No TV soaps for Céline Bonnier. She prefers to follow her chameleon instincts, alternating between a limited audience and the big screen, between TV and the C Factory, Million Dollar Babies and Urfaust ……

Her fame seemed to be assured in 1995 when she shared top billing in the film The Sphinx with Marc Messier. Particularly as she had just moved American audiences as the weeping mother in Million Dollar Babies. Predictions of her fame were revived when in 1997 she played the wife of a goalkeeper, portrayed by Patrice L’Ecuyer in the TV series The Mask. But each time Céline Bonnier has moved on, in pursuit of another guise.

Despite a c.v. which would make many actors green with envy, Céline Bonnier has none of the trappings of a star. Red hair one day, bleached the next, the 33 year old actress delights in making herself unrecognisable. Her name still doesn’t attract the crowds. “To be a  famous name rather disgusts me, and this doesn’t do me any good. I like to change my appearance; being recognised in the street doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Petite, with pale green eyes and a generous mouth, she radiates a mixture of vulnerability and strength of character. Some time ago she turned down important parts in soaps which would have propelled her into the limelight, because she could not imagine playing the same character for a long period of time. “In general I don’t like what is happening in television. I’m not maligning the soap format, but I still don’t understand it.”

Every role, in her opinion, offers an opportunity to explore new facets of the human soul. “I practice my art in order to make people think, to widen their horizons, in short to enlarge the domain of the soul. Human beings have fears, and these must be conquered otherwise it will prevent people from moving forward.” And for her there’s no need for the spotlights. Only great parts which at the moment are more plentiful in the theatre than on TV or cinema.

The youngest of a native Montreal family, Céline is the only one of the 8 children to be born in Saint-David-de-l’Auberivière, now part of Lévis. Their father Irénée was Liberal Member of Parliament for Taschereau, a Quebec constituency, from 1973 - 76. The Bonnier clan had much with which to stimulate the neighbours’ curiosity: the children liked to go barefoot, they dined and went to bed late, and, the ultimate in Bohemianism, they were all musical …..

“As a child Céline had a vivid imagination,” says her mother Raymonde. She put on shows in the playground and people would come over to see her up close. It was at the age of 7, during one of these neighbourhood performances where her over-acting had her public in fits of laughter, that Céline Bonnier knew that she would become an actor. “The biggest high of my life,” she says.

At 17 she took music at high school in Sainte-Foy. Astonished by her talent, her drama teacher convinced her to audition for the Conservatory of dramatic art. She got her diploma in 1987 then performed with the Trident and Théâtre Repère companies. In 1990 when Robert Lepage asked her come to Montreal to play in the part in Tectonic Plates  that she had performed in Quebec, she accepted at once.

A lover of the unknown, without a doubt. But not always a go-getter; when the diary eases off for a bit, laziness overtakes her and prevents her from painting, writing this book she dreams of, taking up the accordion again, or the flute, or the piano.

In interview she holds forth without modesty, as talkative as one might wish for. But about her private life, not a word …. She refuses to talk about actor Roy Dupuis who shares her life. “If I was going out with John Smith, would everyone be asking me so many questions?”

For Céline Bonnier all that matters is that she talks about art with a capital ‘A’ - which, in “a bond between artistes” brought her to tears in front of a Michelangelo sculpture in Rome - or about her inspiration, which she draws as much from The Little Prince as from the works of expressionists Egon Schiele and Otto Dix. Unencumbered by the baggage of a tormented artiste, the actress explores the various facets that allow her to grow. She needs, she says, ‘transcendence’.

A true chameleon, Céline Bonnier has grasped the tortured soul of Chimène in El Cid as much as the intellectual in Les Combustibles.  She has been a prostitute mother in the TV series Blanche and a singer in an erotic club in The Sphinx. Before the Christmas holidays she was a junkie mother in L’Enfant-problème by George F. Walker at the Théâtre de Quat’ Sous. In February she was in Free Cholesterol, a show which she conceived herself, a sort of half-improvisation on the dangers of a new sect, performed in the former Reddy Memorial Hospital! In April at the C Factory, in Urfaust by Denis Marleau, she will cloak herself in the white innocence of Marguerite, a young virgin tempted by the devil. In short, she moves effortlessly from productions destined for a large audience to those for the initiated.

In rehearsal Céline Bonnier asks a lot of questions, works hard and allows herself little time to get it right. Patience is not a virtue that she cultivates; oaths fly when she slips up. “Céline always works very hard,” says director Serge Denoncourt. “She had never done any classical verse. At the first reading for El Cid I said to myself, ‘My God, will she be able to do it?’ She worked all summer and when she returned the result was unbelievable.”

She enjoys not only a good reputation but the admiration of her peers. Directors seek her out for her truthfulness and her exceptional acting, her capacity to breathe a moving humanity into even the most forbidding  of her characters, like Denise in L’Enfant-problème or the terrorist in The Assignment. “I often compare her with Robert de Niro,” says Jean-Frédéric Messier, artistic director of the Momentum company, to which she has belonged since 1991. “She’s a sheet of white paper with nothing on it. But begin to write on it and she becomes something different every time.”

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