Longtime talent agent Ronda Cooper has died at 77.

The musical-loving Torontonian, born May 1, 1947, initially dreamed of becoming an actor and discovered her vocation in 1979 working for Noble Talent. In 1986, Cooper began working at the Characters Talent Agency where she would spend 35 years before retiring in 2021. Cooper died peacefully on Jan. 1, after a years-long battle with dementia, the Characters Talent Agency president Jennifer Goldhar and daughter Tina Cooper told Playback Daily.

“The casting directors called her ‘double-booking Ronda’ which didn’t start as a compliment, but it certainly became one,” said Goldhar in a speech at Cooper’s funeral, provided to Playback. “We all thought it exemplified the limits she would go to, and make everyone else go to, in order to create work for her clients and work out conflicts. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. If there was a problem she would solve it. Ronda lived for her work and loved her clients.”

Cooper’s enthusiasm for her clients is epitomized in the picture to the left, as she celebrates her then-client Mena Massoud (Aladdin) being plastered over what was at the time Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square.

“Ronda LOVED being an agent,” read her obituary. “Phone in hand, she was a force. She was devoted to her clients and they were devoted to her.”

Cooper, known by her granddaughter as “Bub,”  loved shopping for designer clothes, books, Barbra Streisand, liquorice allsorts and going to the theatre. It was there she watched Les Misérables 39 times, bringing different people to see the show and the Characters’ clients that had parts in it.

Cooper is survived by Tina Cooper, Tina’s partner John Critchley and her granddaughter Cooper Rose Critchley.

Photo by Melissa Fletcher