Actor

(b. April 14, 1957 Montreal, Quebec)

“Every time I finish a film, I say I’m not doing another one. Every fucking time.... I used to get really drawn into my characters, which was considered good – it’s very Actors Studio. I got so depressed I had to stop acting [for a time].” – Lothaire Bluteau

One of the most distinctive, recognizable and captivating actors in Canadian cinema of the late eighties and nineties, Lothaire Bluteau has worked in theatre, film and television throughout Canada and internationally, appearing in more than thirty films in the last twenty years. Encapsulating his unique appeal, Janis L. Pallister wrote in The Cinema of Quebec that Bluteau’s inherent fragility and finely honed, internalized acting style “convey a very real sense of pain and suffering, not to mention an ethereal and compelling presence.” Expanding on the notion of Bluteau’s fragility, Bill Marshall commented in Quebec National Cinema that “the version of masculinity he embodies is a feminized, fallible, and chastened one.”

Brooding and intense, with gentle but piercing eyes and a disarming, soft-spoken demeanour, the wiry Bluteau rose through the ranks of Quebec theatre in the late seventies and early eighties, eventually winning the Grand Prize at the Theatre International Fortnight and the Critics Prize from the Quebec Association of Theatre Critics in 1984. He served as assistant director to Paul Buissoneau, performed at the Quat’Sous Theatre in Montreal and worked as an assistant to theatre director Andre Brassard before beginning to work in film in 1982.

His breakthrough film role came via his riveting performance as a mentally handicapped youth in Yves Simoneau’s Les Fous de bassan (1987), which he followed with impressive work as Carole Laure’s lover in Jean Chabot’s La Nuit avec Hortense (1988), a young rocker in Jean-Claude Labrecque’s Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin (1988) and a man on death row in François Girard’s Mourir (1988). After receiving great acclaim for the lead in the stage version of Being at Home with Claude, he achieved international stardom with Denys Arcand’s masterpiece Jésus de Montréal(1989), which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival and netted Bluteau a Genie Award for Best Actor.

He reprised his role in Being at Home with Claude in the long-running London stage production (for which he received the prestigious Time Out Public Choice Award), and went on to star in such notable, award-winning films as Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe(1991) – for which he spent four months researching the role of a seventeenth-century Jesuit priest – and Robert Lepage’s Le Confessionnal (1995). Equally at home in French or English, his diverse international credits include Sally Porter’s Orlando (1992) and Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), as well as roles in such television series as “24,” “Oz,” “Third Watch” and “Law and Order.” Bluteau also directs Off-Broadway plays and has lived in New York City since the mid-nineties.

Film and video work includes

Les Fils de la liberté, 1980 (actor; TV)
Jeune délinquant series, 1980 (actor; TV, 3 episodes)
Rien qu'un jeu, 1983 (actor)
Un Gars d'la place, 1983 (actor)
Les Années de rêves, 1984 (actor)
Les Enfants mal aimés, 1984 (actor)
Un Gars d'la place, 1985 (actor)
Sonia, 1986 (actor)
Miami Vice series, 1986 (actor; TV, one episode)
Les Fous de bassan, 1987 (actor)
La Nuit avec Hortense, 1987 (actor)
Bonjour Monsieur Gaugin, 1988 (actor)
Mourir, 1988 (actor)
La Nuit avec Hortense, 1988 (actor)
The Persistence of Memory, 1991 (actor)
Orlando, 1992 (actor)
The Silent Touch, 1992 (actor)
Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, 1992 (actor; TV)
Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1995 (actor)
I Shot Andy Warhol, 1996 (actor)
Nostromo, 1997 (actor; TV)
Bent, 1997 (actor)
Conquest, 1998 (actor)
Animals (and The Tollkeeper), 1998 (actor)
Shot Through the Heart, 1998 (actor; TV)
Senso unico, 1999 (actor)
Dead Aviators, 1999 (actor; TV)
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit series, 1999 (actor, TV; one episode)
Restless Spirits, 1999 (actor; TV)
Urbania, 2000 (actor)
Oz series, 2000 (actor; TV, one episode)
Solitude, 2001 (actor)
Law & Order: Criminal Intent series, 2001 (actor; TV, one episode)
Dead Heat, 2002 (actor)
Julie Walking Home, 2002 (actor)
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit series, 2003 (actor; TV, one episode)
On Thin Ice, 2003 (actor; TV)
24 series, 2004 (actor; TV, 5 episodes)
Gérald L'Ecuyer: A Filmmaker's Journey, 2004 (actor; TV)
Third Watch, 2004 (actor; TV, one episode)
Desolation Sound, 2005 (actor)
Law & Order: Trial by Jury series, 2006 (actor; TV, one episode)
Disappearances, 2006 (actor)
Walk All Over Me, 2007 (actor)
Race to Mars mini-series (actor)
The Funeral Party, 2007 (actor)