Dawn Greenhalgh

Dawn Greenhalgh died peacefully at her home in Toronto on 6 November 2026, aged 93, surrounded by family and friends, her family announced. No cause of death was made public. Her family thanked her caregiver and her doctor for making her final days more comfortable, and said a celebration of her life would be held at a later date. She was survived by her four children and six grandchildren: Lyla, Aaron, Russell, Samuel, Mikayla and Rowan.

Hazel Dawn Greenhalgh was born on 25 September 1933 in Shanghai, China, to British parents, Elizabeth and Laurence Greenhalgh. Her father was a civil engineer working for the city water works. During the Japanese occupation of Shanghai the family was interned in a prisoner of war camp. Her family later wrote that it was there she discovered that, in the midst of misery, her love of music, theatre and dance could offer happiness, purpose and temporary respite, both to herself and to her audience.

After the Communist victory in 1949, at the age of 14, she travelled to Canada accompanied only by her guardian, Albert Mah. She completed her education at Montreal High School, where she founded the school newspaper and served as its first editor.

Greenhalgh joined the newly founded Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, as a member of its early company, and was later a founding member of the Neptune Theatre in Halifax and Theatre Plus in Toronto. She studied in New York with Uta Hagen, Herbert Berghof and Mira Rostova and performed in theatres from Manhattan to the West End, as well as extensively on Canadian radio.

On television she played Allison Carr in the CBC syndicated soap opera Strange Paradise in 1969 and 1970, and was nominated for the Earle Grey Award at the 1973 ACTRA Awards for Paul Bernard, Psychiatrist. In 1985 she played Mrs. Cadbury in the hugely popular CBC miniseries Anne of Green Gables, alongside her daughter Megan. From 1989 she voiced Queen Celeste in Babar, the CBC and Nelvana series based on Jean de Brunhoff's books, opposite Gordon Pinsent as King Babar; the show aired on HBO in the United States and in more than 150 countries. She and Pinsent returned for the computer animated sequel Babar and the Adventures of Badou in 2010 and 2011.

She received a Gemini Award nomination in 2005 for a guest role in This Is Wonderland. Her film credits included Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999), Avenging Angelo (2002), Welcome to Mooseport (2004) and David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars (2014), in which she played the agent of Julianne Moore's character.

Greenhalgh married the actor Ted Follows in 1958, and the two built their reputations as stage actors in the late 1950s and 1960s; they divorced in 1979. Their four children all made careers in the arts: actresses Megan Follows and Samantha Follows, theatre director Laurence Follows, and playwright, screenwriter and producer Edwina Follows. The whole family worked together on several projects, including a three episode story arc on The Littlest Hobo in 1982 and a 2001 production of Noel Coward's Hay Fever in Gravenhurst, Ontario, which toured Southern Ontario in 2003.

Greenhalgh belonged to the pioneering generation that built professional theatre in Canada, from the first seasons at Stratford to the founding of the Neptune Theatre and Theatre Plus. Through Babar her voice reached children in well over a hundred countries, and through her children, who all followed her into the arts, she helped create one of Canada's best known acting families.