Hugh Pickett

Hugh Pickett was born in Vancouver in 1913. As a teenager he discovered his passion for entertainment and entertainers while working weekends as an usher at the Orpheum. During World War II, he served in the Canadian army, working for military brass in Vancouver organizing visiting movie stars’ tours to overseas military bases. Postwar, New York agent Sol Hurok would become Pickett’s key show biz connection. Through Hurok he met and booked numerous stars and soon he became a regular at Hollywood parties. His favourite movie star was the legendary Marlene Dietrich whom he met through Sir John Gielgud after one of her Las Vegas shows. She found him so engaging that she hired him as her personal business manager, a relationship that lasted for more than 12 years.

Pickett was co-founder with the late Holly Maxwell of Famous Artists, the agency that brought the world of entertainment to Vancouver for more than six decades. He counted among his friends Marlene Dietrich, Jack Benny, Mitzi Gaynor, Rosemary Clooney, Liberace, Ginger Rogers, Katherine Hepburn and Bob Hope, all of whom he booked many times to play Vancouver. He was also hip enough to stage Elvis Presley’s lone Vancouver appearance in 1958, and the concert by the Rolling Stones in 1972 that resulted in a riot.

In the 1970s, he led the movement to save the historic Orpheum, and when he turned 80, the city of Vancouver celebrated by throwing his birthday party in that theatre. In 1992, he was instrumental in establishing the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame. A world-class storyteller, no one in British Columbia has played as large a role in show business as Pickett, from the earliest days of Theatre Under the Stars in the 40s and 50s, through his years as head of Vancouver’s principal booking agency, to his hundreds of lecture-tours at the Orpheum.

Hugh Pickett, internationally-revered impresario whose connection to the
entertainment world spanned the entire 20th century and into the 21st, died peacefully at home in Vancouver, Canada, on February 13, 2005 at the age of 92. He is survived by his long time companion Gordon Boyd.