Garth Drabinsky
Film and theatrical producer and entrepreneur
Garth Drabinsky (born 1949) is a Canadian film and theatrical producer and entrepreneur. In 2009, he was convicted and sentenced to prison for fraud and forgery. The sentence was reduced from 7 to 5 years in prison, on appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear a subsequent appeal. In April 2023, a judge dismissed Drabinsky’s defamation lawsuit against American Actor’s Equity for placing him on their ‘Do Not Work’ list, and in July 2024 the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed this dismissal, also dismissing Drabinsky's claim that the union's conduct violated antitrust law. Drabinsky has attempted 3 comebacks all resulting in failure and millions of investor dollars being lost.
Early life
Drabinsky contracted polio at age 3 and had multiple operations until he was 12. Born to a Jewish family in Toronto, Ontario, Drabinsky graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1973, and was called to the bar in Ontario in 1975.
Drabinsky wrote a textbook, Motion Pictures and the Arts in Canada: The Business and the Law, while attending law school.
Film and theatrical career
Film
Entering into the entertainment business in 1978 as an independent commercial film producer (through Tiberius Entertainment Limited, formed with Joel Michaels) and film distributor (through Pan-Canadian Film Distributors Inc., formed with Nat Taylor), Drabinsky produced a series of projects in the 1970s and 1980s. He produced A Broadway Musical, The Disappearance, The Silent Partner, The Changeling, Tribute, The Amateur, Losin' It.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5524340. VIAF identifies the subject as 79418446. The Library of Congress control number is n96010332. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949, 2009, 2023 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Garth Drabinsky” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.