My stepdaughter, Ruth McCance, who has died of cancer aged 53, was a writer and executive producer for film and TV, based for the last decade in Stockholm.
After graduating with a degree in film and media studies at Glasgow University, in the early 1990s Ruth worked as a secretary to Andrea Calderwood, then head of drama at BBC Scotland. Her potential was quickly spotted and she became a script editor there before moving to become a development producer at Ruby Films, head of development at Pathé productions and a creative executive at Film Four.
Her career took her in the early 2000s to Copenhagen, then to London to work for Potboiler Productions as head of development, and in 2011 to Stockholm, where she spent three years as an executive with Eccho Rights, an international rights management company, focusing on the sale and management of scripted formats. She then became an executive producer for the production company Warp Films for five years, commuting from Stockholm to the UK for a while before becoming a full-time writer.
Films she developed included Lynne Ramsay’s debut feature, Ratcatcher (1999), Simon Beaufoy and Bille Eltringham’s The Darkest Light (1999), Thomas Vinterberg’s It’s All About Love (2003), Soren Kragh-Jacobsen’s Skagerrak (2003) and Garth Jennings’ Son of Rambow (2008). At Warp she was the executive producer and episode writer for Sky Studios’ Little Birds (2020), the six-part Bafta-nominated adaptation of Anaïs Nin’s erotic short stories set in 1950s Tangier.
She had recently adapted Balzac’s Lost Illusions for TV, transposing early 19th-century post-revolutionary France into a metaphor for the pursuit of fame, wealth and power in contemporary western society, and was working on original scripts for TV4 in Sweden.
Ruth’s brilliant mind, sharp wit and creativity shone brightly. Her ability to master and understand the craft of writing, development and production of film and TV meant she was in demand, as she knew the realities and frustrations of the industry and could empathise with both writers and executives.
Born in Belfast, to Hazel Gordon (nee Bell), a relationship counsellor, and Bert McCance, a carpet fitter, Ruth went to the Friends’ school in Lisburn, County Antrim. She never forgot her working-class background in Northern Ireland, once complaining to her mother that, in her teenage years, “you gave me nothing to rebel against”, and she retained her mother’s values and feminism. She also kept up her connection to home by working for Cinemagic (the Belfast children’s film festival) in 1993 and serving on the board of Northern Ireland Screen from 2007 until 2011.
Ruth is survived by her partner, the Swedish artist Lars Nilsson; by her two children, Elsa and Emil, from her marriage, in 2005, to Kalle Torring, which ended in divorce; and by her parents and me, and her brother, Simon.
