Cinar co-founder Micheline Charest dies
MONTREAL - Micheline Charest, the co-founder and former chair of award-winning animation house Cinar, died Wednesday afternoon. She was 51.
A spokesperson for Notre-Dame Hospital confirmed Charest had died, but declined to reveal the cause of death. Some reports alleged that she died after complications from plastic surgery at a private clinic.
Charest's husband Ronald Weinberg, also a co-founder of Cinar, told the National Post that his wife had been in good health.
"We don't know what happened," he said. "She was in very good health."
Last month, the couple sold their shares in Cinar, which made its name with popular children's programs like Caillou , Arthur , Are You Afraid of the Dark? and The Busy World of Richard Scarry .
The London-born, Quebec City-raised Charest studied film in London. She met and married Weinberg in the late 1970s, about the same time they founded Cinar as a film-distribution company in New York.
Upon moving to Montreal in 1984, they began producing children's shows and soon became one of North America's top animation producers, known for its educational and entertaining programming. The Hollywood Reporter once named Charest -- the public face of Cinar -- the 19th most-powerful woman in Hollywood, ahead of Madonna and Barbra Streisand.
The animation company almost collapsed in 2000 amid a wave of lawsuits and a number of inquiries into its business and financial practices.
In August 2000, Cinar's board fired Weinberg and Charest after an independent audit found irregularities in the company's finances. There were allegations that $122 million of the company's money had gone missing. One of the vice-presidents was also fired.
The RCMP also looked into allegations that Cinar improperly collected federal film tax credits by putting the names of Canadian authors on scripts written by Americans. Cinar subsequently negotiated a settlement with the Quebec and federal governments to pay about $18 million in order to settle a dispute over the tax credit claims.
Charest's death came a month after Cinar's sale to a Toronto group headed by Michael Hirsh, founder of the Canadian cartoon channel Teletoon and of the Nelvana film company. The deal was announced last October.