Colleagues and friends have paid tribute to “free spirit” and “brilliant role model”, Northern Ireland-born, Sweden-based film and TV writer and executive producer Ruth McCance, who has died aged 53 from cancer.
McCance was diagnosed in November of last year with stomach cancer, and died just five weeks later.
During her career she worked on films including Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher, Thomas Vinterberg’s It’s All About Love, Soren-Kragh Jakobson’s Skagerrak and Garth Jennings’s Son Of Rambow.
McCance grew up in Belfast. Her mother was a relationship counsellor and her father was a carpet fitter. She studied film and media studies in Glasgow and kickstarted her career at BBC Scotland, initially working as secretary to head of drama Andrea Calderwood, before moving into becoming a script editor.
“The writer Bernard MacLaverty once told me when he met Ruth that ’the brains were shining out of her’ and that’s the phrase that keeps coming to my mind now. I liked Ruth immediately when she turned up for an interview as my assistant at BBC Scotland, she was so funny and sharp – and she quickly became a collaborator and a friend, as it turned out, for life,” said Calderwood.
Her illustrious résumé included leading development posts at Pathé, Film4, Ruby Films and with Calderwood’s outfit Potboiler Productions. McCance was also a board member for Northern Ireland Screen.
For the past decade, McCance was based Stockholm, where she held the position of acquisitions executive at Eccho Rights before joining the UK’s Warp Films as an executive producer. Here, she executive produced and was an episode writer for Sky Studios’ series Little Birds.
McCance’s first love was writing, and in recent years had made this her focus. Her projects in active development included romantic comedy The Chosen; a punk adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions; Near Miss, a comedy series about misplaced loves for SVT in Sweden; and S.O.L for TV4 Sweden and international partners, an English-language thriller about an ill-fated philanthropist. There are plans among partners and producers involved to continue work on some of these projects.
“Everyone wanted to be in Ruth’s gang”
Peter Carlton, joint CEO at Warp Films, said: “Ruth has been a dear friend of mine for 30 years and a close collaborator and partner-in-crime for the last 10.
“Whether sweeping through Soho in her red Astrakhan coat with leopard-print lining and grey beret, regaling bewildered non-UK producers with tales of growing up in ‘Norn Iron’ or determined to set up the most unlikely but brilliant projects against the odds, Ruth always did things unmistakeably her way.
“Ruth was smart, funny, passionate. She lit up a room and her storytelling was spell-binding. On the Little Birds shoot in Spain in 2019, the crew christened her ‘La Suprema’ – everyone wanted to be in Ruth’s gang.
“Thinking of Ruth will always exhort us to take that risk, jump off that cliff, to dare. For all who knew her or had the privilege to work with her, there is a Ruth-shaped hole in our lives that can never be filled.
“Ruth was so well-loved in the industry. Simon Beaufoy, Garth Jennings, Andrea Calderwood, Lars Rahbek, Jed Mercurio, Adrian Dunbar were among her many friends and admirers. She was such a free spirit and such a brilliant role model for young working-class women finding their way in the industry, growing up as she did during the Troubles in Belfast, making her way into the industry in London and branching out as a leader in ambitious international co-production.”
“I think I first met Ruth on a dance floor sometime in the late 1990s in Edinburgh,” said Lizzie Francke, who worked with McCance on a script while Francke was development producer for the now defunct UK Film Council. “Dancing is how I remember her – whether literally or whether it was her extraordinary mind light footing its way through conversation with plenty of acerbic wit and energy. She had a formidable reputation as one of the smartest development executives in town and it was clear how many writers really loved her.”
Natasha Dack Ojumu, producer at Tigerlily Productions, reflected: “Ruth and I became friends at the end of the ‘90s, around the time that the Script Factory was throwing film industry parties. We decided that we would try our hand at DJing and managed to fill quite a few dance floors at these events, with one notable night when Javier Bardem asked us to play some U2 and Ruth told him that we didn’t do requests. Our DJing skills were pretty basic at best, so we didn’t give up our day jobs which meant that the film and TV industry continued to benefit from Ruth’s wisdom, wit and talent as a script editor, development and executive producer, and latterly as a writer.
“I was in awe of Ruth’s encyclopaedic knowledge of film and TV, from 1940s black and white screwball comedies to obscure Werner Herzog films. It felt like she’d seen everything and had a take on it all, and I sought out her invaluable opinion on various projects on so many occasions. I miss her deeply.”
“Ruth had a rare generosity of spirit and even rarer intellect,” said Lucy ter Berg, development executive at Stockholm broadcaster TV4. “There’s no one else quite like her. Working with her was exhilarating and her writing will always be the gold standard against which I measure everything else.”
Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy also praised her writing ability, stating: “Always the screenwriters’ ally as an editor and producer, it took frustratingly long for her to realise that she was often – in a roomful of writers – the best writer there. Her fierce intelligence and wit flowered in screenplays that made everyone else’s imagination look a little threadbare.”
McCance is survived by her two teenage children with ex-husband Kalle Torring, partner Lars Nilsson and her parents.
No comments yet