When spring arrives, Roy Dupuis jumps on his all-white Harley-Davidson and roars off down the highway to the Eastern Townships, in the direction of Farnham. There, in the strictest anonymity, he slips on his parachute, adjusts his helmet and climbs into the fuselage of a twin-engine plane. At a height of 3500m the door opens and, after counting to three, the most adored leading man in Quebec hurls himself alone into space, his eyes wide open. During the 55 seconds when he is falling at 200km/hr through the blue sky, Roy Dupuis is at last free. Gliding, diving, pirouetting, playing with the wind …. all with an eye on the altimeter.

"You learn a whole lot of things while defying death," he says. "Skydiving is like walking onstage or onto a film set: you must jump into space and think of nothing."

When he touches down laughing uproariously you realise that this man, who has been compared with all the sex symbols of the American cinema from Marlon Brando to Mickey Rourke, is above all a gambler. A compulsive gambler who even more than he loves to play hockey, badminton, billiards, chess, bowling and table-football, loves to play for the stakes of life. Success, love, money, the theatre and the cinema are for him faces of the same dice which he throws and rethrows for the simple sweet thrill of the stakes.

Since graduating from the National Theatre School six years ago, the Quebecois Beau Brummel has followed a flawless route to success. After eight films, nine plays and five television series, he has been in work more than the majority of actors of his age and remains one of the few local actors who could realistically hope to have a career abroad. His masterly interpretation in Being at Home with Claude, the Jean Beaudin film released in the spring in London and Paris, confounded the sceptics who thought that his good looks could explain everything. Next winter he will return to the stage after a three-year absence, in True West by Sam Shepard (for the New Theatre Company) to prove once again that he is not just a star of a television series.

On an April afternoon, he arrives in a sweat at the Witloof on Rue Saint-Denis, dressed in a leather jacket and a wool shirt. He has come from a badminton match. It’s spring, and he is in love. Someone at the next table gives him a slap on the back. Does he know him? "Not at all!" It’s impossible to interview the biggest screen idol in Quebec without someone calling "Ovila!", or a teenager asking him to write his name on her left breast, or a housewife scolding him for leaving Macha Grenon in an episode of Scoop.

Two years ago he swapped his flat on Saint-Joseph Boulevard for a duplex on Saint-Louis Square; he learned to drive, bought a black Mustang, a motorbike and two dogs. He got a new girlfriend and celebrated his 30^th birthday in April.

"It’s the age when one becomes an adult. I sometimes feel I have complicated my life these past few years. Today I’m returning to the discipline I knew as a child, when I studied the cello two hours a day and played hockey in the morning before school."

Roy Dupuis disciplined? "In the beginning there weren’t a lot of people betting on him," says Brigitte Haentjens, director of the NCT. At the National Theatre School he was not the most diligent student in the morning theory classes. He would arrive just before rehearsals having partied all night. That didn’t stop him doing better than those who had worked steadily. On the evening of one performance he arrived a few minutes before curtain-up without his costume … which he had left in a bar!

The actor Norman Helms recalls the time when Roy Dupuis was unknown. At 3am the buddies might decide to set off for Ogunquit, wake up a friend, borrow $200 from him, and dive into the icy waters of the Atlantic six hours and 500km later. On the eve of the funeral of René Lévesque, after finishing a show, Roy Dupuis jumped in a taxi and drove from Montreal to Quebec to attend the ceremony with the dramatist Dominic Champagne.

The story has been told a hundred times of how he enrolled at the National Theatre School taking the place of a pupil who did not turn up for the auditions; how the director, Michelle Rossignol discovered the trick by comparing the photo on her form; how, won over, she accepted his application despite everything, even though the deadline for enrolment had passed. "I told myself that if he could charm me, he could charm just about anyone," she says. "Roy Dupuis’ success is a mixture of charisma, talent and luck."

When the young show-off was later asked why he wanted to become an actor, he replied, "To win an Oscar!"

The people of Quebec (particularly the women) love his James Dean-like openness and frankness. He relies on the inspiration of the moment. "He’s an instinctive actor who doesn’t rehearse much but who is never afraid of going too far," says Jean Beaudin, who directed more than 180 hours of filming with him. In interview, Roy Dupuis is no different : he can just as easily have nothing to say, or talk about his mother, or the existence of God, or Dostoyevsky, his favourite author, who wrote somewhere that "to risk" is to find oneself "a part of humanity". (The Gambler)

His sudden success has not surprised those around him who say that he could have played in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (he has had seven years of cello) or in the national hockey league. But Roy Dupuis himself is convinced that "the theatre and the cinema are the biggest skating-rinks." As soon as he left school, he was offered the leading role in Lance et Compte. He has rarely had to do advertising in order to make a living; at most he has been seen dressed up as a matador in a Chrysler ad.

"His acting is physical, almost animal," says Brigitte Haentjens who met him for the first time in Sudbury. She was looking for someone for the role of Jay in Jean-Marc Dalpé’s play Le Chien. "When I saw him I knew that this was my character without even knowing if Roy was an actor." The play was performed in Sudbury, Montreal, Toronto and Limoges.

The actress Sylvie Drapeau, who went to the National Theatre School at the same time as him, compares him with Marlon Brando.

"You’re not exaggerating a little bit?" I asked her.

"Perhaps, but he occupies the space and says everything with his body even before he speaks a word. He’s an actor who is not afraid to declare his virility while the men in Quebec are inclined to apologise for their existence."

Roy Dupuis is built like an ox. His performance in Romeo and Juliet (at the TNM in 1989) was compared with that of an athlete. He has no need of doubles in fight scenes. After one hour with actress Francine Ruel, he was dancing the tango like a professional (in Michel Langois’ film Cap Tourmente). He even developed a taste for boxing while taking to the ring for Scoop.

His hockey teammates call him ‘The King’ because he is a formidable centre who plays to score. Roy Dupuis seldom misses a game for the Artists’ Union league, at midnight on Mondays in the skating rink at Bréboeuf College. Actor Jean L’Italien prefers to play against him rather than with him, "because he won’t pass!" His friends are all in agreement - Roy Dupuis will invent the most absurd excuses, but he’ll never admit that he is wrong.

The star lives surrounded by a tight circle of friends who, along with his agent Hélène Mailloux, cosset and protect him. When the handsome Ovila is reproached for the way he muffles his words (as a matter of fact an accent brought from Abitibi - his friends in Amos have the same one), Jean Beaudin responds as quick as a flash, "Anyway, Jean Duceppe never understood the meaning of the word diction, that was part of his character!" When a Quebec restaurateur tries to get some publicity by exploiting an incident, Hélène Mailloux organises a press conference with witnesses for the defence. When a magazine publishes an article on her protégé, she wants to have a say in the photographs.

For the biggest screen star in the province is also burdened with the biggest rumour machine. "Roy has ambition, he doesn’t hide it, and it has been said that this annoys people," says actress Marie-Chantal Perron.

Some evenings the young leading man finds himself alone. He contemplates the fountain in Saint-Louis Square, thinks about his girlfriend, his mother, and wonders what nonsense the success machine will invent next. "I know what is in store for me every time I make a film. That’s how it is. It’s part of the game!"

Roy Dupuis learned the rules of the game in the cradle. If you can believe his mother, Ryna, little Roy walked at eight and a half months, swam at three, wrote his name at four, and gave his first piano recital (Haydn’s Surprise Symphony) at the age of five in the auditorium of the convent of the Sisters of the Assumption, at Amos in Abitibi.

His mother gave private tuition in piano and his father was a commercial traveller for Maple Leaf. The other woman in his life is his 96 year old great-aunt Mimi, who gave him his first bicycle and "made masses of great French fries". Second in a family of three children, Roy Dupuis was raised in the shadow of the huge cathedral in Amos (apparently known as ‘the big frozen nipple’), which still represents for him the pride and determination of the inhabitants of this area. Churches fascinate him. He has visited all the ones in Montreal, and when he talks of the theatre it’s the language of the church (‘consecration’, ‘revelation’, ‘mystery’) that comes to him spontaneously.

"He never missed a children’s show at the Cinema Royal in Commercial Street. We lived in a perpetual film," says his childhood friend Aubert Gingras, with whom he threw stink bombs into shops and set fire to the undergrowth. Last year, when Aubert was hospitalised in Montreal, Roy commandeered a wheelchair to take him on a tour of the hospital without permission. "There was never anything that could stop us!"

At the age of eleven, this little darling of the nuns left snobbish Amos with his family for the English town of Kapuskasing, a mining community where he was treated as a "frog". He temporarily gave up the cello, learned English, and applied himself to becoming the best at hockey. Roy Dupuis has taken from Ontario a visceral, almost militant attachment to the French language.

One morning, while her husband was away in the north, Ryna Dupuis gathered the three children in the kitchen and announced that they were leaving for Montreal. The removal van was already in front of the house packed with half the furniture. Roy was fourteen.

"I rode around the neighbourhood on my bicycle," he says after a long silence. I said goodbye to the town. I don’t think I have bawled since …. except on stage." He won’t say any more about it. Perhaps because he considers that he has said it all already in his first theatre hit, Le Chien, a long dialogue between a son and his father. (There is talk of making it into a film.)

At Laval, the Dupuis family (including the piano) moved house every year. As a teenager he played Harmonium and Genesis numbers on the guitar in Old Montreal to earn a bit of cash. He spent all his time in the school cafeteria at Curé-Antoine-Labelle until he discovered Ariane Mnouchkine’s film, Molière. It was like an electric shock. He dropped his physics classes and enrolled in drama. The school staff still talk about his end-of-year production of The Hypochondriac, for which he mobilised an entire orchestra.

His mother saw him as a doctor, he was going to be an actor. At the National Theatre School he worked with directors René Richard Cyr and Yves Desgagnés, and came across some of the best actresses of his generation (Élise Guilbault, Sylvie Drapeau). But he is particularly inspired by a 69-year-old anarchist who came to teach in Montreal, the French dramatist Armand Gatti, a leftist who writes 7-hour long plays about workmen and prisoners!

One day Gatti and his pupils were leaving the National Monument and came across some grim looking bikers. The old teacher ran forward to remonstrate with one who was wearing a swastika. "He could have been decked," says Roy Dupuis. "Gatti taught me that there was no need to be afraid to stand up for one’s beliefs. That the theatre was sacred, that it was more important than the individual. He taught me to be a servant."

Next winter, Roy Dupuis returns to the small screen in Scoop III. But he knows that his real challenge is returning to the stage after a three year absence. True West, by Sam Shepard, is about two brothers, a Hollywood screenwriter and a thief (played by Roy Dupuis), whose story turns out to be more interesting than a film plot. The gossip columns won’t mention it, but he will be paralysed with fear in his little dressing room at the Denise-Pelletier Theatre.

Roy Dupuis doesn’t disguise the fact that he dreams of filming in the United States. But it is in France that the opportunity could first present itself. "He is the sort of actor who could conquer the French who are so fascinated by America," says Brigitte Haentjens. Besides in 1987 he was put forward for the title role in a film about the Algerian war, which was never made. He was also to have had an eight month run in a Jean Genet play in Paris (he had been promised Maria Casarès’ dressing room), before being urgently recalled to Montreal for Les Filles de Caleb.

"Roy Dupuis has the potential to succeed in France with a widely broadcast series (Emilie) and a film (Being at Home with Claude) that appeal to different audiences," says film producer Louise Gendron.

After several visits he is at home in Paris. He has got to know singer Jacques Higelin and spent an entire day with him. Last year after leaving Cannes, he explored the Haute-Provence by motorbike.

At thirty, Roy Dupuis is no longer the young show-off he used to be. He speaks of values, of fundamental choices, of discipline. He is in tune with nature and dreams of horses and a house which he will build with his own hands. He is learning to master his fascination for the void "which one day could swallow him up," says director Michel Langlois. When asked whom he’s most afraid of, Roy Dupuis has this simple, concise answer : "Myself!"

"I’m afraid that I will wake up tomorrow and no longer have the power to captivate. It’s true that charisma exists, but it can be short-lived." What has he left to learn? The question surprises him. "Learn? What does that mean? I have things to do, not to learn."

This summer he will probably go back to flying high on the Boomerang <<a ride>> at la Ronde <<an amusement park in Montreal>> with Marie-Chantal Perron. He will soon get his skydiving certificate ….