Allan Winton King spent a lifetime searching for "the truth" about life. He says he never found it. "There is no such thing as truth -- that's why we prize it so dearly," King once told Sun Media.

But the remarkable list of films he made in his 53-year career demonstrates how important it was for an artist to keep looking.

His personal search is over. King died on Monday, at home in Toronto, surrounded by family members. He was 79. In April, he had been diagnosed with a brain tumour.

King, who was born in Vancouver during the Great Depression on Feb. 6, 1930, emerged as a filmmaker in the 1950s.

He spent his formative years working primarily in Canada, but also in Spain and England. Through his documentaries and news affairs programs, and later through his feature films and television programs, King eventually established himself as one of the most important directors in the history of English Canadian cinema.

He may not have been as well known to mainstream audiences as Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg or Atom Egoyan, but King was just as influential, both in Canada and internationally. Indeed, as a national treasure, he was made an officer of the Order of Canada in 2002.

King's national prominence came partly because he plumbed the depth of the Canadian experience, and not just in his home base of Toronto. King's first dramatic feature was Who Has Seen the Wind (1977), a lyrical screen adaptation of W.O. Mitchell's prairie classic.

In another example of the breadth of his work, King's tough-minded drama Termini Station (1989) cast Megan Follows as an alcoholic prostitute in the northern Ontario town of Kirkland Lake. Even in one of his biggest failures, the feature Silence of the North (1981), King tried to discover something new about his beloved country. Although the experience was disastrous -- "It was a rape!" King once told me about the experience -- it steeled his resolve to do important work without interference.

King's reputation as an independent auteur was especially fierce in his ground-breaking documentaries, that series of truth-seeking films he launched in 1956 with Skid Row. He was still working in the documentary field when he died, preparing a new film called Endings.

In 2005, in one of many conversations I had with the classy filmmaker, we were talking about his gut-wrenching documentary, Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company. It was about to make its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where fest director Piers Handling treated King with as much respect as he accorded the giants of world cinema.

King was explaining his theory on "the truth" and his search for it among eight residents of the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto.

Each of the subjects suffered memory loss, thus risking the greater loss of past lives, current identities and even their families.

"We treasure truth as much as life itself," King said. "The fact is, we never know it, we never get it. Finally, it doesn't really matter if you remember actually what has happened, because your version of it 'is' your version of it."

As he always did, King spent an inordinate amount of time just being with his subjects before filming. He built up relationships, made himself familiar.

This bond of trust had allowed King to do his finest early work, transformational docs such as Warrendale (1967), a gripping study of distressed children undergoing radical therapy, and A Married Couple (1969), the portrait of a troubled marriage.

"I found the people as interesting as anybody I have ever filmed," King said of his elderly subjects in Memory.

"I always find the human condition absolutely fascinating. It is dumbfounding to me."

Memory was one of three dynamic documentaries that King made in his 70s. In 2003, he filmed a hospital expose called Dying at Grace. In 2006, he looked at gang gun culture in his empathetic EMPz 4 Life.

King was an intellectual with a passion for fine music, especially classical, and fine art. But he was no snob.

He spent years as a working director, helming episodes of television series as varied as Friday the 13th: The Series, The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Neon Rider, Danger Bay, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues and the Canadian classic, Road to Avonlea.

King leaves behind his wife, writer Colleen Murphy, plus four children, six grandchildren, his sister, Sheila DeJong of Vancouver, and his much adored golden retriever, Abby. A Toronto memorial will be held at the Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles St. W., on Monday at 11 a.m.

More Artists