Monique Mercure
Monique Mercure , CC , GOQ (born November 14, 1930 in Montreal ; actually Monique Émond ; † May 17, 2020 there ) was a Canadian theater and film actress . The former musician was considered one of the most successful Quebec actresses and has played around 100 roles in French and English-language productions in her more than five decades-long stage career. In addition, she appeared in over 80 film and television roles from the 1960s. For Jean Beaudin's feature film JA Martin Fotograf (1977) she received the Acting Award at the Cannes International Film Festival .
Life
Training and theater work
Monique Mercure was born in 1930 as Monique Émond, daughter of the English-speaking bank clerk Eugène and the French-speaking pianist Yvonne Émond (maiden name: Williams ). Her paternal grandfather was of Irish descent and had the family name Aymon, which he later changed to Émond. Her mother has Welsh ancestry. Raised in both English and French at the insistence of her father, she grew up with two brothers and a sister in the Montreal working class suburb of Snowdon. As a child she was introduced to the cello and devoted herself to acting. For lack of other options, she appeared in amateur productions at the nearby Collège Saint-Laurent , a boys' school.
In order to pursue a professional career as a cello player, Émond attended the private music school École Vincent-d'Indy in Montreal (formerly École Supérieure de Musique d'Outrement ) founded by a Roman Catholic order . There she studied singing and cello and completed her training with a bachelor's degree. In 1949, at the age of 18, she married the famous Québec composer Pierre Mercure , whose family name she adopted. The couple spent the first year of their marriage with such famous French-Canadian artists as Jean-Paul Riopelle in France . For the next several years, Mercure subordinated her career to that of her husband and devoted herself to family life. After separating from her husband in the late 1950s, she began a career as an actress, although she had studied as a cellist with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and dance with Ludmilla Chiriaeff . From 1957 to 1958, Mercure attended the École Jacques-Lecoq in Paris and also took acting lessons at the local Théâtre national populaire and at the École Charles Dullin . From 1959 to 1962 she was a student at the Montreal Drama Studio, where she got to know method acting . Mercure earned their living working part-time, while parents and siblings looked after the children from their marriage.
Before long, Mercure took on first roles on small stages in Montreal. In 1959 she appeared under the direction of Jean-Pierre Ronfard in Aeschylus ' Choephoren , the second part of the Orestie trilogy at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (TNM) in Montreal. It wasn't until her early thirties that Mercure was granted success as a theater actress. She has since starred in both classical and modern leading roles in repertory theater , including plays by Bertolt Brecht (various roles in Die Dreigroschenoper , 1960, 1961, 1990 and Mother Courage and Her Children , 1984), Tennessee Williams ( Summer and Rauch , The Night of the Iguana ) and Jean Genet's The Maids , as well as in works by Strindberg , Beckett and Shakespeare . Mercure has also appeared regularly in productions by well-known contemporary Quebec playwrights, including Michel Tremblay's Les Belles-Sœurs (1971) and L'Impromptu d'Outremont (1980) at the TNM. She was mainly active in Quebec theaters. With Tremblays À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou , she also performed beyond Québec's borders in Ottawa , Toronto and Europe and also took part in guest tours to the United States . In 1993, the interpretation of the Hecabe in the Euripides tragedy Die Troerinnen at TNM earned her the Prix Gascon-Roux and she was honored with the prestigious Prix Denise-Pelletier theater prize for her life's work.
Film career
In parallel to her work at the theater, Mercure was seen in Quebequer television series from the early 1960s. She made her cinema debut in 1964 with the supporting role of Barbara in Claude Jutra's award-winning drama All in All . She was then frequently entrusted with roles in French-Canadian and English-language feature films, both in dramas and comedies. She got her first leading role in Claude Fournier's successful erotic comedy Two Goldy Girls (1970), in which she and Louise Turcot gave two bored Montreal housewives a face who began to amuse themselves after reading a book about sexual liberation . She was remembered to a wide audience outside Québec through the role of the mysterious Alexandrine in Jutra's youth film My Uncle Antoine (1971), in which she became the object of desire of the growing lead actor (played by Jacques Gagnon ). In 1975 she made use of her musical skills in Jean-Claude Labrecques Les vautours and Claude Jutras Pour le meilleur et pour le pire , in which she played the piano and cello.
It was not until 1977 that Mercure became known to an international audience when he collaborated with Jean Beaudin on the film project JA Martin Fotograf . In the film adaptation of an original screenplay by Beaudin, she slipped on the side of the well-known actor and co-writer Marcel Sabourin in the role of a quiet wife and mother who discovered in Québec in the 19th century that the relationship with her husband (played by Sabourin) after 15 -year marriage is almost frozen. Despite the incomprehension of her family and environment, she then decides to accompany her husband on his next photography trip. In the same year, the drama received an invitation to compete at the 30th Cannes International Film Festival . The performance by Mercure was well received by the festival jury headed by Italian director Roberto Rossellini . The role of Rose-Aimée brought the 46-year-old as the first Canadian actress the Actor Award of the film festival, which she shared with the American Shelley Duvall (Three Women) . She was unable to accept the award herself because of a theater performance in Montreal.
After the success of JA Martin photographer , for whom she also found recognition in her home country, Mercure worked with such well-known directors as Robert Altman ( Quintet , 1979) or Claude Chabrol ( The Blood of Others , 1984), but was able to work on the previous ones No longer to build on international success. In the early 1990s she was remembered by American cinema audiences through the role of the mysterious Fadela in David Cronenberg's feature film Naked Lunch (1991). The film, in which Cronenberg combined the plot of the cult novel of the same name by William S. Burroughs with the genesis of the book, earned Mercure the Canadian Genie Award . Seven years later she was part of the acting ensemble of François Girard's Oscar- winning drama The Red Violin (1998), while she won a second genius award as the disgruntled, rural companion of Lothaire Bluteau in Piers Haggard's tragicomedy Conquest (1998) . Another success was the lead role of Édith Beauchamp in the French-Canadian television series Providence (2005). The role of the affluent but ailing business woman who has to decide on a successor to her company earned her the 2007 Canadian television award Prix Gémeaux .
Monique Mercure lived in Montreal and was married from 1949 to 1958 to the composer Pierre Mercure (1927–1966). The connection resulted in a daughter and twin sons. Her daughter Michèle Mercure was also active as an actress and appeared together with her mother in the feature film La cuisine rouge (1980), before moving to the Canadian state broadcasting company Société Radio-Canada (SRC) as a producer . With her daughter, Mercure also launched a retrospective of the work of her late husband in 1996. From 1991 to 1997, she was also the first woman to hold the post of General Director at the École nationale de théâtre (ÉNT), Québec's national theater school, which she then headed as artistic director from 1997 to 2000. In 1998 she was the jury president of the Montreal World Film Festival .
Her decades of work in Canadian theater, film and television has received multiple awards. In 1994 she received the Ordre du Canada as a Compagnon , after having been promoted to the rank of Officier in 1977 . In 1993 she had already received the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards . In addition, Mercure was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto , and in 2006 was elected to the Royal Society of Canada , the national academy of science of Canada. In 2008 she received the Prix Gascon-Thomas des École nationale de théâtre .
She died on May 17, 2020 at the age of 89.
Filmography (selection)
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Awards
Genius award
- 1983: Nominated for Best Actress for La quarantaine
- 1992: Best Supporting Actress for Naked Lunch
- 1999: Best Supporting Actress for Conquest - Journey into a New Life
Prix Jutra
- 1999: Nominated for Best Supporting Actress for The Red Violin
Further
- 1977: Best leading actress for JA Martin Photographer
Cannes International Film Festival
- 1977: Best Actress for JA Martin Photographer
- 2000: Nominated for Best Actress in a TV Series or Dramatic Program for Albertine, en cinq temps
- 2005: Nominated for Best Actress in a Television Series for Providence
- 2007: Best Actress in a Television Series for Providence
Web links
- Monique Mercure ( English, French ) In: The Canadian Encyclopedia .
- Portrait in the Canadian Theater Encyclopedia
- Profile at filmreference.com (English)
- Monique Mercure in the All Movie Guide (English)
- Monique Mercure in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Monique Mercure, Grande officière (2010) (French)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Montreal's Monique Mercure dies at 89 after 60-year acting career. In: montrealgazette.com. May 18, 2020, accessed on May 18, 2020 .
- ↑ cf. Monique Mercure. In: Contemporary Theater, Film, and Television. Vol. 57. Thomson Gale, 2004 (accessed via Biography Resource Center)
- ↑ a b cf. Monique Mercure. In: World who's who: Europa biographical reference . London: Routledge, 2003 (2002) ff. (Electronic resource, accessed April 10, 2009)
- ↑ a b c d e f g cf. Bagnall, Janet: Monique Mercure. In: The Gazette (Montreal, Québec), February 18, 1996, Sunday Life, p. C1
- ^ A b Monique Mercure ( English, French ) In: The Canadian Encyclopedia . Retrieved August 21, 2016.
- ↑ cf. Portrait ( Memento of the original from December 5, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at northernstars.ca (English; accessed April 10, 2009)
- ↑ a b c cf. Lalonde, Michelle: A Woman Of Influence. In: The Gazette (Montreal, Québec), March 23, 1992, Woman News, Chez Nous, p. C1
- ↑ cf. Biography ( Memento of the original from December 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at agencegoodwin.com (PDF file, English; 22.5 kB)
- ↑ a b c cf. Le prix Gascon-Thomas à Monique Mercure on radio-canada.ca (French; accessed April 18, 2009)
- ↑ cf. Biography in the Internet Movie Database (accessed April 9, 2009)
- ↑ cf. Donnelly, Pat: Mercure to head National Theater School. In: The Gazette (Montreal, Québec), October 22, 1991, Entertainment, p. B6
- ↑ cf. Mercure named festival judge. In: The Gazette (Montreal, Québec), August 27, 1998, Entertainment, p. D8
- ↑ Monique Mercure Deces: Canadian actress Marie Lise Monique Émond CC Has Died. May 17, 2020, accessed May 17, 2020 .
- ↑ cf. Profile ( page can no longer be accessed , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in Canada's Awards Database (accessed April 19, 2009)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Mercure, Monique |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Émond, Monique (real name); Emond, Monique |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Canadian theater and film actress |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 14, 1930 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Montreal , Quebec |
| DATE OF DEATH | 17th May 2020 |
| Place of death | Montreal , Quebec |