Ted Follows
Edward James Follows was a Canadian film, television and stage actor. He was best known for playing the role of Macduff in Macbeth at the Stratford Festival and the 1961 CBC Television film adaptation, and his television roles as the title character in the CBC drama series McQueen, as crown attorney Arnold Bateman in Wojeck, and as Charles Tupper, Minister of Railways, in The National Dream.
Follows was born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1926 to Edward James Follows and Isabella Follows, and had a younger brother, Jack. He was raised in a variety of locations across Canada as his father was a serviceman with the Royal Canadian Air Force. Ted Follows attended high school in Winnipeg. He studied psychology at the University of Toronto, also acting in Hart House theatre productions, and following his graduation he had his first professional acting role in 1945. Over the next number of years, he regularly toured Canada and the United Kingdom with the Canadian Players and the Canadian Repertory Theatre Company, before being invited to join the Stratford company in 1955.
He married actress Dawn Greenhalgh in 1958. The couple had four children, including actress Megan Follows, before divorcing in 1979. Follows later remarried to Susan Trethewey, a musician with the Stratford Festival Orchestra.
In 2001, Follows directed a production of Noël Coward's Hay Fever in Gravenhurst, with a cast that included himself, Greenhalgh, all of their children and their children's spouses. They subsequently mounted a tour of the production to several Southern Ontario cities in 2003.
