBC sitcoms and TV movies that touched the heart or made viewers laugh, or both.
She was a fluent writer, untroubled by writer’s block and easily wrote seven or eight drafts of her scripts and teleplays, sometimes rewriting dialogue on set as a TV movie was being shot. She described her method in the program notes on one of her last works, a stage play about an aging actress named Constance Crowne: “I just sat down at my computer one morning and she [the fictional Constance] started dictating her story.”
Her teleplays garnered prizes in both Canada and the U.S., including multiple Emmys for the Holocaust drama Miss Rose White (1992) and other Emmys for My Louisiana Sky (2001). She was proud of her three Humanitas awards, a prize founded in 1974 by a Paulist priest who believed that television had the power to change society.
She took home a Gemini award for her contribution to Canadian television and the Margaret Collier award for lifetime achievement in the Canadian industry.
After half a century as a scriptwriter, Ms. Sandor, who had set out to be an actress before discovering her true calling, died Nov. 1 in Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla, Calif., of melanoma, at age 76.
Born in Budapest on March 4, 1949, she was the only child of Agnes and Paul Sandor, both Holocaust survivors. Her father died when she was 5, about two years before the outbreak of the Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule. When the revolt was brutally crushed, Agnes, with her little girl and some of her relatives, fled to Austria.
Anna Sandor attends the Humanitas Prize Roundtable at the Hollywood Reporter office in May, 2007, in Los Angeles.Michael Buckner/Getty Images
They briefly lived in Switzerland, France, then England before settling in Toronto, where the mother found a job selling bridal outfits at Princess Formals on Bloor Street. Meanwhile, young Anna discovered the movies and adjusted to the freedoms of Canadian life. In 1992 she told an interviewer from the Los Angeles Times that she “lived with the spectre of what my parents had gone through” in the concentration camps. “The memories were strong. I began to make discoveries about myself and my background. I began to feel Jewish.”
She attended Harbord Collegiate Institute, and after high school, enrolled in the new School of Dramatic Art at the University of Windsor in Southern Ontario, to study acting. Having obtained her degree, she acted in various plays around the province, ran theatre workshops for children, and to pass the time, wrote poetry backstage.
Her writing came to the attention of the multitalented actor and writer Louis Del Grande who suggested that acting was a misuse of her natural gifts; she should be writing. She resisted his advice at first but had to admit he was right.
When he was appointed head writer on a new CBC television sitcom King of Kensington in 1975, Mr. Del Grande brought on Ms. Sandor as one of the writers. The show starred Al Waxman as Larry King, the titular convenience store owner, a fixer in Toronto’s Kensington Market, who tries to help his neighbours but often just compounds their problems. In the Pierre Trudeau era, the show’s humour drew heavily on the ironies of multiculturalism.
In their 1996 book about Canadian popular culture, Mondo Canuck, Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond wrote that King of Kensington stood alone “as the sole domestically produced sitcom that Canadians seemed to want to watch.” At a time when Canada’s population was a little over half of what it is today, the show attracted 1.5 to 1.8 million viewers weekly. Some episodes can still be seen on CBC Gem. (In the years since, Canada has produced a string of other successful sitcoms.)
King of Kensington had guest appearances by several young comedians including Mike Myers, then aged 12. Later Mr. Myers named the heroine of his film Austin Powers Vanessa Kensington as a tribute.
Meanwhile Ms. Sandor found romance with another writer, David Mayerovitch: “We clicked right away, and we were together for about a year until she met and married Bill Gough,” Mr. Mayerovitch recalled in an interview. “Because of her, I got to write for the King of Kensington, too. After that I started to work for Wayne and Shuster.” The seventies, he recalls, was a good time to be a young scriptwriter. “The CBC had money and lots of airtime to fill.”
Their romance had two instalments. “In 1996, my phone rings,” Mr. Mayerovitch recalled. “She and Bill have split up. She had moved from California to Boulder, Colo. We saw each other a few times and at one point we decided to get married but later decided not.”
When King of Kensington ended, Ms. Sandor created – with Jack Humphrey and Joseph Partington – Hangin’ In, a show about a young social worker (Lally Cadeau) helping troubled teens at a drop-in centre. There were guest appearances by Keanu Reeves, Mark Humphrey, Jessica Steen and other up-and-comers as clients of the centre but the show was not as successful.
Anna Sandor attends the reception for the 32nd Annual Humanitas Awards Luncheon in June, 2006, in Hollywood, California.Chad Buchanan/Getty Images
Ms. Sandor then began writing television movies for CBC based on novels such as A Population of One (1980), The Marriage Bed (1986), and Mama’s Going to Buy You a Mockingbird (1987). She scripted the history-based TV movie Charlie Grant’s War (1985). Directed by Martin Lavut, produced by William Gough, her husband, and starring R.H. Thomson, it told the true story of a Canadian diamond merchant who used his business as a cover for a dangerous rescue operation to save Jews in Nazi-run Vienna until he himself was caught and sent to a concentration camp. The film won ACTRA awards for best program and best writing of the year.
In 1989, Ms. Sandor and Mr. Gough were hired by two U.S. producers to write the television film Tarzan in New York. The producers were happy with the film and sold CBS on commissioning a weekly half-hour spinoff show.
There were opportunities in the larger U.S. TV market that were not available at home and the couple decided to stay. They settled in Los Angeles along with their small daughter, Rachel, born in 1984. There was plenty of work; networks had their movies-of-the-week and Hallmark produced a series of telefilms, many written by Ms. Sandor, or adapted from other sources, or based on real events. For example, her award-winning Miss Rose White was adapted from a stage play about two sisters, one of whom ended up in a concentration camp while the other was safe in the U.S.
She wrote a telefilm called Gift of Love (1999), based on the true story of a young football player who must give up his sport when he decides to donate a kidney to save the life of his beloved grandmother, played by Debbie Reynolds. After it aired, there was a noticeable increase in kidney and bone marrow donations and Ms. Reynolds became Ms. Sandor’s close friend. Another long-standing Hollywood pal was Diane Keaton, who had played the lead in Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight, which Ms. Sandor wrote in 1994.
Soon after, she moved to Colorado to give her adolescent daughter a more normal life, however she returned to California when Rachel started college, and ultimately settled in San Diego to be near her daughter and grandchildren. Her friend Mr. Mayerovitch said: “She had a powerful gift for drama and a naturalistic talent with lots of humour. She was very much a child of her life in Hungary and of her escape.”
In her last years, she returned to writing for live theatre, where she could explore the drama of her own life rather than write to fit the needs of producers and directors. In April of this year, her play Knock Loudly, about an aging actress struggling to be heard and seen, was mounted by the OnStage Playhouse in Chula Vista, a city in San Diego County. It was a cry of protest against the phenomenon that “women of a certain age begin to fade away into a ghostlike mist,” she wrote.
Her last script, completed just before her death, was a one-act play titled A Letter from Montgomery Clift, drawing on her experience as a movie-mad immigrant teen whose Hungarian mother – tone deaf to the nuances of American popular culture – urged her to follow the example of Hanna Honthy, a hugely popular performer in operettas of the interwar years in Budapest. The interaction between mother and daughter is sharply observed, with the mother trying to expropriate the daughter’s success to assuage her own disappointments in life.
Anna Sandor leaves her daughter Rachel Stone (husband Adam Stone) and two granddaughters, Gabriela and Daniela Sandor Stone.
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