Lothaire Bluteau

Lothaire Bluteau

 Lothaire Bluteau, actor (b at Montréal 14 April 1957). Lothaire Bluteau is an intense and talented actor who has worked in theatre, film and television in Canada and internationally. After working with André BRASSARD, one of Québec's leading directors, he spent several years in theatre and television, mainly playing juvenile delinquents, street hustlers and drug dealers. However, his slight build and lack of English held him back in his career ambitions and eventually, after leaving Québec for Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles and Toronto, he landed back home. In 1984 he won the Grand Prize at the 15th Theatre International Fortnight and the Critics prize as chosen by the Association of Theatre Critics of Quebec.

Lothaire Bluteau appeared in a short film by Brigitte Sauriol, Bleue brume (1982), then longer ones such as Rien qu'un jeu (1983), also by Sauriol, and Les années de rêves (1984), directed by Jean-Claude Labrecque. His break came in 1985 in the critically praised stage production of René-Daniel DUBOIS's Being at Home with Claude. The play, which featured Bluteau in an explosive performance as an unstable homosexual who slits the throat of his lover, was the biggest hit of the season. He was first in line to repeat his performance in the 1992 film version directed by Jean BEAUDIN, but the part eventually went to Roy DUPUIS.

The play, however, did launch Lothaire Bluteau's career in film with an important role as a mentally challenged young man in Les fous de Bassen (1987), directed by Yves Simoneau, based on the novel by Anne HÉBERT. This was followed by Jean Chabot's La nuit avec Hortense (1988), Labrecque's Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin (1988) and the short feature Mourir (1988), directed by François GIRARD. Then Denys ARCAND came calling, casting him as the lead in Jésus de Montréal. The film was a hit in Canada, where Bluteau won the 1990 GENIE Award for best actor, and internationally, winning prizes at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival and earning a nomination for the best foreign-language film Oscar.

Being at Home with Claude was revived on London's West End, where Lothaire Bluteau received Time Out's Public Choice Award for his performance. It was there that Australian director Bruce Beresford saw him on stage and cast him as the lead in the historical drama BLACK ROBE (1991), a Canada/Australia co-production set in 17th-century Québec. The film was another hit for Bluteau, winning a Genie Award for best picture and the GOLDEN REEL AWARD for the top-grossing film at the Canadian box office in 1992.

In 1992 he appeared in Sally Potter's Orlando and Krzysztof Zanussi's The Silent Touch. In 1995 he was the lead in Robert LEPAGE's Le Confessionnal (for which he was nominated for another best actor Genie Award); in 1996 Mary Harron cast him in her film debut, I Shot Andy Warhol; and in 1997 he appeared in Other Voices, Other Rooms, based on the Truman Capote novel, and Bent, a film about the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany. In 1999 he played his first romantic lead in Conquest, an offbeat story about an affair between a French-Canadian banker and a stranded British tourist in the dying prairie town of Conquest, Saskatchewan. He played a troubled faith healer in Julie Walking Home in 2002 and in 2007 a vicious hood in Walk All Over Me.

Lothaire Bluteau's television work includes the miniseries "Nostromo" (1997), "Race to the Moon" (2007), and the made-for-television movie Dead Aviators (1999); in episodic television he had a recurring role in the 2004 season of "24," as well as parts in "Miami Vice" and "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."