Lothaire Bluteau
About
Biography
Biography
With his gaunt, angular features and piercing gaze, this charismatic French-Canadian leading actor won considerable acclaim onstage in the early and mid-1980s and began starring in well-received art-house films near the end of the decade. An award-winning actor for his work in French-speaking theater in Montreal, Lothaire Bluteau enjoyed a major breakthrough with his role as the theater director obsessed with a modernized staging of the Passion and his performance as Jesus in Denys Arcand's striking satirical drama, "Jesus of Montreal" (1989).
Bluteau later made an acclaimed debut upon the London stage with his fiery performance as a murderous gay hustler in "Being at Home with Claude" (1991). He confirmed his talent for enigmatic heroes pained by troubles both physical and metaphysical with his fine work as a French Jesuit missionary making a harrowing journey to a remote mission outpost in Bruce Beresford's powerful "Black Robe" (1991). After bringing an imposing presence to the role of the Khan in Sally Potter's time-spanning, often whimsically gender-bending take on Virginia Woolf, "Orlando" (1992), Bluteau continued in a somewhat lighter vein with Krzysztof Zanussi's quietly comic romance, "The Silent Touch" (1993). Robert Lepage's "The Confessional" (1995) brought the actor raves for his deeply emotional portrayal of a man searching for the father of his adoptive brother in 1950s Quebec. More recently, he was Maurice Girodias, wounded by Valerie Solanas, in "I Shot Andy Warhol" and briefly appeared as the doomed fiance of Juliette Binoche's Hana in Anthony Minghella's Oscar-winning "The English Patient" (both 1996). Director Sean Mathias tapped Bluteau to portray Horst, the openly gay concentration camp inmate, in the feature version of Martin Sherman's acclaimed play "Bent" (1997).
Bluteau has also played in numerous French-language Canadian film with limited foreign distribution. He was a young rocker in "Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin" (1988), Carole Laure's lover in "La Nuit avec Hortense" (1988) and a man on death row in "Mourir," a 1987 short. On Canadian TV, he has starred in "Les Enfants mal aimees" and "Les Jeunes delinquants" as well as in the Canadian-French co-production, "Les Fils de la liberte." American audiences first saw Bluteau as a hired killer in a 1986 episode of "Miami Vice" and he was alongside Angela Lansbury in the 1992 CBS TV-movie "Mrs. 'arris Goes to Paris."
Filmography
Cast (Feature Film)
Cast (TV Mini-Series)
Life Events
1982
Awarded use of a studio in New York City owned by the government of Quebec; was based in NYC for about five years (dates approximate)
1986
Acted on US TV in an episode of "Miami Vice" entitled "One-Way Ticket"; played hired killer Phillipe Sagot
1986
First film role of note in "Les Fous de bassan"
1989
Breakthrough performance in the leading role of Daniel in Denys Arcand's "Jesus of Montreal"
1991
London stage debut, "Being at Home with Claude"
1992
American TV-movie debut, "Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris" (CBS)
1996
Co-starred in "I Shot Andy Warhol"
1997
Playe Horst in film version of Martin Sherman's play "Bent", directed by Sean Mathias
Videos
Movie Clip
Trailer
