NEWS

Asheville theater legend Hazel Robinson passes away at 90

Hayley Benton
hbenton@citizen-times.com

Asheville theater legend and Montford Park Players founder Hazel Robinson passed away Thursday afternoon.

Hazel Robinson, 90, founder of the Montford Park Players, still lives in her longtime home in Asheville’s Montford neighborhood. She is a living link to one of Asheville’s oldest theater companies.

Robinson and her late husband John created the outdoor Shakespearean theater company in 1973, and, by 1983, the performers moved out of the namesake park and into an amphitheater down the road, since renamed in Robinson's honor. John passed away last July at age 91.

Earlier this year, in a profile of the Montford resident, the Citizen-Times reported that Robinson, a lifelong theater fan, was "seemingly ageless."

Born in Mississippi in 1926, Robinson spent her childhood moving with her family around Western North Carolina. She attended the then-named East Carolina's Teachers College in Greenville, North Carolina, and then transferred to UNC Chapel Hill, where she was active in the school's legendary Playmakers company.

After school, life took her in many directions, including marriage to a poet that ended in divorce, but she met John, an accountant, and, in 1957, they moved back to Asheville, where they raised four children: Margaret, Joe, Johnny and Kenneth.

She worked at the Asheville Community Theater, later becoming its technical director, from 1963 or 1964 until 1972, leaving a year later to found the Montford Park Players.

Though she had remained the chairwoman emerita of the organization, Robinson directed her final production of "A Christmas Carol" in 2012. The matriarch of Asheville's theater scene had been ill with lung cancer for quite some time.

Robinson was 90 years old and beloved by the community. Arrangements for her service have not yet been finalized.

Asheville theater legend Hazel Robinson still lively

Reporter Tony Kiss contributed to this story.