Celebrated contralto Maureen Forrester, who toured the globe giving concert tours and championed Canadian composers, has died at the age of 79.

Her daughter, Gina Dineen, said the famed singer died Wednesday night with family at her bedside in Toronto.

Forrester was born in Montreal on July 25, 1930, the youngest of four children of a Scottish cabinetmaker and his Irish wife.

In a career that began in church choirs and peaked on the world's best stages, Forrester was usually described in superlatives for roles that spanned the classics, opera, musicals, burlesque and even pop songs.

"Miss Forrester has a contralto that one can only describe by comparing it to a stained-glass window with the midday sun pouring through it," the Herald Tribune said after one New York performance.

Born into poverty, Forrester left school at 13 and worked as a secretary and a Bell telephone operator. All the while she scraped together enough money to pay for singing lessons.

By age 20, she was studying with singer Bernard Diamant, who taught her to sing as a contralto, her natural register. At 21, Big Mo, the nickname she earned playing basketball with her neighbourhood team, made her professional debut with the Montreal Elgar Choir.

Forrester had her Montreal Symphony debut in 1953, her Toronto Symphony debut in 1954 and her European debut in Paris in 1955.

The formidable and vivacious Forrester was a vocal champion of Canadian musicians and composers, regularly showcasing and premiering their work in her concerts.

"That's part of your job as a loyal subject of a country: to make sure that the culture of your country spreads around," she said in an interview with the CBC.

After she married Toronto violinist Eugene Kash in 1957, her career took on a new challenge: balancing the raising of five children with her touring schedule of up to 120 concerts a year. However, she admitted that she loved her busy life.

"I think the minute that saying — and I've always said this — this [has become] a job, I would give it up. As a job, it would be a lousy job because I'm on the road 90 per cent of the year," she told the CBC in 1975, the year after she and Kash separated.

Headed the Canada Council

In 1984, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau asked her to head the Canada Council. She accepted and over the next four years was instrumental in preventing the council from succumbing to political control.

World famous Canadian contralto Maureen Forrester has died at the age of 79. (Canadian Press)"No truly free society compromises its artists' freedom," she told the government. Her arguments won exemption from Bill C-24, legislation to tighten control over Crown corporations, for the Council, the CBC, the Canada Film Development Corp. and the National Arts Centre.

She published her memoir, Out of Character, in 1986 and continued to achieve career milestones even after that, including singing at La Scala in Italy in 1990, just weeks before her 60th birthday.

Forrester, who had been named a companion of the Order of Canada in 1967, was awarded a star on Canada's Walk of Fame in 2000, as well as Opera Canada's first Ruby award in the creative artist category.

That same year, CBC Radio Two featured Forrester on In Performance, and CBC TV aired the documentary Maureen Forrester: The Diva in Winter on its Life and Times series.

In 2003, she was made an Officer of the National Order of Quebec and in 2004 Forrester became a MasterWorks honouree of the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada.

Tributes to the singer have also included more than two dozen honorary university doctorates, namesake concert halls, scholarship funds, awards and artist showcases, including the Stratford Summer Music Festival's Maureen Forrester Award and its Maureen Forrester Young Artists series.

She is survived by her four daughters, Paula Burton, Gina Dineen, Linda Kash and Susan Whaley, her son, Daniel Kash, and her grandchildren.