Prolific writer Anna Sandor crafted stories for CBC TV viewers

If you are of a certain age, chances are you’ve seen Anna Sandor’s work. Before relocating to the United States in search of opportunities, the screenwriter was responsible in the 1970s and 80s for shaping a great swath of Canadian popular culture in the form of CBC sitcoms and TV movies that touched the heart or made viewers laugh, or both.

She was a fluent writer, untroubled by writer’s block and easily wrote seven or eight drafts of her scripts and teleplays, sometimes rewriting dialogue on set as a TV movie was being shot. She described her method in the program notes on one of her last works, a stage play about an aging actress named Constance Crowne: “I just sat down at my computer one morning and she [the fictional Constance] started dictating her story.”