Robert Marshall Blount Fulford (February 13, 1932 – October 15, 2024) was a Canadian journalist, magazine editor, essayist, and public intellectual. He lived in Toronto, Ontario.
Background
Fulford was born on February 13, 1932, in Ottawa, Ontario, the third of four children, to Frances (Blount) Fulford and A. E. Fulford, a journalist and editor at Canadian Press, who later covered the Dionne quintuplets and the 1939 royal tour of Canada of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
Fulford met his first wife, writer Jocelyn Jean Dingman Fulford (1930–1976), while they were both working at the Globe and Mail. Fulford and Dingman divorced in 1970. and is married to writer Stephen Marche. Rachel Fulford is a psychotherapist and former film and television producer who was director of original production at Showcase.
Fulford suffered a stroke in 2008, in his late seventies, but was able to continue his writing career. He retired his column in the National Post in 2019. His last published work was A Life in Paragraphs, a collection of essays published in 2020. He had vascular dementia for five years leading up to his death on October 15, 2024, at the age of 92 at Meighen Manor, a long-term care facility in Toronto where he had lived for three years.
Career
Fulford's media career began at the age of 16, while still in high school, when he worked for Toronto radio station CHUM reporting on high school sports and producing a weekly radio show for teenagers. His nephew, Marcus Gee, recalled that Fulford having worked as a sports journalist was "a fact that the family always viewed as hilarious given his complete and utter indifference to sports later on."
Fulford was critical of David Cronenberg's films and the usage of funding from the Canadian Film Development Corporation (now Telefilm Canada) and wrote the article You Ought To Know How Bad This Film Is Because You Paid For It. Michael Spencer, the head of the CFDC, contacted Cronenberg about Fulford and Cronenberg stated that "only 100 people read Saturday Night magazine", but Spencer replied "Yes but it's the wrong hundred people".
On CBC Radio, he hosted two weekly programs, The Arts This Week from 1965 to 1967
He contributed longer essays to the Queen's Quarterly from 1991 to 2014, winning a National Magazine Award for his essay "Those Imbecilic, Stultifying Games: Notes on the Age of Sports" in 2006. He was also a frequent contributor to Toronto Life and Canadian Art magazines.
In his 1988 entry for The Canadian Encyclopedia, Douglas Fetherling described Fulford's politics as being on "the more conservative end of the liberal spectrum".
Fulford was also a critic of literature, art and films. He wrote extensively about the Canadian abstract art group Painters Eleven, its members (particularly William Ronald, Tom Hodgson, and Harold Town), and the Saskatchewan abstract artist Mashel Teitelbaum.
Honours
In 1984, Fulford was invested an Officer of the Order of Canada (OC).
He received the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal and Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2002 and 2012, respectively. In his career, Fulford won a total of 17 National Magazine Awards, including 14 Gold and 3 Silver awards as well as the Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement. Other awards he received include the Diplôme d'honneur from the Canadian Conference of the Arts (1981), the Tom Fairley Award for book editing from the Editors' Association of Canada (1989), and the Quill Award from the Press Club of Windsor (1989). He was inducted to the Canadian News Hall of Fame in 1990, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Journalism Foundation in 1996 and the Kilbourn Award from the Toronto Arts Foundation in 1997.
Selected bibliography
- This Was Expo – 1968
- Remember Expo: A Pictorial Record – 1968
- Crisis at the Victory Burlesk: Culture, Politics and Other Diversions – 1968
- Harold Town Drawings - 1968 (editor)
- Read Canadian: A Book about Canadian Books – 1972 (co-editor with Dave Godfrey and Abraham Rotstein)
- Marshall Delaney at the Movies – 1974
- An Introduction to the Arts in Canada – 1977
- The Fulford File – 1978
- The Beginning of Vision: The Drawings of Lawren S. Harris – 1982 (co-author with Joan Murray)
- Canada: A Celebration – 1983
- Best Seat in the House: Memoirs of a Lucky Man – 1988
- Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto – 1995
- Toronto Discovered – 1998
- The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture – 1999
- A Life in Paragraphs: Essays – 2020
See also
- List of newspaper columnists