Ed Mirvish

“I never have partners or shareholders,” Mirvish said. “Partnership is fine as long as things work out, but as soon as they go wrong you have to sit around for the next three years talking about it.”

Mirvish spent £2.5 million restoring the theatre. He hung a banner over the scaffolding during the restoration which said: “Lilian Baylis, you’re going to love this. Honest Ed”, and won a series of architectural awards. In 1996 he was given an honorary Olivier for outstanding service to British theatre.

By then, aged 82, he had handed over control of his theatre enterprises to his son, David, but enjoyed the back-slapping even if he did not take it as seriously. When he was granted the Freedom of the City of London in 1984 he discovered that with the honour went the right to drive a flock of sheep across London Bridge. With police permission, at 7am on a cold Sunday morning, he prodded seven recalcitrant beasts over the river: “I just thought it should be done,” he said, through his Hollywood-class grin.

Edwin Mirvish was born in 1914 in Colonial Beach, Virginia, and at the age of 9 moved with his parents, Russian-Jewish immigrants, to Toronto where they opened a grocery shop. At 15, when his father died, Mirvish dropped out of school to carry on the family business. He found that it was doing poorly. His father, he said, “used to give everybody credit and it was the Depression years so nobody could pay the bills, so we were always in bankruptcy. Once we got out of there, I never gave credit – just strictly cash.”

He opened his discount department store, Honest Ed’s, on the corner of Bloor and Bathhurst Streets, Toronto, in 1948, selling stock from bankrupt businesses, with the goods displayed still in their boxes. The shop remains there, impervious to the voracity of larger retailers such as Wallmart.

Mirvish’s brash instinct for publicity was what made the success. Of the shop’s name, he said: “I thought it sounded appropriately stupid but I figured if you knocked yourself, you’d get attention. It did. It hooked ‘em.”

He continued in the same vein to the end of his life, with signs hanging above the sales floor declaring “Honest Ed’s a lazy lout: he won’t get his prices up”; “Honest Ed’s a freak but his prices ain’t so weird”; “Honest Ed’s no midwife but the bargains he delivers are real babies” and “Honest Ed won’t squeal, he lets his bargains do the talking”.

Selling everything from clothes pegs to televisions, Honest Ed’s has become so much a part of Toronto that in 1988 it was declared a tourist attraction.

“There’s no magic,” Mirvish said. “We eliminate all the services – no refunds, no credit, no delivery, no free parking. And we try to pass the savings onto the public.” To see the window displays shoppers have to peer through the dozens of newspaper cuttings pasted on to the glass, and his office is a cross between a museum gallery and an archive, with collections of pottery and other collectibles on stands, theatre posters on the walls and map drawers full of more newspaper cutting of reviews from his theatres, and playbills.

Theatre was his later enthusiasm, and in 1962 when the Edwardian Royal Alexandra Theatre was about to be demolished he bought it, for a third of the original building cost. He knew nothing about running theatres and later confessed that if he had he would never have acquired it. But he was committed to running it as a theatre for five years, and by the fifth year it had begun to make money.

He approached theatre like any other commercial business, buying successful shows and selling them to Toronto. “It was not so artistic,” he said. “If the show was a hit I went after it, and it seemed to work. And then I built up a big subscription with 52,000 subscribers for seven weeks each show, six shows a year. And every show was 85 per cent sold out.”

He tried subscription sales at the Old Vic, with less success despite reaching 10,000 during the three years that Jonathan Miller was artistic director under the Mirvishes.

“Ed said that subscriptions were not for real theatre-goers,” said Andrew Leigh, executive producer at Old Vic in the Mirvish years. “London was different from Toronto in that here you have 100 shows any night to choose from, and people prefer to take a chance.”

In Toronto Mirvish expanded his theatre interests in 1993 by building a new theatre, the Princess of Wales, because he liked Miss Saigon when he saw it in Britain and there was no theatre in his home town big enough to take a helicopter on stage.

In 1998, after 80 productions, including such landmarks as the 1997 Peter Hall revival of Waiting for Godot, Mirvish relinquished personal interest in the Old Vic, selling it for £3.5 million to Alex Bernstein’s and Sally Greene’s The Old Vic Theatre Trust.

Mirvish also owned six restaurants in Toronto. In one of them, Old Ed’s, for which his wife Anne devised the menus, he had a theatre museum, the only museum in the world, he boasted, where you could buy the objects. The pieces had come from the basements and attics of the Alex. Ancient flyers could be bought for five cents, while a cloisonn? vase cost $95,000.

The restaurants were sold as Mirvish Productions, now a $100 million-a-year enterprise, became more centred on theatre production, but Ed Mirvish’s high profile never diminished. He was the patron of numerous charities and a member three synagogues in Toronto, and each Christmas he handed out dollar notes and 1,000 turkeys to the poor. He bought houses around his store for staff, and “Mirvish Village” was the venue for his July 24 birthday party each year, which became known as Ed Mirvish Day, when he gave the gifts to 50,000 guests including the poorest of the area as well the stars of his shows.

He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada (OC) in 1987 and CBE in 1989.

Ed Mirvish is survived by his wife Anne, whom he married in 1941, and son.

Edwin “Honest Ed” Mirvish, OC, CBE, retailer and theatre producer, was born on July 24, 1914. He died on July 11, 2007, aged 92