Desmond Cyril Scott
1926 - 2019
Director • actor • writer • sculptor • reader
Desmond Scott was born in London, England to novelist Rose Allatini (aka Eunice Buckley, A.T. Fitzroy) and composer/writer Cyril Scott.
Desmond served in the Royal Navy in WWII, was stationed in the Pacific, and having dropped a bomb on his foot, while recovering in Hong Kong, began acting and directing. Demobbed, on return to England, he was engaged by the BBC as part-time announcer while reading for his M.A. at Cambridge.
A graduate of the Old Vic Theatre School under Michael St. Denis in London, Desmond worked in repertory theatre in England before emigrating to Canada in 1957. Immediately on arrival he was engaged by the Crest Theatre in Toronto, followed by an eastern tour with the Earle Grey Players after which he toured Canada from east to west and even the frozen north with the Canadian Players, both as an actor and director.
Scott became the director of the Manitoba Theatre Centre in the early 1960s, while working as an actor and director. During his four year tenure at the Manitoba Theatre Centre, among the many plays he directed was the first professional Canadian production in 1961 of “Waiting for Godot”, his favourite play which informed all his subsequent work.
Desmond directed in theatres across Canada and the U.S.A., taught drama in B.C., Saskatchewan and at the National Theatre School in Montreal
In 1970, following Leon Major’s departure to the newly constructed St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, Scott became the director of productions at Hart House Theatre (then within the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama, under Brian Parker). Continuing Major’s program of employing a professional company at Hart House Theatre, Scott’s tenure was controversial with the student body, with The Globe and Mail critic Herbert Whittaker arguing it only produced, “confusion… from the dubious nature of its connection with the University of Toronto’s Graduate Centre.” However, his tenure was not without its artistic highs. Of particular note was his production of Endgame with Ted Follows who was described as giving a “marvellous performance of aimless monotony.”
Desmond also wrote documentaries, and directed radio and TV dramas for CBC Toronto.
Desmond was an accomplished sculptor, beginning with plasticine at the age of four, and progressing into ceramics, bronze, wood and found objects. Scott described his work as “inspired by the theatre, particularly Frink, Giacometti, Samuel Beckett and Shakespeare.”
Desmond served as president of the Sculptors Society of Canada.
Scott had five solo exhibitions in Toronto in 1964, 1969, 1982, 1990, and 1994. In 1990, the exhibition consisted solely of works inspired by the works of Samuel Beckett. Nine of his bronze sculptures inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot were on display for several years at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario and have now been donated to the Irish Theatre in Buffalo, New York. Scott exhibited regularly at the Sculptors Society of Canada, as well as in New York, The Hague and London, Ontario. His work is in private collections in Australia, England, Switzerland, the U.S. and throughout Canada.
From 1999 - 2011 Scott lectured on his father, Cyril and gave illustrated talks in Philadelphia (1999), Birmingham UK, (2000) Charlottetown P.E.I,(2001) Boulder Colorado USA (2002) Toronto, (2002 & 2003); Melbourne (2004) and Barcelona, Spain (2011).
In Melbourne there was a Society of International Musicologists Seminar at Monash University where six papers including Desmond’s were given on Cyril Scott. Accompanied by his wife Corinne Langston, they also gave an extended lecture in Melba Hall at the University of Melbourne which focussed on Cyril’s lifelong friend Percy Grainger and was organized by the Friends of the Grainger Museum.
In 2018, he co-edited a publication of “The Cyril Scott Companion”, a tribute to his father, his music and his spiritual beliefs. He was delighted that his mother Rose’s novel, “Despised and Rejected”, written a hundred years earlier was also republished that same year, by Persephone Books.
Recording books for the CNIB every Friday afternoon for almost fifty years he considered his most important and enjoyable work and seldom missed a session. In 2004 he received the Ontario’s Volunteers’ Award and in 2012 the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medal.
Desmond Scott lived in Toronto with his wife of 58 years, Corinne Langston (writer, actor) and his daughter Amanta Cecilia Scott (artist and musician) and son Dominic Daniel Scott, an executive with Cisco Systems in Hong Kong.