Adrian Waller is an award-winning British-Canadian magazine journalist and author. During his 60-year writing career he wrote 12 published books and numerous articles in such magazines as Saturday Night, Maclean’s, Equinox, Time, and Reader’s Digest, where he was a globe-trotting senior writer whose work was published worldwide.
Waller covered a broad spectrum of topics but was mostly acclaimed for his profiles of international celebrities, including the Italian opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti, the British flutist Sir James Galway, and orchestra conductors Seiji Ozawa, Franz-Paul Decker, and Charles Dutois.
He also profiled numerous world-renowned Canadians, including jazz pianist Oscar Peterson; opera singers Maureen Forrester and Jon Vickers; popular singers Paul Anka, Hank Snow, and Wilf Carter; actors Kate Reid and Donald Sutherland; movie director Norman Jewison; the composer Healey Willan (posthumously); former Canadian Governor General Georges Vanier (posthumously); bandleader Guy Lombardo; and the portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh. “I very definitely have an appetite for giants,” Waller told a CBC television interviewer in 1986.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Adrian Waller was well known in Canada as a theatre director and opera tenor, having sung with the Canadian Opera Company, given several concerts, and recorded two LPs, Adrian Waller Sings and A World of Song. Additionally, he directed 20 plays and acted in others at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre, Saidye Bronfman Theatre, Thêatre La Poudrière, and on CBC radio. He lectured widely about his work on three continents.
