Nathan Aaron Taylor, one of the men behind the world’s first Cineplex, died of natural causes in Toronto on March 1. He was 98.

Taylor was the man behind many movie theater firsts, building the first duo-screen theater in Ottawa in 1957, a triplex in Burnaby, BC, a quadplex in Mississauga, ON, and the Uptown theater quintplex in Toronto. In 1979, he teamed with Garth Drabinsky to build the world’s first 18-screen cinema, in Toronto’s Eaton Centre, which closed its doors in March 2001.

Taylor opened his first theater at 16, was the first person to open a cinema in a shopping mall in 1963 and, throughout his years, built close to 60 theaters, several drive-ins, a film-distribution company, and a 140-acre studio in Kleinburg, ON.

He also released the first Canadian film distributed by a major studio in the U.S., The Mask (1961), received an honorary degree in 1982 after donating a movie theater to York University and, in 1984, was awarded with a Genie for outstanding contribution to the business of filming in Canada.