Isabella Morrow looked like a film star but those who knew her well loved her inner beauty | Canada Voices

Isabella Georgia Morrow: Matriarch. Bibliophile. Cook. Style-setter. Born Jan. 4, 1935, in Luseland, Sask.; died Dec. 15, 2025, in Toronto, after a brief illness; aged 90.

If you saw a photo of me as an infant with my mother, you’d be forgiven for thinking I was Audrey Hepburn’s son. In the late 1950s, Isabella Morrow was a ringer for the Hollywood star. Petite, fine-featured, with short dark hair and elegantly arched eyebrows, she seemed to belong on the silver screen or the catwalk – not in a quiet Regina suburb, where she was about to embark on a career in motherhood that would ultimately lead to five children.

By the middle of the 1960s, she had ditched the gamine look. In faded colour photos she models a navy-blue dress and white pillbox hat, giving off Jacqueline Kennedy vibes. Then there are those candid black-and-white snapshots of her playing with her kids or watching TV, where she looks like a glamourously dishevelled Elizabeth Taylor.

Isabella retained her beauty throughout her 90 years, while her children became used to hearing strangers tell her how attractive she was. To us, however, she was so much more.

This was a woman with an insatiable hunger for knowledge and a desire to understand both herself and the world around her. There’s a telling anecdote from her teenage years as a Catholic high-school student. At 15, she had begun dating boys and buying her own clothes with money from after-school jobs. But at the same time, she was avidly reading the monk Thomas Merton and seriously considering joining a contemplative order of nuns. “It was only the fantasy of a 15-year-old,” she would laughingly admit, but it reveals how even then she felt the need for a deeper purpose to her life.

Isabella was the third of eight children in a family with an intellectual and artistic bent. Her father, Philip Rigelhof, a Volga German immigrant with a gift for languages, served as a translator for the Saskatchewan government. Some of her siblings would become academics and writers. Isabella herself loved drawing, painting and the theatre. The Rigelhofs were not well-to-do, however, and she left the University of Toronto after only one year because, she explained, “there wasn’t any money for me to continue.”

Instead, like many poor young women in the 1950s, she became a working girl, until she met, fell in love with and married Andy Morrow.

She threw herself into the vocation of raising a family, first in Saskatchewan and later in Calgary, where the family moved in 1969. She saw to it that her children were well-dressed and well-fed. Just as important, she fed our minds. There were frequent trips to the library and discussions about everything from feminism and vegetarianism to the existence of God – although raised a devout Catholic, she would patiently listen to the anti-religious arguments of an adolescent atheist.

The one thing she absolutely wouldn’t tolerate, however, was bad manners. Those dinnertime talks were often punctuated by commands, “Say please,” “Chew with your mouth closed” and, most frequently, “Elbows off the table!” The latter faux pas – to her despair – was passed on to her grandchildren.

Not that Isabella didn’t have her own weaknesses. She was a lifelong black-coffee addict, brewing a cup so eye-wateringly strong that only the brave dared to share one with her. As a young mother, she also relied on frequent energy boosts from secret supplies of chocolate hidden throughout the house.

Isabella’s life wasn’t easy. Andy died suddenly in 1985, leaving her, at 50, to support herself. She held various jobs, from realtor to theatre front-of-house manager, until finding a natural outlet for her sense of style selling high-end women’s fashions. She eventually moved to Vancouver to be closer to two of her daughters and, after retiring, relocated again to Toronto.

There, she was able to live comfortably with the help of her kids and delight in her role as matriarch of an extended family, which came to include eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Yet her passion for learning never stopped as she enrolled in an endless succession of courses at TMU’s LIFE Institute, approaching each one more like an enthusiastic undergraduate than an octogenarian great-grandmother.

Isabella maintained a radiant presence all her life. The compliments from strangers kept coming and her vanity clearly enjoyed them. But for those of us who knew her well, it was her inner beauty that mattered. She has taught us all how to think, and to feel, deeply.

Martin Morrow is Isabella Morrow’s son.

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Lives Lived celebrates the everyday, extraordinary, unheralded lives of Canadians who have recently passed. To learn how to share the story of a family member or friend, go to tgam.ca/livesguide.