Geneviève Bujold

Geneviève Bujold grew up with a brother and a sister in Montreal`s East End; her father was a bus driver. At convent school shewas always the girl called upon to read the welcoming address to visiting notables. At 16, she was caught reading Marcel Pagnol’s proscribed but unexceptionable play, Fanny. Asked to leave, Bujold enrolled in Quebec`s Conservatory of Drama. By day she learned the classical tradition of Racine, Corneille and Moliere; by night, she was an usherette in a local cinema. With just two months left before she was to have graduated, Bujold decided that experience was better than a scrap of paper and signed on for the Théatre du Gesu’s production of The Barber of Seville. The man responsible for that first break was Monique Leyrac’s husband, Jean Dalmain. She would go on to star as St. Joan for the same company. Shortly after making her screen debut she was touring France with Montreal’s Théatre du RideauVert`s French production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She was spotted by Alain Resnals and given a screen test to play with Yves Montand in La Guerre Est Finie. She got the part and decided to stay in Paris after that to make two more films: King of Hearts (with Alan Bates, directed by Philippe de Broca) and Le Voleur (The Thief of Paris with Jean-Paul Belmondo, directed by Louis Malle) – then proceded to turn down offers from Roger Vadim, Harry Saltzman, Sam Spiegel (who wanted her to star opposite Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer), and Darryl Zanuck (“I heard that what Zanuck wants, Zanuck gets – well, he wasn’t going to get me,” she was quoted as saying). The part she did take was the famously risky one of Saint Joan in an NBC television special (December 1967), followed by the title role in the small Canadian film, Isabel (written, produced and directed by her then husband, Paul Almond). She played the lead role in another of his films, The Act of the Heart (opposite Donald Sutherland), before taking the title role in Anne of the Thousand Days (with Richard Burton), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award.