Robert Munsch, the beloved Canadian children’s author of books like The Paper Bag Princess and Love You Forever, says he has been approved for medical assistance in dying (MAID) after he was diagnosed with dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

In a New York Times profile of Munsch, the author said that he applied for MAID — a practice that was legalized in 2016 — and his application was approved.

Munsch, 80, joked to the outlet that his application said, “Hello, Doc — come kill me! How much time do I have? Fifteen seconds!”

He said he had watched one of his brothers die slowly from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a nervous system disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord and gets worse over time.

“They kept him alive through all these interventions. I thought, ‘Let him die,'” Munsch said.

The author said he doesn’t want to “linger that way” and added that he thinks he will choose to go “when I start having real trouble talking and communicating. Then I’ll know.”

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Under MAID laws in Canada, Munsch must be able to actively consent on the day of his death.

“I have to pick the moment when I can still ask for it,” Munsch explained to the Times.

Munsch told his wife, Ann, that if he misses the opportunity, she’s “stuck with me being a lump.”

2:31 Terminally ill Edmonton senior chooses MAID

The author, who has published more than 70 books over his career, said he doesn’t want to be here “when I can’t recognize the people I love.”

For now, he said his old stories have survived his diagnoses and remain with him.

“I notice that the stories are mostly free from the problems I have with speech,” he said.

In Canada, a person who wishes to receive MAID must meet eligibility criteria that include being at least 18 years of age, having decision-making capacity, being eligible for publicly funded health-care services and making a voluntary request that is not the result of external pressure.

The person must also have a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability, be in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability and enduring and intolerable physical or psychological suffering that cannot be alleviated under conditions the person considers acceptable.

Munsch was inducted into the Order of Canada in 1999 and received a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2009.

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After the New York Times profile was published, Scholastic Canada shared a statement on Instagram, writing, “As proud publishers of Robert Munsch’s beloved books, we are grateful for all the stories he’s shared, including his own. We love you forever.”

“This New York Times article by Katie Engelhart offers a powerful glimpse into the man behind the stories, and we join those who have expressed profound gratitude for this chance to understand and connect with Robert Munsch in a new way,” the publishing company wrote.

“It’s an incredibly generous act to open up like this, and it reminds us, once again, why Robert’s work continues to touch many generations.”

His death was announced in a statement by Cindi Berger, the chief executive of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK.

Berger said Redford died at his home “in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy.”

His cause of death was not revealed.

After rising to stardom in the 1960s, Redford was one of the biggest stars of the ’70s with such films as The Candidate, All the President’s Men and The Way We Were, capping that decade with the best director Oscar for 1980’s Ordinary People, which also won best picture in 1980. His wavy blond hair and boyish grin made him the most desired of leading men, but he worked hard to transcend his looks — whether through his political advocacy, his willingness to take on unglamourous roles or his dedication to providing a platform for low-budget movies.

2:25 Robert Redford receives Presidential Medal of Freedom

His roles ranged from Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward to a mountain man in Jeremiah Johnson to a double agent in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and his co-stars included Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise.

But his most famous screen partner was his old friend and fellow activist and practical joker Paul Newman, their films a variation of their warm, teasing relationship off screen. Redford played the wily outlaw opposite Newman in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a box-office smash from which Redford’s Sundance Institute and festival got its name. He also teamed with Newman on 1973’s best picture Oscar winner, The Sting, which earned Redford a best-actor nomination as a young con artist in 1930s Chicago.

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Film roles after the ’70s became more sporadic as Redford concentrated on directing and producing, and his new role as patriarch of the independent-film movement in the 1980s and ’90s through his Sundance Institute. But he starred in 1985’s best picture champion Out of Africa and in 2013 received some of the best reviews of his career as a shipwrecked sailor in All is Lost, in which he was the film’s only performer. In 2018, he was praised again in what he called his farewell movie, The Old Man and the Gun.

“I just figure that I’ve had a long career that I’m very pleased with. It’s been so long, ever since I was 21,” he told The Associated Press shortly before the film came out. “I figure now as I’m getting into my 80s, it’s maybe time to move toward retirement and spend more time with my wife and family.”

Sundance is born

Redford had watched Hollywood grow more cautious and controlling during the 1970s and wanted to recapture the creative spirit of the early part of the decade. Sundance was created to nurture new talent away from the pressures of Hollywood, the institute providing a training ground and the festival, based in Park City, Utah, where Redford had purchased land with the initial hope of opening a ski resort. Instead, Park City became a place of discovery for such previously unknown filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson and Darren Aronofsky.

“For me, the word to be underscored is ‘independence,’” Redford told the AP in 2018. “I’ve always believed in that word. That’s what led to me eventually wanting to create a category that supported independent artists who weren’t given a chance to be heard.

“The industry was pretty well controlled by the mainstream, which I was a part of. But I saw other stories out there that weren’t having a chance to be told and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can commit my energies to giving those people a chance.’ As I look back on it, I feel very good about that.”

2:00 Two Women: Chloé Robichaud reimagines a Québecoise classic

Sundance was even criticized as buyers swarmed in looking for potential hits and celebrities overran the town each winter.

“We have never, ever changed our policies for how we program our festival. It’s always been built on diversity,” Redford told the AP in 2004. “The fact is that the diversity has become commercial. Because independent films have achieved their own success, Hollywood, being just a business, is going to grab them. So when Hollywood grabs your films, they go, ‘Oh, it’s gone Hollywood.’”

By 2025, the festival had become so prominent that organizers decided they had outgrown Park City and approved relocating to Boulder, Colorado, starting in 2027. Redford, who had attended the University of Colorado in Boulder, issued a statement saying that “change is inevitable, we must always evolve and grow, which has been at the core of our survival.”

Redford was married twice, most recently to Sibylle Szaggars. He had four children, two of whom have died — Scott Anthony, who died in infancy, in 1959; and James Redford, an activist and filmmaker who died in 2020.

Redford’s early life

Robert Redford was born Charles Robert Redford Jr. on Aug. 18, 1937, in Santa Monica, a California boy whose blond good looks eased his way over an apprenticeship in television and live theatre that eventually led to the big screen.

Redford attended college on a baseball scholarship and would later star as a middle-aged slugger in 1984’s The Natural, the adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s baseball novel. He had an early interest in drawing and painting, then went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, debuting on Broadway in the late 1950s and moving into television on such shows as The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Untouchables.

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After scoring a Broadway lead in Sunday in New York, Redford was cast by director Mike Nichols in a production of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, later starring with Fonda in the film version. Redford did miss out on one of Nichols’ greatest successes, The Graduate, released in 1967. Nichols had considered casting Redford in the part eventually played by Dustin Hoffman, but Redford seemed unable to relate to the socially awkward young man who ends up having an affair with one of his parents’ friends.

“I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser,’” Nichols said during a 2003 screening of the film in New York. “And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘OK, have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.”

Indie champion, mainstream star

Even as Redford championed low-budget independent filmmaking, he continued to star in mainstream Hollywood productions himself, scoring the occasional hit such as 2001’s Spy Game, which co-starred Brad Pitt, an heir apparent to Redford’s handsome legacy whom he had directed in A River Runs Through It.

Ironically, The Blair Witch Project, Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite and other scrappy films that came out of Sundance sometimes made bigger waves — and more money — than some Redford-starring box-office duds like Havana, The Last Castle and An Unfinished Life.

Redford also appeared in several political narratives. He satirized campaigning as an idealist running for U.S. senator in 1972’s The Candidate and uttered one of the more memorable closing lines, “What do we do now?” after his character manages to win. He starred as Woodward to Hoffman’s Carl Bernstein in 1976’s All the President’s Men, the story of the Washington Post reporters whose Watergate investigation helped bring down President Richard Nixon.

With 2007’s Lions for Lambs, Redford returned to directing in a saga of a congressman (Tom Cruise), a journalist (Meryl Streep) and an academic (Redford) whose lives intersect over the war on terrorism in Afghanistan.

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His biggest filmmaking triumph came with his directing debut on Ordinary People, which beat Martin Scorsese’s classic Raging Bull at the Oscars. The film starred Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore as the repressed parents of a troubled young man, played by Timothy Hutton, in his big screen debut. Redford was praised for casting Moore in an unexpectedly serious role and for his even-handed treatment of the characters, a quality that Roger Ebert believed set “the film apart from the sophisticated suburban soap opera it could easily have become.”

Redford’s other directing efforts included The Horse Whisperer, The Milagro Beanfield War and 1994’s Quiz Show, the last of which also earned best picture and director Oscar nominations. In 2002, Redford received an honorary Oscar, with academy organizers citing him as “actor, director, producer, creator of Sundance, inspiration to independent and innovative filmmakers everywhere.”

“The idea of the outlaw has always been very appealing to me. If you look at some of the films, it’s usually having to do with the outlaw sensibility, which I think has probably been my sensibility. I think I was just born with it,” Redford said in 2018. “From the time I was just a kid, I was always trying to break free of the bounds that I was stuck with, and always wanted to go outside.”

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Associated Press journalists Hillel Italie, Jake Coyle and Mallika Sen contributed to this report. Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014, was the principal writer of this obituary.

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— With files from Global News’ Katie Scott

Prince Harry — after meeting with his father, King Charles III, for the first time in almost two years last week — says he’s warming up to the idea of introducing his kids to their estranged family members.

During an exclusive interview with The Guardian, the Duke of Sussex, 41, said he would like to bring his American-born children, Prince Archie, 6, and Princess Lilibet, 4, whom he shares with his wife, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, to his home country.

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“Yes, I would. This week has definitely brought that closer,” he told the British outlet on an overnight train to Kyiv after a short trip to the U.K.

Not much is known about the recent meeting between Harry and his father, other than they sat down for a cup of tea.

0:38 Prince Harry gets emotional as he visits Kyiv memorial dedicated to fallen soldiers

The Duke, who became entirely estranged from the Royal Family after he released his tell-all memoir Spare, did not share a great deal about the rift at the behest of his father.

He did provide some novel tidbits about himself, including that he hates cycling because he has a “bony ass,” and that boxing and “hitting the hell out of a bag” help him to relieve stress.

The outlet went on to describe him as an “informal” person who walked around in his socks and made dad jokes during the overnight train ride to the capital of Ukraine.

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Harry, who is not on speaking terms with his brother, Prince William, the Prince of Wales, said, “my conscience is clear,” while alluding to wanting to spend more time in the U.K. despite his public criticisms of his family.

His comments mark a shift in outlook from earlier this year, when Harry told the BBC he did not “see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the U.K.,” after losing a legal bid to retain his publicly funded police security detail provided to him when visiting Britain.

“They’re going to miss, well, everything,” he said. “I love my country. I always have done. Despite what some people in that country have done,” the prince, whose security was downgraded when he left England for the U.S., continued.

1:54 Prince Harry loses legal battle with UK government over police protection

“I miss the U.K., I miss parts of the U.K., of course I do,” he also told the BBC in May. “I think that it’s really quite sad that I won’t be able to show my children my homeland.”

Before his most recent visit, Harry last saw his father in person in February 2024, days after the King announced his cancer diagnosis.

During their latest meeting, the Duke of Sussex was seen arriving at Clarence House at around 5:20 p.m. local time on Sept. 10. He was pictured leaving just under an hour later, according to People.

The two have been distant since Harry and his wife, Meghan, left royal life and moved to California in 2020.

Country singers Zach Bryan and Gavin Adcock got into a heated confrontation during the Born & Raised Festival in Oklahoma over the weekend.

Several videos posted online show Bryan, 29, yelling at Adcock, 26, through a fence while at the festival on Sept.13 in Pryor, Okla.

“Hey, do you want to fight like a man?” Bryan yells in the video. “Come open the gate. Want me to throw a beer too?”

Once Adcock gets closer to the fence, Bryan appears to push it in his direction, which resulted in a security guard stepping forward to get involved.

“When you get death threats from Sack Cryin before you headline in his hometown,” Adcock wrote in text over clip.

“Eat a snickers bro,” Adcock wrote in the post’s caption.

In another video posted online, Bryan can be seen climbing the fence — topped with barbed wire — to get to Adcock, but he’s held back by security once he gets over the fence. A bodyguard can also been seen escorting Adcock away from Bryan.

Adcock shared a video on Instagram, talking about the incident with the caption, “Rotten fruit falls on its own.”

“Well, like I already said, I don’t think Zach Bryan’s a very good person. He wasn’t locked out of the festival. He had been there all day with his multiple security guards. He saw me standing between my buses when he got here,” Adcock began.

“He had plenty of opportunity between the whole day to do whatever he wanted to do but decided he was going to wait like an hour before my set while I was standing out there.”

Adcock said that “no artist who cares about their fans is going to fight right before their set, missing going on (stage) and disappointing fans that spent way too much money to be there.”

“I wasn’t even mad I didn’t even have a single reason to fight him. After he had already left before my set I was standing outside. He pulls up in a pick-up truck outside the gate and starts giving out threats,” Adcock continued. “So I just decided to stir him up to the point where he jumped over the fence.”

“I don’t think anybody’s scared of Zach Bryan. I’m just an adult and fighting him would only mean going to jail, missing my set and falling into a Zach Bryan lawsuit. And we all know he likes to manipulate people with money,” Adcock said.

He told his fans that Bryan knew where he was all day and “knew my set time, knew where I’d be standing.”

“He created this whole ‘I’m a badass,’ jump over the fence narrative just to try to make himself look bigger or tougher even though he could have just walked on in the gate. He’d been in there all day. At the end of the day I know my decision I made was right. I didn’t take the Zach Bryan bait,” Adcock concluded.

Adcock and Bryan have been in an ongoing feud since July.

Adcock had previously criticized Bryan as a young fan claimed he waited hours after a show in New Jersey in the hopes of getting an autograph from Bryan. The fan took to TikTok and wrote, “We waited 3 hours outside to meet Zach Bryan… he completely blew everyone off and drove away like a jerk.”

In a since-deleted response to the TikTok, Bryan wrote, “You’re not entitled after someone plays two and a half hours to a picture or a hello.” Bryan also added the acronym “GOMD,” meaning “Get off my d—.”

Adcock then fired back on X and wrote, “If you can’t handle the criticism of a 14 year old why do people idolize you? The kid was head over heels to meet you and spent/parents spent a ton of money to see you. He’s got feeling[sic] too and you’re a ‘grown man’ nearly 30. They’re the only reason you are around.”

Adcock addressed his post on Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast in August, saying, “It wasn’t about not wanting to sign autographs after a show, it’s like letting a 14-year-old kid rant, without saying, ‘Get off my d—.’ You’re bigger than that.”

He also accused Bryan of wearing “a big mask in his day-to-day life.”

“Sometimes he can’t help but rip it off and show his true colours,” Adcock added. “I don’t know if Zach Bryan’s really that great of a person.”

Ellen DeGeneres is facing a new lawsuit after a woman claimed that the former talk show host ignored a stop sign while driving in Santa Barbara County, Calif., nearly two years ago and “t-boned” her car.

According to the lawsuit, viewed by People, the woman claims that DeGeneres, 67, “entered the intersection without stopping at the stop sign.”

The lawsuit says the intersection where the incident occurred on Oct. 16, 2023 “is controlled by stop signs in all directions.”

The plaintiff claims that she stopped for her stop sign and “made sure there were no other vehicles” present before continuing to drive forward. But she claimed that DeGeneres “suddenly and without any warning” collided with her car and “t-boned” her vehicle, which resulted in injuries to the plaintiff.

The lawsuit also accuses DeGeneres of exhibiting “negligent conduct (that) fell below the standard of care of a reasonable person,” and alleges that the comedian “negligently caused, or contributed to causing plaintiff’s vehicle to be collided with by the defendants’ vehicle.”

The woman claims she has suffered “multiple serious personal injuries and damages” as a result of the collision, along with wage loss, accrued hospital and medical expenses, “loss of enjoyment of life, emotional distress and anxiety.”

She is suing DeGeneres for general negligence and an undisclosed amount of compensatory damages.

DeGeneres has not publicly addressed the allegations from the new lawsuit and was last seen on an Italian vacation with her wife, Portia de Rossi.

3:50 Why Ellen DeGeneres says she’s ‘done’ with showbusiness

The lawsuit comes after DeGeneres confirmed that U.S. President Donald Trump is the reason she left the United States and moved to the U.K.

In her first public appearance since leaving the U.S. last year, DeGeneres was asked at a conversation event in July if the reports that she moved to the U.K. because of Trump, 79, were correct, and she simply said, “Yes.”

“We got here the day before the election and woke up to lots of texts from our friends with crying emojis, and I was like, ‘He got in,'” DeGeneres told broadcaster Richard Bacon in Cheltenham, England. “And we’re like, ‘We’re staying here.'”

DeGeneres had nothing but good things to say about her new home in the aristocratic Cotswolds region, telling Bacon that life “is just better” in the U.K.

“It’s absolutely beautiful,” she said. “We’re just not used to seeing this kind of beauty. The villages and the towns and the architecture — everything you see is charming and it’s just a simpler way of life.

“It’s clean. Everything here is just better. The way animals are treated, people are polite. I just love it here.”

DeGeneres and de Rossi moved to England last November after selling their home in Montecito, Calif., in August.

At the time, The Wrap spoke to sources close to the comedian and the Arrested Development star, who told the outlet the couple are likely to “never” return to the U.S. on a permanent basis.