Whoever saves one life, says the Talmud, saves the world entire.

My father Bill Freedman could, if he’d wanted, have claimed to have saved not just one life but hundreds of thousands of lives — and all in his spare time, from his day job as a West End, Broadway and TV producer, theatre and cinema proprietor.

This sounds improbable but let me explain.

When his wife (my mother), the actress Toby Robins died of breast cancer in 1986 at just 55, Bill founded the charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer, which financed the Toby Robins Breast Cancer Research Centre. It brought breast cancer scientists and clinicians together in a co-ordinated way for the first time and continues to thrive next to the Royal Marsden Hospital in London.

Breakthrough lived up to its name and helped make global advances in breast cancer research. Some years later, when I went for a cancer genetics test and the researcher conducting it saw from my family tree that Toby Robins was my mother, she said: “Did you know that research by the Toby Robins Centre has already saved hundreds of thousands of lives across the world — and will, in time, save countless more?”

This is even more impressive given that Bill nurtured Breakthrough in his spare time, while he was also running the Maybox group of six West End theatres and, with his younger son Ben, revived a series of neglected, smaller cinemas across the country, along with the Prince Charles Cinema in Central London.

If this wasn’t enough to keep him busy, he was also among the founders in 1983 of Aspire, the national spinal injuries charity, and, until 1991, its second chair.

Bill was known both for his charm and his bow-ties, but famed above all for his optimism. One friend used to tell him: “When you say you’re feeling optimistic, I feel worried. When you say you’re feeling worried, I feel suicidal.” He always liked to think the best of people, occasionally to his cost.

He was also funny and wise — a mentor, sage and, as he aged, a father figure to many people. Bill was born in Toronto — the much-loved only child of Eastern European parents; Ukrainian-born Mary Cohen and Ben Freedman from Belarus, who ran a movie theatre in a tough part of town.

Since his mother Mary had suffered multiple miscarriages before Bill’s birth, which occurred during the Depression, she was taking no chances.

She plied him with as much food as he could eat until he became the fattest boy in the school and the family doctor had to stage an intervention and force her to put him on a diet, which he stayed on the rest of his life. He was always amused in later life when someone described him as slim.

While his parents worked nights at the cinema, Bill was left home alone with his Yiddish-speaking grandma and acquired a life-long mastery of Yiddish, with which he would later pepper jokes and stories.

From high school in the 1940s he remembered a kindly careers teacher who sat him down one day and listed all the employers, industries and sectors that didn’t hire Jews.

This helped simplify career choice. After the University of Toronto, where he discovered his love of theatre, he joined his parents in the family cinema business. This made him the third generation of a cinema family, since his grandfather had once run a Yiddish nickelodeon, in a roomful of kitchen chairs.

It was also then that he courted his future wife, my mother Toby, by then already a famed young actress and beauty with many, more obviously eligible suitors than the bespectacled young Bill, but who, to general amazement, won her hand.

The two married in November, 1952 and honeymooned in London, where, in 1964, they moved with their three young children for the sake of Toby’s acting, initially for a trial period of six months.

In London, Toby’s acting career flourished, while Bill became a leading theatre producer. He went on to produce some 15 plays and musicals in the West End and several on Broadway.

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Bill outside the Prince Charles Cinema with his granddaughter Shosh dressed as a sheep

In 1968 alone, he produced two acclaimed hits: first, Staircase, a Tony award-winning Broadway play, starring Eli Wallach and Milo O’Shea, which was among the first stage portrayals of a gay couple; and then, in London, Hadrian VII — starring Alec McCowen as an English priest elected Pope — which went on to be an even bigger hit on Broadway.

He produced other West End hits too and gave important early roles to Maureen Lipman, Penelope Keith and Polly James of The Liver Birds.

He spent his happiest working years co-running a group of six West End theatres. He also ran cinemas, both in Canada and here. With his son Ben, he opened Britain’s second 10-screen cinema, in Slough, and, at the Prince Charles Cinema made sing-along screenings of

The Sound of Music, Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and other films, a cultural phenomenon.
In his mid-seventies, he switched careers again and opened a Pilates studio.

In his mid-eighties, he became a TV producer, making Warren United, a loosely autobiographical animated cartoon series, about the long-suffering fan of a chronically disappointing football team.

Bill is survived by his three children, Lisa, Peter and Ben, seven grandchildren and the hundreds of thousands of women whose lives he helped save.

Bill Freedman: born August 13, 1929. Died October 5 (Yom Kippur), 2022