Danièle signing copies of her book at the Stanké stand at the Salon du livre
in Montreal on 20/21 November 2004.

A book on Roy Dupuis ... by a full-time admirer

by Agnès Gaudet

After more than 100,000 hits from 50 countries on her Roy Dupuis internet site, Danièle Saint-Denis, a fan of the actor, is bringing out a 350 page book, a tribute to the artist’s work, entitled Dans les Peaux de Roy Dupuis.

Bearing in mind the fanbase of the website she created about Roy Dupuis, and in order to publicise the actor’s lesser known works, Danièle Saint-Denis decided to pitch a book to the publishers, Éditions Stanké. Ten days after sending her initial draft on the role of Ovila in Les Filles de Caleb, Alain Stanké telephoned her for the rest.

Danièle got back to her research, rewatched all the performances to refresh her memory and wrote her book. The result is a 350 page manuscript which dissects the actor’s work, adding commentaries and factual details.

The author has never met Roy Dupuis in order to avoid becoming biased, but Roy has approved the publication.

Roy Dupuis’ success broke through our borders a long time ago. The Quebec actor, who played the role of Michael in the American secret agent series Nikita, has been seen all around the globe.

In the past five years a huge number of people have visited www.rdcharacters.com, the site that Danièle Saint-Denis created; more than 100,000 hits from all corners of the globe, many from Quebec, Canada and the United States, but also fans from Japan, Argentina and a great many from Spain.

So great was the interest that the site has been translated for free by foreign fans, in English, Spanish and Italian. From a simple pastime the site has become, for Danièle, a full-time activity.

Danièle Saint-Denis discovered Roy Dupuis in 1990, when she went to see the play Un oiseau vivant dans la gueule at the Théâtre de Quat’Sous. “He made an impression on me and I began to follow his career. I watched all the episodes of Les Filles de Caleb, Scoop and Nikita (around 92 episodes because there were 22 per year over 5 years), and all of his films,” she tells the Journal de Montréal. “I also went to see the play True West in January 1994.“

To obtain more information on the actor, Danièle began to surf the many websites dedicated to him. There she established how little serious information there was about her subject, and how little awareness there was of the actor’s body of work outside Quebec. And so Danièle, who worked as an administrator in the Notre-Dame Hospital, started to write, although she had never written professionally before.

According to her, the actor has played 26 characters in the course of his career; Ovila from Les Filles de Caleb, Michael from Nikita and Alexis from Un homme et son péché being amongst the most famous. She deals with 13 of them in her book, all roles performed in Quebec, plus the one in Nikita.

Dans les Peaux de Roy Dupuis is therefore an amazing pilgrimage through the career of Roy Dupuis, and not a biography. It will be launched officially this autumn. It is possible that the book may subsequently be translated.

Footnotes:

For once we have the interviewee’s right of reply! Danièle sends a few notes to correct some of the interviewer’s inaccuracies ….

First of all, she wishes to play down the assertion that Roy has “approved the publication”. All she told the journalist was that her editor and Roy have spoken about it.
 

The statement about the lack of “serious information” on the internet is taken out of context. Danièle’s search began around 1998 when there were indeed few websites on Roy himself, and there was nothing to match the Quebec viewpoint she wished to present. (Don’t worry, Danièle, we’re not taking offence!)
 

The “26 characters” is also a bit of journalistic shorthand. Danièle’ said she had written about 13 of his characters, and that Roy had played perhaps twice that number. (Actually, this is a bit difficult to judge precisely. Counting the 4 new films in the pipeline, the number of professional roles is approaching 50! At the time of the interview though, and if you count only lead and major supporting roles, the number is around 29.)