Bill Vigars would not want this to be a sad story. He lived an amazing life, had friends across Canada, and Robert Duvall once played him in a movie. Oh yes — he also helped raise a billion dollars to find a cure for cancer.
Still, Bill Vigars has died, and that is terribly, terribly sad.
If you have heard of Vigars, it is probably through his close association with Terry Fox. He was Fox’s public relations organizer during the 1980 “Marathon of Hope.” He was also Fox’s close friend, running mate, and confidante.
Writers also loved Vigars. As a network TV publicist in Toronto and later in Vancouver, he set up cool assignments, was fun to hang around and never took himself or the work too seriously. As someone who spent years helping to cure cancer he knew that working on TV shows wasn’t exactly curing cancer.
Bill even occasionally snuck into a scene or two, usually uncredited, on the shows he was working on. It doesn’t really show up on his IMDb page, but he could be spotted as either a wino or a transvestite in at least 20 different episodes of Night Heat.
We were friends even though we only really got together a handful of times over many years, especially after Bill moved to Vancouver. Others knew him better but picking up where we left off always seemed so effortless and rewarding. He had a consistently strong sense of right and wrong, even though he could be mischeiveous at times. That he was respected for both was a rare and beautiful thing.
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I first met Bill, who grew up in St. Thomas, Ont., when he was a publicist for the CTV cop show Night Heat (1985-89) and I was typing stories for TV Guide Canada. He set up a memorable, on location, overnight interview filled with some crazy characters: American guest star David Carridine, Canadian guest Don Francks; executive producer and former “French Connection” cop Sonny Grosso, and others.
On our first podcast conversation in 2021, he cops to the time he foolishly pulled a fake gun on Grosso and lived to talk about it. Or the time he was having lunch with Fox, Daryl Sittler and Bobby Orr and decided to steal croutons off Orr’s salad. There are stories about Donald Sutherland, David Foster, Kyra Sedgwick and Peter O’Toole. There was the time the star of a West Coast Canadian series tried to bean him on the head with an apple.
I’m glad I went down to his book launch last September when he was promoting “Terry & Me: The Inside Story of Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope” (Sutherland Press). Buy it, read it, share it with your kids. Vigars left behind the best possible eyewitness account of a true Canadian hero.
The link at the top of this page will take you to the most recent podcast conversation I had with Bill. That was posted this past April. I did not for a second think that would be the last time I would speak with Bill, but that is what happens. In the words of Robert Frost, “Nothing gold can stay.”
He was proud of, and humbled by, the fundraising he helped establish and nurture in Terry’s name. In recent years, he traveled to China to see a Terry Fox run with 8,000 high school kids, all wearing Fox Marathon of Hope shirts.
“Terry would never have believed the impact he had all over the world,” said Vigars.
Likewise, Bill had no idea the impact he had on many of us who loved him and were inspired by him. Rest in peace my friend.
