Adrian Waller

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Adrian Waller (born in West Wickham, Kent, England, on June 17, 1936), has been widely acclaimed as one of North America's most successful magazine journalists and authors. In a busy career spanning 45 years, he earned a lucrative living from 16 published books, nearly 600 articles in North America's best-known magazines, including Time and Reader's Digest, and from numerous newspaper columns that appeared in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan. He was also well known in Canada as an actor, theatre director, and opera tenor, having sung with the Canadian Opera Company, given numerous concerts, and recorded two LPs, Adrian Waller Sings and A World of Song.

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[edit] Early life

Adrian Charles Waller, the son of a British customs officer who later became a university lecturer, held down a series of menial jobs in his youth (barman, factory worker, printing company packer, and mortgage company clerk) to earn money for music and drama studies in London, England. At 16, while still at school, he won first prize in the junior tenor class at the Welsh National Eisteddfod in Llandudno, north Wales; at 17, shortly after his mother had died suddenly from a hernia, he began studying at England's Blackheath Conservatory of Music with the British tenor Heddle Nash. He made his professional debut in 1954 at age 18, singing the leading tenor role in Stainer's oratorio The Crucifixion.

By his early 20s, after having served a mandatory two years of military service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, Waller had performed in numerous plays and was already a sought-after young concert tenor. Soon, however, he succumbed to another passion – writing – and became a reporter on a small newspaper in Sheerness, Kent, singing where he could to earn extra money. He also contributed news and feature articles to many of London's major newspapers, including the Evening News, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, and The Daily Telegraph. Appropriately, the first article he ever had published was an obituary of one of his idols -- the great Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli who died in 1957.

[edit] Career

In 1963, Adrian Waller settled in Canada as a journalist, working first for the Chronicle-Herald and Mail-Star in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Soon he moved to Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario, to write for such papers as The Hamilton Spectator, the Toronto Telegram, and The Globe and Mail. During this period, he gave many recitals both “live” and on CBC radio, acted in nearly 60 plays, sang with the Canadian Opera Company, and recorded his LPs of popular opera arias and songs. As a theatre director later, he staged nearly 50 productions and won several best-director awards.

This work continued through the 1970s and much of the 1980s -- while Waller was writing for the Montreal Gazette, Time, and Reader's Digest, where he became a roving editor (senior writer). As a magazine journalist he covered a wide selection of important topics but won special acclaim for his profiles of literally hundreds of famous people including the great tenors Luciano Pavarotti and Jon Vickers, popular singers Paul Anka, Hank Snow, and Wilf Carter, actors Kate Reid and Donald Sutherland, orchestra conductors Charles Dutoit and Seiji Ozawa, movie director Norman Jewison, bandleader Guy Lombardo, and the renowned portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh.

In the early 90s, when he was in his 50s, Waller earned a Ph.D. in English (a degree awarded cum laude in Iowa, USA), and taught journalism, non-fiction writing, and theater arts at several Canadian colleges and universities. Between 1991 and 1997 he made 28 trips to Japan where he lectured widely and gave recitals in Tokyo and Yokohama. At one point he painted water colors for an art gallery and appeared on stage as a classical pianist. When a television interviewer asked him why he had done so many different things with his frenetic life, Dr. Waller replied, “I have always believed that success is not a line rising diagonally through a man's life, where he starts as an office boy and struggles all his life to become the president, and has a heart attack on the way, it is a circle. Man is in the middle of that circle and his success is measured by all the things he can develop on its circumference – health, imagination, passion, intuition, and an ability to communicate widely, in different forms, with lots of people.”

[edit] Theatre work

Sprinkled throughout Adrian Waller's long and busy career as a journalist and author are numerous appearances as an actor and opera and concert tenor, and assignments as a stage director. Despite having studied acting, and playing roles in London's West End and on BBC television as a juvenile back in the 1950s, Waller always maintained he was “a poor actor who had more audacity than talent”. This was not, however, true of his work as a journeyman opera tenor in both England and Canada throughout the 1960s and 1970s — and certainly not of his success as a blazing young stage director who helped upgrade theatre in many corners of his adopted country.

Far from it. Following his directorial debut, with the Keith Waterhouse-Willis Hall play Billy Liar in Scarborough, Ontario, in 1964, Adrian Waller was in constant demand to stage both plays and musicals. After singing in Rigoletto, La bohème, and Turandot with the Canadian Opera in its 1965 season, and while working as a Globe & Mail theatre critic, he was contracted by the Arts Council of Canada to help amateur groups throughout Ontario, Manitoba, and Canada's Maritime Provinces upgrade their work.

A slew of some 40 productions — plays by Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, N.F. Simpson, and Neil Simon, for example — culminated with successes at the Dominion Drama Festival, known as the DDF. For three straight years, in fact (1966, 1967, and 1968) Adrian Waller took an amateur group to the Festival's finals, picking up many awards for his actors and designers, and three best-director awards for himself.

The plays he directed at the Festival were Joseph Kesselring's Arsenic and Old Lace, one of his favourites, John Williams’ Can You Hear Niagara Falls?, and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit. Waller's production of this searing drama was widely acclaimed, and in 1969 it was seen the at the Stratford Festival of Canada, Stratford, Ontario, with the same cast he had used at the DDF!

At one point in the late 1960s, Adrian Waller was directing three shows simultaneously, in three widely situated Ontario centres — George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion in Toronto, N.F. Simpson's A Resounding Tinkle in Woodstock, and the Richard Rodgers musical The Sound of Music in St. Catharine's.

Then followed three productions of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (in Hamilton, London, and Saint John, New Brunswick), numerous theatre workshops, and a handful of Neil Simon comedies that yielded him more best-director awards — Barefoot in the Park in Kitchener-Waterloo, The Odd Couple in Burlington, and Plaza Suite in Montreal, where he completed the first of his 16 books. This was Theatre on a Shoestring, in which Waller sought to show how to produce a theatrical production with little money,

As his writing career, journalistic travels, and academic pursuits demanded more and more of his time, Dr.Waller turned to what he called “the less arduous task of acting.” Poor actor or not, he appeared in character roles at Montreal's Saidye Bronfman Theatre, Thêatre La Poudrière, and Centaur Theatre, and on CBC radio in both Toronto and Halifax, Nova Scotia. At one point he took part in a play for Radio Canada, in French.

Today, he reflects on theatre work that earned him many friends and won him much critical acclaim. Stuart Brown of The Hamilton Spectator called Adrian Waller "a one-man cultural explosion,” and The Globe & Mail's Herbert Whittaker said he was as good a stage director as he had seen anywhere, and “one who, as an intellectual, never suffered theatrical fools or poor playwrights gladly.”

Not only that, Whittaker added, Adrian Waller, "a man for all seasons", was shrewd enough — even during days when he needed the money from stage direction badly — only to tackle those plays he liked and completely understood, and could cast intelligently within the scope of the resources available to him.

An intensely private man, Adrian Waller has shunned the limelight in recent years and often refused to give press interviews except on "live" television. He and his French wife, Irène, live in both Bainsville, Ontario, and Hallandale Beach, Florida. Their daughters, Nathalie and Zoë, live in Geneva, Switzerland, and Toronto respectively.

[edit] Published books

  • Theatre on a Shoestring (Clarke-Irwin, Toronto, New York, and London), 1st edition 1972; 2nd edition ( Littlefield-Adams, New York) 1973. A well-known book on how to stage a theatrical production on a low budget. ISBN 0-7720-0557-5
  • Adrian Waller's Guide to Music (Clarke-Irwin, Toronto, New York, and London), 1st edition 1973; 2nd edition (Littlefield Adams, New York), 1975. A best-selling book about the history of music, and how to enjoy it. ISBN 0-7720-0590-7
  • Data for a Candlelit Dinner (Clarke-Irwin, Toronto, New York, and London), 1973. A sociological, novelized documentary about the loneliness of big-city life in the West. ISBN 0-7720-0616-4
  • The Gamblers (Clarke-Irwin, Toronto, New York, and London), 1975. A novelized documentary on the psychology of gambling, which follows the lives of six habitual gamblers. ISBN 0-7720-0733-0
  • Soulikias: Portrait of an Artist (Marcel Bourquet Inc., Montreal and Paris), 1983. A profile — written in both English and French — of the great Greek-Canadian painter Paul Soulikias, and how he became world-famous. ISBN 2-89000-060-5
  • Writing!, An informal, anecdotal guide to the secrets of crafting and selling non-fiction (McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, New York, Melbourne, London), 1987. An autobiographical account of the author's work with Time magazine and Reader's Digest — and the secrets of success as a magazine writer. ISBN 0-7710-8794-2
  • The Canadian Writer's Market, Eighth Revised Edition (McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, New York, Melbourne, London), 1988. A well- known book aimed at helping Canadian writers get their work published, and where. ISBN 0-7710-8798-5
  • No Ordinary Hotel, The Ritz-Carlton's first seventy-five years (Véhicule Press, Montreal), 1988. A historical, anecdote-filled history of what was one of the world's finest hotels. ISBN 0919890865
  • The Canadian Writer's Market, Ninth Revised Edition (McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, New York, Melbourne, London), 1992. A well- known book aimed at helping Canadian writers get their work published, and where. ISBN 0-7710-8796-0
  • Being Here, a Western journalist's view of Japan, A collection of Japan Times-Weekly columns (Yohan Publications, Tokyo, and Weatherhill Inc., New York City) 1992. Sixty of the author's Japan-related columns, and some larger articles, that were published in 1990 and 1991. ISBN 4896842235
  • The Canadian Writer's Market, Tenth Revised Edition, 227 pages (McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, New York, Melbourne, London), 1992. A well- known book aimed at helping Canadian writers get their work published, and where. ISBN 0-7710-8796-3
  • Portraits of Japan (Yohan Publications, Tokyo, and Weatherhill Inc., New York City) 1992. A collection of columns and anecdotal essays that depict life in Japan through the eyes of a Westerner. ISBN 4896842308
  • The Canadian Writer's Market Tenth Revised Edition (McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, New York, Melbourne, London), 1993. A well- known book aimed at helping Canadian writers get their work published. ISBN 0-7710-8796-2

[edit] Textbooks and academic works

  • Good Stories for the Japanese Classroom, a reading textbook (MacMillan, Tokyo, 1995), co-authored with Irene Waller, M.A. ISBN 4-89585-194-X
  • Nineteen academic essays, anthologized throughout Britain, Canada, the USA, and Australia.

[edit] Awards and honours

  • Western Ontario Newspaper Award for feature writing: 1968.
  • Author's Award for Outstanding Magazine Writing, presented by the Periodical Distributors of Canada at Ottawa's Chateau Laurier, January 1978.
  • Media Club of Canada's Certificate of Honour, presented at McMaster University, Hamilton, 1979, for "excellence in magazine writing."
  • Author's Award for Outstanding Magazine Writing, presented by the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters at the Harbour Castle Hotel, Toronto, October 1989.
  • Nomination: National Magazine Writing Awards of Canada, March 1990, for outstanding magazine writing.

[edit] Sources

  • Writing, an informal anecdotal guide to the secrets of crafting non-fiction, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, New York, Melbourne, London), 1987. An autobiographical account of the author's work with Time and Reader's Digest — and the secrets of success as a magazine writer.
  • Interviews with Dr. Adrian Waller
  • Numerous interviews with Dr. Adrian Waller for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)
  • Numerous published articles about Dr. Adrian Waller's work in such leading Canadian magazines as Saturday Night.