Châtelaine, December 1996 - Céline Bonnier, chameleon star
	She changes the colour of her hair according to the season. She played the mother in the mini-series about the Dionne quintuplets and the nightclub singer in The Sphinx. Directors fight over her, but in the street practically nobody recognises her. Céline Bonnier auditioned for the character of Thérèse – the logging camp whore in the popular TV series Blanche – with white hair. She says that it was a matter of pure chance, that she often changes her look. If she had her way, her hair would be blue or orange, or maybe even sticking out of her head in nice straight spikes, like the punks with whom she feels a natural sympathy. Combing her hair is not her thing. Being a star who is recognised in the street isn’t either. Once she was stopped at a garage sale where a woman insisted, “You look like the woman who was in The Sphinx with Marc Messier!” The actress could have smiled proudly, puffed out her chest… She preferred to walk away. An enigma, Céline Bonnier. Next March we’ll be able to see her once again on the small screen in the mini-series The Mask, written by the Tremblay-Larouche duo. The actress will play the wife of the goalkeeper, played by Patrice L’Écuyer. Whether she likes it or not, it will be more and more difficult to go around incognito… Since she left the Conservatory of Quebec in 1987, Céline Bonnier has worked practically non-stop. She was monopolised by the theatre, and in 1990 the now famous Robert Lepage took her to London and Glasgow for his production of Tectonic Plates. On leaving the Conservatory this girl, who has little fondness for awards, had an unswerving desire: to be in the movies. Her big screen career began in 1993 with Marc-André Forcier’s A Wind from Wyoming, in which she played Manon. In The Sphinx, a bittersweet comedy by Louis Saïa, she portrays a nightclub singer for whom Marc Messier willingly leaves a spotless bungalow and a wife who specialises in roast dinners. In Caboose by Richard Roy, she is Camille, a tough-as-nails character who learns to be a lightning shot when she becomes the bodyguard of a policeman (Gilder Roy) who is a target for revenge. She also featured alongside Ben Kingsley and Donald Sutherland in an English language political thriller by Christian Duguay which is due out next year. Television indulged her beyond her dreams. Jean Beaudin gave her the role of Renée Vauquet in Shehaweh. And when she was offered the part of Elzire, the mother of the Dionne quintuplets in Million Dollar Babies, Céline Bonnier was speechless. “A mother of a large family? Look, I don’t have the equipment for that,” she says in astonishment, looking down jokingly at her small breasts. Even the members of the film crew were sceptical. Nevertheless, the gamble paid off. And as for the … equipment … “I was padded, that’s all!” Charles Binamé, director of Blanche, remembers having to delay the filming schedule three times to allow Bonnier to honour her stage commitments. Unheard of! “There was something rather weary in her expression that sat well with the character of this poor country girl, who allows the lumberjacks to have her because she has to earn a living for her family,” he says. A solution was finally found to accommodate her; she set off in the evening by plane to perform in Ottawa, returning early in the morning to Lac-à-la-Tortue, in Maurice, to be on the set! She was the first person Binamé spoke to about Eldorado, the innovative film which he directed in close collaboration with the handpicked cast; Pascale Monpetit, Pascale Bussières, James Hyndman, Robert Brouillette …. But she was too busy and Binamé had to pass on her. Unlike the theatre, where an actor can work with great freedom, the seventh art is a straitjacket; the framing, the lighting, the necessity to scratch yourself with the same hand in the long shot as in the close-up … These constraints drive some people mad. Not Céline Bonnier. “She is ‘technique friendly’,” says Charles Binamé neatly. She is slight, even frail, with a voice whose pleasant tone resonates in the ear, and full lips which slice through her face which has a clear, radiant complexion. Beautiful in her own way, a type that doesn’t turn heads in the street, but which lights up mysteriously on the screen. She has a good reputation in the business; not a fusser, cheerful, accessible, in her element in fact. “I’m a team girl,” she says. For almost six years she has worked in Momentum, a group of young actors who put on plays that are equally subversive and daring. In December 1995 at the Théatre Rialto, she also linked up with Théatre Il va sans dire, the happy band who practically reinvented collective working with Cabaret Neiges Noires and who made Céline Bonnier the star of their next play, Lolita. What has this woman got that has people falling over themselves for her? “Her acting is unadorned, unpretentious. It’s what you always ask from actors but don’t get from everyone,” suggests Charles Binamé. She was the only person that stage director René-Richard Cyr envisaged to play opposite Jean Besré and Jean-François Casabonne in the play Les Combustibles, performed at l’Espace Go in October. “There are actors who I like but whose faces never come to me when I’m reading a script, as if they weren’t in my mental scrapbook!”, he explains. “But I’ve wanted to work with her for a long time.” However he never suspected just how much in demand she was. “I was surprised when I saw her c.v….” he adds. Normally when an actor finds himself being offered a role, especially by a well-known director, he appears enthusiastic, inquiring about the dates, the names of the other actors etc. But, when René-Richard Cyr telephoned her, rather than accepting straight away, Céline Bonnier asked to read the play. Then she called the director to ask him why he thought it was important to put on this particular play … Then they discussed the script and it was only after two readings that she said yes. A fit of diva-ism? Cyr saw it more as the intelligence of an artiste who was not content just to read her lines when a script was put in her hands, but who considers the entirety of the play. “A rare quality,” he says. In auditions for roles, you have to portray the character in such a disturbing way that they give it to you even if you don’t have the necessary bust size … “It’s my job to look for a little bit of myself and to make a whole character out of it,” explains Céline Bonnier simply. “Elzire Dionne lost her children and I had to have in my eyes this pain that the loss of someone you love inflicts,” she adds thoughtfully, alluding to the death of her beloved brother Bernard, who was taken without warning by cardiac disease in his mid-thirties. He was her mentor, her ally, her model. He didn’t tell her what to do (the rebel in her would never have agreed!) but they understood each other without words, through the drawings that she sent him, through the music he composed. Bernard Bonnier worked closely with the Théatre Repère, whose top director at the time was Robert Lepage. Bonnier admired Frank Zappa so much that he had a lengthy meeting with him in Paris a short time before the singer’s death. He had a deep faith in his little sister; “She’ll be all right,” he assured their parents Raymonde and Irenée Bonnier, who never doubted it at all. “When she was little she gave theatrical performances in the playground and the children jostled for places to see her more closely,” her mother remembers. The Bonniers are more of a tribe than a family. “When we went on holiday people who passed us on the road gaped at us, there were so many children in the car,” remembers Raymonde Bonnier with a laugh. There were eight children, six boys and two girls, of whom Céline, the youngest, was the only one to be born in Saint-David de l’Auberivière, a village which is now part of the town of Lévis. The others were all born in Montreal. Which was already enough to make them a bit odd in the eyes of the neighbours … The tribe had a flair for transforming everyday life into a hilarious party. “We went barefoot outdoors, we went to bed late, we lived like a band of affiliated artists and everybody thought we were weird,” relates Céline with obvious pride. Their parents were particularly fond of singing and the theatre. They invited Africans to dinner or gave lodgings to a Peruvian student… This taste for fun has never left them. Only a few years ago the children, all of adult age like their mother, dressed up from head to foot not for Halloween but for Christmas! “Father is more serious,” adds Mrs Bonnier, jokingly. Between 1972 and 1976, Irenée Bonnier was the Liberal member for Taschereau, an underprivileged county. A politician at the head of a family of Bohemians? “He was a missionary,” corrects his daughter, “always ready to be of service. Even today people call him up to ask for advice….”. ‘Missionary’ is also the term she uses to describe her best friend Julie, a music therapist. Céline Bonnier loves people who have convictions, who cherish an ideal. “By doing something that’s important to you may be able to make a tiny difference,” her brother Bernard used to say. In films like The Sphinx and Caboose, Bonnier plays women who have been through some hard times, able to pull a revolver out of the belt of their pants or to get on the first bike that comes along. “She’s so nice and responsible,” says her mother … All the same … to see her on the day of the Châtelaine interview, her hair (red at the moment) all over the place, her tights cut off at mid-thigh and her threadbare coat, she looks more like a rock singer than a well-behaved child! The apartment she has just moved into in the middle of Montreal reeks of paint and on a little cassette player Alanis Morissette vents her rage. “I need some fresh air,” Céline Bonnier announces a little bossily, dragging me to the park on this chilly early morning. As long as we are talking about work there are no problems, she plays along with the interview. Her green eyes masked by sunglasses, she readily admits to painting “to clear the head” and to going to art galleries “as if they were (her) home”. But when the conversation veers dangerously towards her life, to her lost brother, to the rumour that she’s Roy Dupuis’ girlfriend, she bridles, protecting her territory, ready to pounce! She positively forbids me to talk about Roy Dupuis. “The media write all sorts of nonsense about stars, claiming to know them,” she protests. “I refuse to play that game. Mrs Smith who sees me on TV needs someone to talk about the art, she doesn’t need to know my private life!” The art, the art … Coming from Céline Bonnier, however, the word doesn’t sound pompous. “Maybe I’m an idealist, but art helps to keep me alive.” If she guardedly keeps her affairs of the heart to herself, maybe it’s because she finds her ideal of love quite difficult to achieve? “I had a good example of a happy couple,” she says. “My parents are together, they love each other. But I live in a different time from them, I have a different career. Certainly I would like to spend a lot of time with the same man in my life. I’m learning how.”
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